Comment by ylee
18 days ago
I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home.
In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients available for download that use the retail version's assets. Despite the valiant efforts of Wine and related projects, the world would have to wait 15 more years before Proton leveraged Wine technology to bring quasi-native games to Linux, and 20 years before Steam Deck made it the norm or close to it.
That reminds me of 1999, where I threw a party to help my friends modify their Celeron 300A CPUs so they could run dual-socket. My dual 300A running at 450MHz would run Starcraft under WINE faster than Windows could run it because at the time Windows couldn't do multi-core. Under Linux one processor would run the graphics (in X) and the other would run the game mechanics, and it would blaze.
Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium?
EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE
Yes, the dual Celeron 300As, if you could take advantage of multiple cores, were faster than the higher end CPUs, particularly if you overclocked to 450MHz. My box was stable at 450MHz for around a year, then I had to gradually down-clock it, eventually back to 300. Never really did much to track down why that was, just rolled with it and figured I should be grateful for the overclocking I had.
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I hate you.
Well, just envy hate and just momentarily. Back then, such hacks were harder to find/discover. I would have loved to do that hack, I yearned for true multicpu.
That stuff was all over Slashdot at the time, where I heard about it; even got one and ran it for awhile, eventually relegating it to a Linux server.
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I remember Corel Linux!
It was the first Linux I ever used, from a PC magazine CD in 1999. A significantly hacked-up KDE 1.1 w/ integrated Wine. To this day, you can find Corel in the copyright dialogs of a few notable KDE apps, e.g. the file archiver Ark.
I'm now looking back on 25 years of Linux use, 19 of them as a KDE developer, including writing large parts of the Plasma 5/6 shell, 6-7 years on the KDE board, and working on the Steam Deck (which ships with KDE Plasma) at a contractor for a hot minute to bring gaming back as well. At least on the personal level it was an impactful product :-)
Same here. The Spanish edition of PC Mag included Core Linux. It was the most pleasant install experience in much, much time (next, next, next, finish)
I had the box set, it was the first Linux game I bought. The flurry was Loki Games, a porting house. They let me help as a beta tester! I got to test Descent III and Mindrover. Next would have been Deus Ex, but they flamed out. One of them, Sam Latinga, built SDL and I believe is still active.
I still have my boxed copy (along with everything Loki produced) in a big box in the garage.
I think Loki also originated OpenAL, which is still around as well.
What a shame, GOG only has the Windows version :-(
I'd love to buy the linux native version.
You probably don't, the old linux binaries are notoriously hard to get to function properly on a modern distribution.
While the kernel interface remained stable across all those years, user space libraries have changed quite a lot, so it's much easier to run the Windows version with wine.
ah, that makes a ton of sense actually. Thanks!
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Plays just fine under Wine, better than on modern Windows in fact
I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.
However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see which company has bigger budget to spend on lawyers, whatever.
WINE and Proton piggyback on Microsoft's guarantees of Win32 stability. As long as that remains in place (which should be for all intents and purposes forever given MS's customers) they can't really do anything about it.
So, next time you hear the joke about Win32 ABI being the only stable ABI on Linux, remember it's funny because it's true!
Don't forget Windows finally made Year of the Linux Desktop(tm) a reality, Windows is the best desktop Linux distro (Android gets the mobile Linux distro crown).
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If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined today, surely.
If all one wants it to run games that use the Win32 API as defined tomrrow, anyone's guess.
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There's a good chance that if that if Microsoft doesn't act soon enough, and a lot more devices running Steam OS are released, Proton might become the de-facto platform against which many new games are developed, and which engines target.
At that point, there is nothing Microsoft can do.
Agreed. I actually think it might be too late at this point since it takes so long to turn the aircraft carrier.
Microsoft can't realistically deprecate/remove Win32, so all they could do is entice with new APIs. That will work for some games, but especially with the frameworks in place, they'll have to be really good to get people to abandon Steam Deck compatibility to use them.
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Microsoft controls Windows and DirectX, Valve only gets to play until Windows landlord allows it.
DR-DOS, OS/2 and EEE PC.
Lets see if SteamOS makes the list as well, this is after all round two, Steam Machines didn't go that well.
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On the other hand building Linux binaries and keeping them running for years without maintenance has proven far more difficult than emulating Windows.
For an example track down the ports Loki games did many years ago and try to get them running on a modern machine. The most reliable way for me has been to install a very old version of Linux (Redhat 8, note: Not RHEL 8) on a VM and run them in there.
Naturally it means GNU/Linux will never improve until being forced upon.
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> I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.
Microsoft can't do shit against WINE/Proton legally, as long as either project steers clear of misappropriated source code and some forms of reverse engineering (Europe's regulations are much more relaxed than in the US).
The problem at the core is that Linux (or to be more accurately, the ecosystem around it) lacks a stable set of APIs, or even commonly agreed-upon standards in the first place, as every distribution has "their" way of doing things and only the kernel has an explicit "we don't break userspace" commitment. I distinctly remember a glibc upgrade that went wrong about a decade and a half ago where I had to spend a whole night getting my server even back to usable (thank God I had eventually managed to coerce the system into downloading a statically compiled busybox...).
They surely can, and Valve got lucky UWP didn't took off as they feared.
Microsoft can easily do another go at it.
That is the problem building castles on other vendor platforms.
As reminder,
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-ste...
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> forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy
Would that still not be easier than developing something stable and finding ways to force 3rd party developers to support Linux? (when you can offer them anything in return)
Was the Linux port made by Loki Software by any chance? That shirt lived company did a lot to make Linux viable for gaming. They developed a bunch of new libraries to help with porting and open sourced them. SDL was one of them.
Edit: OpenAL was another one of their libraries.