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Cut and Paste don't work
It does, those ctrl-c ctrl-v thing has been introduced by KDE/Gnome, because those people always have to reinvent the wheel, whether the existing solution is useful or not. Use you middle mouse button, everythings fine.
Games
Although their is a much wider variety of games available for Windows, many games that are important to me are running fine on Linux (UT2k4, ET, etc.), even more can be played using Wine, especially those using a Quake3 Engine (Jedi Knight series, Call of Duty e.g.). There are also plenty of free (beer as well as speech) games available, check out Linuxgames or HappyPenguin.
Font display is awful
It's not, I can'u say anything more to this.
Aplication installation is awful, poorly integrated with desktop(s)
Now you are kidding, apt-get is the finest thing ever invented for installing application. Once you ever tried apt-get, you'll never want anything other.
86 different text editors... why?
Why not?
Some very important web sites only work with IE
www.windowsupdate.com is not that important...
General lack of polish, little (and some big) things inexplicably not working
??
Cut and Paste don't work
It's not, I can'T say anything more to this.
As you can see, I was able to even copy & paste the above line.
Font display is awful
Looks quite fine to me...

First off i've only been using linux about 6 months. The realization that win98 wasn't going to cut it anymore, combined with a growing hatred for MS drove me there. now i won't buy anything from them, not even if bill himself swore to resurrect my beloved dog smokey from the grave.

Before i made the switch, i did a lot of reading about linux. my real question was "Can it run or replace the software i use most?" Yes it can, for the most part. in the end my biggest concern (foolish, but probably true for more potential linux users than one might think) was gaming. to make a long story short, transgaming gave me the comfort to switch over because (based on their database) i knew i could run my games with them IF i couldn't find another solution.

i used linux 3-4 months and actually played all the games i wanted (read: CounterStrike, and please don't flame me for that) on openGL-enabled installs of regular old WINE. about 3 months ago, i decided to subscribe to wineX because 1) $5/month was worth the time it took me to compile WINE as often as i did. rpm=easy 2) wineX works better than reg. old wine for games. 3) "Wow, this is $15 dollars towards supporting Linux!" so imagine my surprise a few days ago when i started reading this anti-winex stuff. Transgaming was part of the reason i even tried out Linux, and now i find that i could be hurting linux gaming by supporting it?

Obviously, native ports of games are the best option. I don't even like UT but it's on my buy list now only because it runs natively. One solution i have to the 'if you buy it at walmart, it counts as a windows sale' argument is this: when you buy your copy, e-mail ID/Atari/whoever and tell them that you use this game on linux, you appreciate their efforts, and that Ryan Gordon should be king.

others have addressed most of the 10 "P" arguments against Cedega. I find that the strongest and hardest to answer is Prevention. e-mails to ID/Atari are great, but I won't lie, $ makes the strongest argument for the developer.

when i first started with linux, I e-mailed Valve a few times about porting their games. No surprise that they didn't respond, but elsewhere they've stated they have no plans for that. Knowing this, i was very surprised to see this from valve on this forum yesterday. (forums are open to public)

In an e-mail exchange with a branch of Valve Software, I recently recieved this:

We are working very closely with Transgaming to get our games to continue to run well on Cedega in the future.

Well I guess Valve knows about Transgaming. I doubt that they would consider a linux port even if WineX didn't exist, so no "prevention" is probably occuring, but it is interesting. Mostly because Valve is looking more and more like microsoft to me these days. why? 1) steam 2) said refusal to port 3)Gabe Newell used to work there. I don't know what his relationship with MS is these days, but he's an intelligent man and he has been using Outlook for his e-mail (look at info on the source code theft for HL2) so that doesn't bode well. one wonders if i should support them at all anymore...

On the flip side, we can look at LucasArts. Surely they know that you can run many of their games (i've personally run JK2 even on regular WINE) but apparently they are at least considering porting to linux. We'll see about that... either way their path here could be indicative of the truth or slander behind the 'prevention' argument.

