Slashdot Mirror
Liberated Games Launches
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."
Sweet! Now I don't have to liberate them myself!
The original generic sig.
and before people flame, yes, Solitaire and Minesweeper are commercial games (you pay for them as one of the applications when you buy a "busniess" resource from MSFT [which, BTW, sucks] ); and yes there are free implementations available.
On a similar note, I think Linux is a good candidate for future gaming platforms (I'm thinking ps3) because of it's flexibility. Last I checked, sony has already made use of Linux in their products.
Hi there
This 'official' list is very nice to have, especially to track games with source available (good educational code).
As you may already know, 'unofficially' free software site Home of the Underdogs http://www.the-underdogs.org/ links to source or binary (now by Bittorrent!) to all old games abandonned by developpers and/or publishers. An endless source of fun and nostalgia... be sure to check it out!
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
This is a great way to find lots of Linux games in one place. Previously I had to search Google, follow tons of broken links, get pisssed off, etc... I've stil had better luck playing games under windows. Maybe I'll check out some of the source code. Reading others' source code can be a nice learning experience.
--
Play the Gmail game, win a free Gmail invitation!
Except that they're only accepting games that were at one point for commercial sale.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Oh yeah... soon Linux'll be free'd by SCO.
This is excellent news! I just found out Duke Nukem 3D is not only on the list of liberated games, but that it also runs natively on Linux now! Grab a copy from http://icculus.org/duke3d/index.html and meet me for a game. I'll be the one with the pipe bomb.
Oh and first p0st.
Now if we could just liberate them from the /. effect.
You can't take the sky from me
Well, the site's slashdotted now, but UT's source code was released, although the license isn't GPL..
Also - Dink Smallwood is a fun, quirky RPG which is also now available free of charge.
And if I put a paypal button my tic-tac-toe program's page, can I get it listed?
Cause I can't see it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here is the Coral link, seeing as the site appears to be /.'d (Coral seems to be suffering from the /. affect too, interestingly enough).
Hi there
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Slashdotted at 7 posts. I think they underestimated the interest in free (as in both gratis and libre) games.
everything in moderation
If you're looking to d/l old-school MSDOS abandonware, The Home of the Underdogs rocks. While the organizers admit that the site isn't exactly kosher, they do remove stuff at the requests of the copyright holder. A lot of the more major titles aren't found there but if you have a little-known, favorite PC game from 10-15 years ago, odds are they have it. I've gotten Megatraveller, Deathtrack, The Magic Candle, SEAL Team, among others.
If you're looking for a good DOS emulator to play these classics under 2K/XP or Linux, I use DOSBox. It's not perfect, but it does work for most of the games that I've tried.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
... that LinuxGames has two staff members!
Liberatedgames.com to Commercial Developers:
"Pharaoh! Let my software go!"
There are 3 more for ya..
CloudScape
NetBeans
OpenOffice
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... the server's /.ed already.
Correction: The server has become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Game data is not released under GPL. This is obvisly a mayor flaw, and will render the game unplayable. This includes Doom, Quake 1, 2 etc.
The licence is too restricted. This includes Civ :CTP, where the license will not allow you to fork your own project. Therefore noone is willing to do anything with the new code.
The release of the code happens too late, so the game isn't "interesting" any more. (Eg. Wolf 3d)
Still, by all means, more GPL'ed games is a good thing!
You mean like it's worshipping its Slashdot overlords right now?
home
for the art/levels? I don't think that was released for free distribution.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Stop accessing the site so I can view it >_
Wow, how much of a geek do you have to be to include Linux as a "major computing platform" and leave out MS-DOS when the subject of said platform is gaming.
I don't have any hard numbers to back this up... but I wouldn't be at all suprised if the number of MS-DOS games out-strips every other platform around.
/dev/random
Depending upon your blessing of knowledge on what "freedom" is defined, your thoughts may vary on truth that GPL compared to public domain is not free.
Microsoft open-sourced Homeworld, but not under public domain and neither GPL.
ID Software open-sourced and GPL'd the engines for Wolfenstein & Spear-of-Destiny, Doom1, Doom2, Quake1, Quake2, and no later than December 2004 to GPL Quake3; ID is a pioneer and don't belong on the list because it makes them look uninteresting.
Among the above are the following software,
Aliens vs Predator 1 (they have source, no portage)
(Free)Space
Rise of the Triad
Duke Nukem 3D
Descent 1
Descent 2
Jagged Alliance
SiN
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
Fortunately, some upstanding citizens have realized their responsibility and have formed underground networks to liberate the poor captives and transport them into safety.
As always, the officials are after these groups of freedom fighters, and many have fallen, but the rest fight on. And there is good news too: in the past, the captive games, once freed, were taken to secret safe houses (called "ftp sites" by the underground), but nowadays, a number of networks are moving the captives around constantly, making it almost impossible to recapture them.
Three hurrays for the brave freedom fighters, past, present and future members of Razor, Myth, Khan, Origin and others. And to the brave, upstanding citizens, who risk arrest helping liberated games continuing their run on the wild. Hurray ! Hurray ! Hurray!
Most games are liberated, some (like Half-Life 2) before they are even released ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Jagged Alliance was such a cool game. I've kept it in my Win32 box of games that don't work well with Transgaming Cedega (WineX 4.0).
Thanks for the update! Whoever modded you down deserves hell on earth!
This would be a perfect time to test out Coral: http://www.liberatedgames.com.nyud.net:8090/gameli sting.php ...but I fear it may be too late.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Wouldn't the timing have been better if this was yesterday (i.e., the UN-declared Software Freedom Day)?
/me goes off to download Bungie's Aleph One yet again ...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
If they had read TFM or played the training missions, they wouldn't be so dumb. But they didn't buy the game, so they feel like they can jump right in and nothing bad can happen because if they get banned, oh well, they can just get another CD-key for free.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Only if the server welcomed us.
I wish more of "you linux geeks" would check out the list of Linux games, then maybe you'd be too busy playing games to slashdot every link in the articles I am trying to read! :-)
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."
"What we need is a persuasive liberation militia."
A regime-change! We could civilise the game-playing companies, and bring democracy to their offices! Bring out the bombs!
It's deceptively sophisticated --- put more simply, I suck. Each creature you summon has an associated element, and there's a strict order of precedence between the elements. Choosing your creatures to counter your opponent's is the key to the game. It's definitely made for wargame fans.
Despite being quite dated, it's still a lot of fun. The graphics are old but well done and perfectly adequate; it's full of well-presented little animations whenever anything happens. It's got a lot of nice touches like the fact that when you create a character, it runs you through a short personality test to find the right one for you... and there's something going on with Tarot cards I haven't figured out yet.
One of the attractions is the really, really bad translation from the Japanese. There's enough information there to actually play the game, but there's a weird air of surreality about the whole experience; particularly the cut scenes describing the ongoing plot. I've no idea what they're about --- my character seems to spend a lot of time talking to some woman with a dog, uttering the kind of cryptic runes you get when you try and speak Japanese without the right font installed!
Oh, yeah, and the fact that the title theme song is a direct ripoff of Limahl's Neverending Story has to be a point in its favour.
Alas, it's Windows only and doesn't run properly under Wine (it runs, but there's no sound and it's far too slow).
I don't believe SiN and Jagged Alliance are free in any sense of the word.
How is this site different from http://www.gamehippo.com/? I would RTFWS (web site) if it weren't already brought to its knees by the hoards of slashdotters hoping to find their favorite game from 1983.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't
UQM content seems "undecided" if you're going by the FAQ.
BaSS and FotAQ are labled freeware, so I doubt modification is permited.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Tons of other abandonware games available here .
--
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.
were at one point for commercial sale.
Wrong. Golgotha and Wolfenstein-Enemy-Territory are on the list, and they were never for sale.