IMHO, the best way to find out if 'prevention' is a real threat is to find Ryan "Icculus" Gordo

I'm amused that you think that lack of citation makes things not factual. If you live in the US, I sure hope you don't watch/trust the evening news. Here are some citations about "dubious claims", since you are determined not to trust anything I say:

Dubious claims by Transgaming about Transgaming: http://www.transgaming.com/about.php

Dubious (as in, just plain false or poorly researched) claims by Transgaming about the game industry, debunked here: http://timedoctor.org/index.php?id=1798 Transgaming did change their page after the article above was posted. The quote won't link to anything anymore since it was when they had their old website.

I can't find any dubious claims about the native porting process right now, since their website is down, but usually you don't have to look much farther than the Gav States column or the one by the other guy. When they put out The Sims, their claim that their process was better because they could complete a port in 3 months was especially amusing to me, since I had just completed porting a title for Loki in one week.

how many different programs can you burn dvd's with in linux?

Just off the top of my head, four. There are also two major (and free) dvd movie authoring packages. Look them up.

how many linux computers can play doom 3?

In a few weeks, all of them.

Although it may be too late ...

Coralized
Crusader writes "Two LinuxGames staff members have launched Liberated Games, a site devoted to cataloguing full commercial titles that have been released for free by the developer or publisher, either with the full source code or without. The current list is available here; the site tracks releases for all major computer platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux), so feel free to submit any missing games to the list."

Freecached
Crusader writes "Two LinuxGames staff members have launched Liberated Games, a site devoted to cataloguing full commercial titles that have been released for free by the developer or publisher, either with the full source code or without. The current list is available here; the site tracks releases for all major computer platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux), so feel free to submit any missing games to the list."

Although it may be too late ...

Coralized
Crusader writes "Two LinuxGames staff members have launched Liberated Games, a site devoted to cataloguing full commercial titles that have been released for free by the developer or publisher, either with the full source code or without. The current list is available here; the site tracks releases for all major computer platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux), so feel free to submit any missing games to the list."

Freecached
Crusader writes "Two LinuxGames staff members have launched Liberated Games, a site devoted to cataloguing full commercial titles that have been released for free by the developer or publisher, either with the full source code or without. The current list is available here; the site tracks releases for all major computer platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux), so feel free to submit any missing games to the list."

http://www.linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identi ferID=6737&action=flatview/

..And we already got that news days ago. In fact it was mentioned by someone in a thread yesterday. The game's not overly demanding which is good.
Interestingly it will make for a nice benchmarking standard seem as its targeted for Linux too. Together with new versions of UT etc. I expect it to be part of the default measuring tape in the battle of performance gaming between Windows and Linux.
By the way anyone interested in benchmarks for games on 64 bit O.S.' should check out this site. Apparently Suse is the way to go. Beats Fedora and XP 64 bit version overall, and by a long way in some areas, and enen in some games! Now get moving on those drivers nVidia and ATI, especially ATI...

Is this an ev4 system or is it by any chance an ev6 based system with a (Samsung embedded design) UP700 or XP700 (IIRC) motherboard?

I may know someone who can fix it, but I don't know if they'll give it back to you...me!!!

But seriously, scoot your browser over to BadFlash and ask the man there. There are two things he'll need; if possible the extracted BIOS (or you'll need to send the entire motherboard just so Jack can manipulate the BIOS), and you also need to include the BIOS flash image data that you want re-flashed onto the BIOS. Jack is quite skilled and he is not a dull boy; his work all day consists of playing with everyone's BIOSs. This is the same Jack that provided the earliest of upgrades for the Netpliance I-Opener "Internet Appliance" modifications. Don't give up on your Alpha, as it will never give up on you! Alpha hardware is highest quality components and their replacement is trivial when you have access to a source of similar replacement parts and the right extraction tools.

Sincerily,

Alpha Troll (as so I am known at LinuxGames

Give me DoomIII on Linux and I might switch now.

For those of you who might not be familiar with what Wine actually is, let me clarify. Even though some of us enjoy a sip of wine every now and then, this is not what we are talking about today. We are referring to a package that allows Windows applications to run on Linux... outside of an emulator. Wine uses an open source Windows API (application programming interface) to allow modified Win32 binaries to run in a UNIX/Linux environment, completely free of Windows. Think of it not as an emulator, but more of a compatibility layer, or translator if you will. The status of the Wine project can be found here.

CodeWeavers is at the head of the pack in Wine development and deservedly so. They produce the most well packaged, capable distributions of Wine available. As Jeremy has stated, development is in the hands of their customer base and supporters. Whatever the customer wants the customer gets, and so it should rightfully be. Mr. White knows his business. You can see which applications are getting all of the attention at the CodeWeavers Top List page, and it's actually pretty interesting to see what apps are getting pushed to the top. Take a look.

Well, enough of the small talk, let's carry on with the interview. Enjoy!

Mad Penguin: First of all, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to sit down with us today to answer a few questions. I guess the first thing I'd like to know is more personal than anything... why Linux? What was the motivational factor(s) behind developing software to run Windows applications on Linux?

Jeremy White: Well, it's a fairly long story. I've always been a geek. I've loved programming on computers since I was 11 and had to sneak into the Radio Shack to do it, and I've also always loved computer games. Early in my career, I grew quite proficient at communications and networking programming. I was working on a project for a customer that had a Solaris system. But, they were across town, and I had to drive over there to work on it, and I couldn't afford a Sun of my own. So, instead, I installed and starting developing against Linux (circa 94 I'd say), and then just migrating the code once it was done.

So that's when I fell in love with Linux, and when we started having at least one Linux box around all the time.

Now fast forward to about 1997. One day, at lunch, I'm talking to a few new hires (young kids) that had never played the original Combat cartridge in an Atari 2600. This struck me as horrible
cultural illiteracy on their part, and so I set off to find an Atari 2600 emulator to correct this horrible flaw in their education. Along the way, I stumbled across the Wine project, and thought that it was the most audacious project I'd seen in a long time. I thought then (as I think now) that if Linux could become a truly Windows compatible operating system, it would allow for an explosion in new computing choices, and I'd get to feel like that kid at Radio Shack again.

Further, in 1996, I had founded CodeWeavers so I could do work I considered meaningful, challenging, and fun, and although we did some fun projects, I was really looking for a mission. Of course, I had a day job (and a young kid), so I couldn't really do much with Wine then. But I kept dreaming, and then one day, it being the 90s and all, I decided to pursue a business built around Wine and helping people port Windows software to Linux. I successfully landed some venture capital, asked a bunch of the Wine developers to come on board, and that's really how we got started on this mission.

MP: I'm interested in learning how quickly CodeWeavers evolved into the full-blown business it is today. Ho

Apparently Tuxgames is sold out of the letfover Linux versions from Loki's firesale, and there's nothing on ebay. Looks like T2 won't work in WineX as well.

Sometimes you just don't get a break being a Linux gamer. Maybe if every third Linux gamer hadn't pirated the Linux version in the first place (since everything in Linux has to be "free", right?) things would be different. But there's so much legal detritus floating around, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting to see a free Linux version.

-B

I have found the FreeSCI being the best for Sierra games, and it's available for Win32, Macs, Linux, DEC Alpha, etc. Same with Maniac Manson, Beneath a Steel Sky, and other SCUMM based games (lots of lucas Arts games). ScummVM is a fantastic, widely compatible engine for LucasArts and other SCUMM based games, and is also available for a host of formats. To boot, two different games are freely available for it, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Flight of the Amazon Queen (both are in the floppy version, and the full CD ROM version with voice audio! Beneath A Steel Sky will NOT disappoint, play it!).

The Z-Machine engine for Zork has been ported to everything known to man, and some things not known to man, so that's widely playable.

Lastly, for those niche games that you love (Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle!) try a virtual machine system, like VMware (the best, IMHO), Microsoft's newly aquired and freshly released Virtual PC 2004 (not as good, IMHO, and not available on Linux, obviously), or some other open source projects might work.