(However, both of those were planned for sale at some point)
There are already some of these types around the web
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
I don't know what their source license is, but I was able to apt-get install Beneath a Steel Sky onto my Debian box, so it seems to meet Debian's requirements for distribution...
Here's a lightweight solution for Win2K/XP users that provides SB Pro emulation to a DOS box:
http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound/
It's not a DOS emulator, and it won't let you play DOS games on Linux or Mac, but it will let DOS games have sound under Win2K/XP. It's probably faster than using DOSBox since it doesn't emulate the x86, just the sound card. Which may or may not be a good thing. The original Descent runs at 400 frames per second under VDMsound on my low-end Athlon XP.
In communist russia, games liberate YOU!
I usually think that slashdot is a relatively openminded crowd but TROLL? For stating the exceedingly obvious fact there are more DOS games than linux games?
I can only hope that the metamods catch this...
I haven't kept up to date on what's happened in the emulator world, but I seem to remember that platforms like Vectrex were released to public domain.
They're obviously not trying for accessibility. It couldn't be that hard to write an installer for the source files. quake linux
Is it really necessary to specify that they're pimping out games with or without their full source code released? I mean, unless they're like specifically avoiding games that only have partial source code released...
And, how come the idea of liberating more software via the application of money not been considered?
Wonder how much it would cost to get source code to some of the classic games (e.g. various games in the C&C series)
...the best liberated game of all, Star Control 2? Not only has the sourcecode been GPL'ed, but the content is freely available as well.
I fucking hate sites that do that
I was just looking at the Liberated Games, and the games I looked at (Aliens v. Predator and Homeworld) both require a purchased version installed in Windows or Wine to function. Further, the "source code" is not the source for the games, it is the source for an addon that allows the game to play in Linux. Being that such addons are not written by the game developers but some third party Linux enthusiast, it is not surpising these bits of code are free, but the games themselves remain proprietary and completely closed source.
So exactly what is "liberated" about this? Are these games "liberated" because you only have to install them in Windows and not play them in Windows? Or is the mere fact that one can play games in Linux a liberating experience in and of itself?
I expected some restrictions, like licencing or some similar unpalatable requirements, but I did not expect this "liberated" software to still be closed source. I am disappointed.
Perhaps the site should create a rating system for types of "liberated" if it is going to define "liberated" so liberally.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
I am very much submitting few games there. A good example would be Star Control 2, aka Ur-Quan Masters. http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
This game called glx http://glx.upir.org// looks really good. Reminds me of Gravitar by the looks of it.
I couldn't get this fmod sound library working though. I couldn't find an install for it anywhere and I downloaded it from their site but it would just seg fault.
Any ideas on how to get this working would be cool.
I remember when Golgotha released their code and game data I was sure that somebody would pick up the torch and create a nice game out of it but nothing significant ever came of it. Considering the amount of press it got in the Linux press I'm sure that people knew about it, so that wasn't an excuse. And although it was still very rough around the edges they did include all the needed code,maps,textures,audio to get a good running start. So why did it fail? From what I could tell somebody ported it to run with OpenGL and there was a lot of discussion on licensing terms, but no real usable results. Maybe the code just sucked, but there was something like 1 1/2 years of commercial effort in the game that should have gone to some good use! It would just be instructive to learn why it failed.
Tribes: Veangeance ->new game, new servers the problem you mentioned gone. So besides getting the new gamers to the game they can move the crowds from old game to the new game simply by suplying them with annoying newbies.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
I was rather doubting at first, but... Holy schnitzel! beneath-a-steel-sky is in main, not non-free! Woowowowie! And other mysterious sounds!
I think it's in main because the distribution of the data has been approved AND it doesn't use the actual BaSK's interpreter but rather relies on scummvm.
Wrong. Golgotha and Wolfenstein-Enemy-Territory are on the list, and they were never for sale.
Not true. I bought the RTCW GOTY edition which included Enemy Territory and I definately paid money for it.
AC: which included Enemy Territory and I definately paid money for it.
Sucker.