The last gasp is to install a copy of DOS or Win9x on a spare small partition (Mine's a half gig bootable partition on my second drive), and boot from it for really cranky stuff. This only works, mind you, if your sound card has some form of DOS based drivers/emulation drivers available. I have a Creative branded Ensoniq Audio PCI, and while I have the DOS drivers, they're a bitch to find now, and I keep them very safe. I've found that Demos and Intros are most likely to fail. I can't get Future Crew's Second Reality running with sound under anything but real DOS.

This is also another good reason to kep an old Sound Blaster 16 lying around. God knows they're plentiful enough and cheap, so no true old school hard core gamer/geek shouldn't have one. :)

Hey jvm, thanks for posting the itching question of "Will this include the Loki Linux release?" up on http://www.linuxgames.com/
At least now I have a place I can watch for the answer!

I wonder if this version of Quake can be played using CABAL...

Except for games that use audio or graphics, Linux has pretty much spot-on compatibility with any IF game, as do most operating systems. IF games are extremely portable, written to one of a number of portable VMs (and all this years before Java...and with better compatibility than Java).

TADS (IMHO the most advanced engine, though Inform is very close) just plain runs on Linux. You want this to play .gam files.
There is Frotz to run Inform (.z5 files...I believe a couple other .zX formats, but I've only played .z5).
There is an ADRIFT implementation called SCARE for Linux. It has a less-than-perfect parser. To be honest, ADRIFT is a much simpler engine, and I generally fine TADS or Inform games to be much more fun and impressive.

Note that other classic adventure game VMs -- the ones for commercial graphical adventures -- like the Sierra (King's Quest, among others) and Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Secret of Monkey Island, among others) VMs have been ported to Linux in the form of Sarien, FreeSCI, and ScummVM. I don't believe there have been any new AGI/SCI/SCUMM adventures made -- the engines are static and no improved games will be made for them, but they're still neat projects to have fun playing the originals on.

Soon! See http://www.linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identi ferID=6495&action=flatview

According to LinuxGames.

My next video card purchase will be from a company that makes GPL-compatible drivers. Suggestions anyone?

We're basically screwed. Nvidia's success with binary-only drivers has made ATI do the same thing. Unless the Weather Channel decides to fund development of drivers for the newer cards, Radeon 8500 is the end of the open-source line. And no one else really exists in the high-performance 3D graphics card market.

I hope Red Hat uses some of their new half a billion to do something about this, but they've probably got other goals to hit first.

I think the site you are referencing to is this one.

You can run the original with WINE (not wineX) just fine, but the anti-cheat will say you're cheating. I don't know if Steam (the new frontend thingy) will work or not. Just play single player or join servers that aren't running anti-cheat and you're set. Linux Games has a hosted site or something on the toolbar to the left that has detailed intructions that are updated fairly regularly for playing Half-Life with WINE.

While I _did_ have a :) at the end of my original comment. If you do have some real interest, look at a couple of the Linux gaming sites...

The Linux Game Tome

Linuxgames

...and a place to buy them.

What needs to be worked on, like I said before, is making a market for Linux by establishing a desktop presence and get some key companies supporting Linux. Until then, the handful of Linux gamers will have to settle with what little they have while the rest of the world has some fun.

Erm, I'm having plenty of fun here, and I honestly have no problem spending my limit on Linux games. Go read. Go play. See what's actually out there.

IIRC, the idea of porting Half Life to Linux was dropped after the Half Life crew recieved a large number of flames because there was a Linux server but no Linux client.

There was also this from Linux Half Life:
In a press release on the morning of Sunday, 1st of April, 2001 Valve CEO Gabe Newell announced that they had secretly been working on a Linux port of the most popular game, Half-Life.
"We have taken alot of offensive email recently, asking for a port, all the while we have been secretly porting the game, it has been alot of fun."
Valve's marketing department speculate that Half-Life will be a top seller for the Linux platform, despite the fact its getting relitvly old, and that it seems to work flawlessly under WINE.
"We think that most of the Linux Half-Life players will purchase the game, in order to get native support, better performance and ofcourse to support the Linux gaming industry. Sales of Half-Life will determain if we port Teams Fortress 2 to linux".

Which seems to contradict my original statement, however, that statement was made on April 1 2001*. And I still don't see a port. After the dismal sales of games for Linux such as Quake 3 and the rest of the Loki selection, I believe that Valve saw no profit in the port, and were probably tired of the flames anyways.

FYI, for those of you who are about to bitch about the volume of Linux game sales:

1) EB World stopped carrying Linux games because they did not sell.

2) I bought every Linux game Loki made, with the exception of "Eric's Ultimate Solitare."

If we want a Linux port, we need some way of making Valve *WANT* to do a port - either by making it profitable, eliminating the flames, or both.

It is unfortunate that the open source community cannot come up with a way that the people in the community could provide the porting for Valve. Maybe some of the hot OS coders out there could agree to sign a NDA for Half Life so it could be ported? I know, I am hoping too much, but it is worth a try.

* The date of that release also makes it very questionable...

ATI has historically made good hardware that was crippled by buggy, poorly written, limited drivers.

Stop complaining about your 'historical' (i.e. anecdotal) experiences with ATI hardware. I own an R200 and am extremely satisfied with it (using DRI thank you very much). I haven't used the closed source driver, but feedback seems to be very positive.

If it's Windows your referring to, then ATI has extremely competitive, high quality drivers. The CATALYST crew claim they produce the industry standard in graphics drivers. In the wake of the 3dmark controversy, they may be right.

If you have a specific complaint about modern ATI products, then share it. Otherwise, shuddup.

Check out also ScummVM. Plays lots of good oldies, LucasArts' adventure games, Simon the Sorcerers, Beneath a Steel Sky etc. And enhanced with anti-aliasing too!

Sarien plays some Sierra oldies.

And perhaps FreeSCI (other Sierra oldies) might work some day on OS X too (native or via X11).

Funny, I run Linux and seem to recall enjoying playing:
Neverwinter Nights,
Unreal Tournament 2003,
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory,
America's Army,
Return To Castle Wolfenstein,
and Quake 3

None of which require WineX or VMWare to be installed.
Yes, there are some games that only run in Windows, but developers are starting to see how easy it is to make a Linux port and pick up some free advertising and some more sales simply for the fact that there's a native linux client.

Another game coming soon that will ship with a linux version included in the windows box is Savage.

(what was I saying about free advertising?)

Instability, yes...
Games? No...

Right, it is indeed x86-only according to a post on LinuxGames by one of the developers IIRC. Don't know if you could've played it with DRI drivers anyway. PPC Linux users really get to notice why non-free software is bad. They don't get the 3D, Realplayer, Flash plugin etc.

Gotta love these guys even without the PPC port, the programmer responsible for the GNU/Linux port posting on the LG comment threads for Savage and very much feeling like he's "with us". And this one really seems like an original game.

I get sick and tired of non-enlightened computer users knocking a modern (Alpha) architecture just because the company selling them didn't price them low enough for use in the present.

The Alpha's problem was shitty marketing. When the marketers couldn't think of somthing better to market than "It is the Windows NT dream workstation", there was a problem... People didn't buy it because it was too expensive, and in-turn the numerous companies (Samsung, API Networks, IBM, Penguin Computing, DEC) selling the hardware would only raise the price to make-up for low sales (2% market share). The result: an architecture 3 years more advanced than anything Intel and Sun could put out, combined, stuck in a prison of Federal Reserve Notes. Alpha burned. It's followers were the IT technologists that held onto them when their companies upgraded to even better Alphas. You know a Good Thing(TM) when it is tossed in the dumpster for an upgrade, and performs 2x faster than the latest Pentium3 out-of-box-trashcan.

To make a short story shorter, there is a growing intelect repository on the Alpha architecture. Some people want to purchase the patents from Intel and AMD, in order to open-source the Alpha architecture in favor of a 100% open-source computing platform. This will work wonders; 64bit clean architecture, consistent instruction set, wonderfuly optimized native C compiler for Linux.

As of note, someone on LinuxGames or HappyPenguin was talking about a homebrew dual Alpha (ev5/6/7?) based PDA. Would'nt that rock? Open-source arch, PDA-sized modules, SMP, portable; what more can you ask other than some good power managment support? Well, I dunno about low-power; the purpose of the project is portability and small-size super-computing on a 100% free and 100% documented architecture. Remember, a mere 400MHz Alpha ev6 out-performs a Pentium4 at 2000MHz as well as a mere old-school Alpha ev5 out-powerforms a Pentium3 1000MHz; and Alpha ev5 and ev6 are still ontop of a 100MHz BUS!

Alpha rocks!

I get sick and tired of non-enlightened computer users knocking a modern (Alpha) architecture just because the company selling them didn't price them low enough for use in the present.

The Alpha's problem was shitty marketing. When the marketers couldn't think of somthing better to market than "It is the Windows NT dream workstation", there was a problem... People didn't buy it because it was too expensive, and in-turn the numerous companies (Samsung, API Networks, IBM, Penguin Computing, DEC) selling the hardware would only raise the price to make-up for low sales (2% market share). The result: an architecture 3 years more advanced than anything Intel and Sun could put out, combined, stuck in a prison of Federal Reserve Notes. Alpha burned. It's followers were the IT technologists that held onto them when their companies upgraded to even better Alphas. You know a Good Thing(TM) when it is tossed in the dumpster for an upgrade, and performs 2x faster than the latest Pentium3 out-of-box-trashcan.

To make a short story shorter, there is a growing intelect repository on the Alpha architecture. Some people want to purchase the patents from Intel and AMD, in order to open-source the Alpha architecture in favor of a 100% open-source computing platform. This will work wonders; 64bit clean architecture, consistent instruction set, wonderfuly optimized native C compiler for Linux.

As of note, someone on LinuxGames or HappyPenguin was talking about a homebrew dual Alpha (ev5/6/7?) based PDA. Would'nt that rock? Open-source arch, PDA-sized modules, SMP, portable; what more can you ask other than some good power managment support? Well, I dunno about low-power; the purpose of the project is portability and small-size super-computing on a 100% free and 100% documented architecture. Remember, a mere 400MHz Alpha ev6 out-performs a Pentium4 at 2000MHz as well as a mere old-school Alpha ev5 out-powerforms a Pentium3 1000MHz; and Alpha ev5 and ev6 are still ontop of a 100MHz BUS!

Alpha rocks!

Theres dozens, theres a few that are pretty good, no they arent as good as Doom3(until ID releases the source) or Turbines engine, but they dont have to be, they just have to be good enough to make PS2 quality games.

Most of these games would look better than anything on the PS2. There is an open source game repository but are you willing to donate money to make these games good? Or will you complain about quality when you dont pay?

Well here are some engines.

Genesis3d
Nooface
WorldForge

Reality FactoryM

Ogre

Obsidian

More at LinuxGames

> Want Linux Games? Transgaming [transgaming.com]

Nice try :p
you'll find Linux games here and here
Transgaming offers a way to running Windowsgames on linux
and I think the transgaming referrer competition ended some time ago :p

While I'm all for backwards compatibility, you can only keep it up for so long. Backwards compatibility is probably one reason the current API is so freakin' huge.

I can't run my old Sierra games, either, but thanks to efforts like DosBox and FreeSCI, that doesn't matter.

'Sides, I'm sure someone'll come up with a Win95 emulator somewhere along the line.

What I've found frustrating is the lack of adventure games available for Linux

Really? I've found that adventure game support for Linux is actually quite good relative to other genres.

There's an entire commercial seven-episode line in the LadyStar series.

Hopkins FBI was, I believe, the first commercial SDL-using game available for Linux.

Want to play older adventure games in Linux? ScummVM can run older Lucasarts adventure games. AGIL lets you play old AGI Sierra games, and FreeSCI old SCI Sierra games. TADS can run on Linux to let you play TADS-based text adventure games (it *is* true that there isn't an HTML-enabled runtime for Linux, but that hasn't turned to be much of a big deal), and Frotz lets you play text-based Z-Machine games on Linux. Both of these have massive libraries of games, some of which are very good (I dearly love Tower of Babel for TADS). There are runtimes for numerous other, less widely-used systems listed on ifarchive.

Finally, I realize it's not a fantastic solution, but adventure games that use DirectX are more likely to work with WINE than the latest 3d shooter because they tend to use fewer features. Riven, for instance, works this way.

But I wonder if the Linux gaming market isn't somewhat different than the Windows gaming market. Many of the people who run Linux are older professionals. We're often not runnng the latest and greatest equipment. Perhaps one explanation for the lackluster sales of Linux games is that they're targeting the wrong population.

I agree -- the best selling games for Linux have been Civilization, SimCity 3, Kohan...the games without high end system requirements on 3d cards or CPU. They tend to be less twitch games.

I wish adventure game developers would return to the VM-based approach that Sierra and Lucasarts used to great success. The portability and ease of debugging is well worth it.

WineX tackles the chicken and egg problem...

You should also check out the Duke Nukem Forever news which says it's going to be Linux-only and called GNU/DNF. Oh and use glide to render.

Sierra is publishing now, not developing, although supposedly their development division was sold and is still in operation by Codemasters. They pretty much got kicked out of their old office in the Sierra foothills... lots of stuff was left behind, including, most likely, source to a lot of their old games, which sucks since many of them run too fast on modern processors. Of course, there are some developing utilities to play them at 'normal' speed, and in some cases with improved graphics.
DOSBox, your general purpose DOS game machine.
Sarien, for Sierra games using the AGI interpreter, and
FreeSCI, for Sierra games using the SCI interpreter.
Needless to say, all of these utilities are far from complete.

Anyway, there you go.

That's why there are several different groups around dedicated to reverse engineering old games and rewriting them so people can actually -play- them... and usually on a stupid number of platforms, from PCs to Consoles and PDAs.

Not to mention places like VOGONs (Very Old Games On New Systems) which itself exists just to help people find ways to run said older games on newer OS's (mostly w2k mind you).

I just wish more companies would support efforts like this and release some source to older games OTHER than FPSes. I really appretiate the release of source from ID and everyone else, it's great learning material. But it would be nice if other genre developers also were intrested in preserving their 'art'.

ScummVM, my project, recently obtained the Beneath a Steel Sky source-code from the authors and we're now working off support for that. The difference in this case is that the engine -is- almost pure x86 assembly, so it would be rather a waste of time to GPL... for anything useful to be done, it would need to be mostly reverse engineered anyway. So this just makes it easier for us to do so dirty-room with commented assembly. Releasing it to a small dedicated group may be more appropriate in cases like this, to prevent splintering and stagnation, until the reimplementation is truely started.

Anyway.

- Ender
Boss Monkey: ScummVM
Founder: QuakeSrc

Standard Disclaimer: It's 8:45am, I havn't had any coffee yet. Any spelling or grammatical errors are henceforth claimed as artistic license. It's art, damn it!

If anyone knows...Brad from Stardock? Is he still at the helm? Speak!

Did you play GTA3? I think that Vice City is not nearly as good as GTA3. Sadly, I'm mostly alone in that view; many reviewers proclaimed it a great sequel, better than the original. I honestly can't see how that can be.

http://www.bluesnews.com/
http://www.shacknews.com/
http://www.slashdot.org/
http://www.linuxgames.com/
http://www.icculus.org/
http://www.flipcode.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://www.gouranga.com/
http://curmudgeon.linuxgames.com/
http://icculus.org/fingerdigest.html
http://kerneltrap.org/

No doubt this will be buried into the mass of similar posts before long, but it is a decent format for listing where people generally go...

http://www.bluesnews.com/
http://www.shacknews.com/
http://www.slashdot.org/
http://www.linuxgames.com/
http://www.icculus.org/
http://www.flipcode.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://www.gouranga.com/
http://curmudgeon.linuxgames.com/
http://icculus.org/fingerdigest.html
http://kerneltrap.org/

No doubt this will be buried into the mass of similar posts before long, but it is a decent format for listing where people generally go...

The Atari 2600 homebrew scene just did lose out on a really great opportunity. Activision Anthology, which emulates a ton of Activision titles for the old 2600 on a PS2, was to have an online component which would allow owners of the PS2 disc to download homebrew games for playing on the emulator. That would have absolutely rocked, and I think it would have really given the guys writing these games the kind of credit they deserve.

You can read about that and other interesting bits about Act. Anth. in an interview with the Anthology producer Ken Love.

Thanks to a couple ex-Loki guys (Sam Latinga and Mike Philips, most notably) this is often the case. I'm sorry to question your experience, but things weren't always this way. I recall waiting months before finally giving up on Linux T2 (I had purchased both Linux and Win32 copies).

Who's to say that the goodwill which keeps Linux patches coming will continue? If Sam goes on vacation for two weeks while a Win32 patch is released, what will Linux T2 players do? Play only on Linux servers until he gets back, that's what.

-B

Thanks to a couple ex-Loki guys (Sam Latinga and Mike Philips, most notably) this is often the case. I'm sorry to question your experience, but things weren't always this way. I recall waiting months before finally giving up on Linux T2 (I had purchased both Linux and Win32 copies).

Who's to say that the goodwill which keeps Linux patches coming will continue? If Sam goes on vacation for two weeks while a Win32 patch is released, what will Linux T2 players do? Play only on Linux servers until he gets back, that's what.

-B

From the makers of Things You Cant Do in Windowscomes Things You Can't Do in Linux You Can Do in Windows:

With chapters such as, Playing games without a Athlon XP 2200 emulation runner, Running a 21th century GUI!, and free time!! Thats right folks, with our guide to Things You Can't Do In Linux you can actually install programs without scheduling the time to do so! Install a new camera without restarting 6 times to find the right driver! Even use the latest video card without scrambling for seventy-two kernel patches!

All for the price of only thirty-nine ninety-five.

"...all sorts of video games (if you know where to look).

That sounds cool. Where might I find information?

"...all sorts of video games (if you know where to look).

That sounds cool. Where might I find information?

I use GameSpot a lot and paid for a subscription to their "Complete" service. Another poster mentioned GameSpot, but didn't point out that IGN and GameSpot have a somewhat different model for subscriptions.

At IGN, you have to pay for the new stuff and eventually it ages into the free section. (Some stuff may always remain pay-only. I don't know.) At GameSpot, most everything is free for a limited time, but then ages into the pay-only archive.

Of the coverage I've read, I prefer GameSpot, and so chose to pay for that service.

Because I enjoy playing games on older systems and games that have been out for a while on newer systems (see my site), the pay-only archive at GameSpot is useful to me. They go back to the Saturn and PSX with their reviews, and these have made for some reasonably good reading and research of games to try out. Also, if I'm considering a game in Sony's cheapo Greatest Hits lineup, then the full review is probably in the pay-only archive.

The GameSpot model is friendly to the daily reader (free access, albeit with adverts) and the long-time reader (no adverts, old content) who doesn't mind paying. I'm not sure who likes IGN's model. It's worth noting that IGN's reviews are often posted to USENET by a subscriber when they're initially published online and only accessible to subscribers.

Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. Different models, and a distinction that I think is worth looking at, especially in the long term.

A number of games run under Linux.. linuxgames.com talks about some of them, and more can be found with a simple google search.

As for "tasks", I've found that my mother can make much better use of Redhat Linux 8.0 than she can of WinXP. Supporting it for her is easier as well--"Hi mom, turned SSH on for me? Great--remember that green piece of paper with instructions on how to give me your IP?" For her limited word processing needs (She writes a weekly article for a local newspaper), there's Abiword and openoffice. For email there's Kmail or Evolution, or any other number of excellent email applications. There's free solitaire games that she loves, etc. Windows--to get the same functionality for this woman--I'd have to pay quite a bit more. I'd have to purchase Microsoft Word and pay for a LOT of features that she can't use, Outlook--again the same, and download a number of buggy shareware games that would likely cause issues for her down the line.

It's not the "casual home user" that is tied to Windows. It's the office user whose environment requires MS-Office ONLY features that have not yet been implemented in the OSS solutions available on Linux. It's the user that has specific requirements as far as software, which in turn has specific requirements in therms of OS.

For the casual home user, or even for the middle-of-the-line home user, Linux is *wonderful*. For the advanced user? More of the same.

-Sara