Interplay Entertainment announced today they're updating many of their classic titles to support Linux. A lot of it of course is thanks to the excellent free and open source DOSBox, which allows thousands of classic to play on modern systems without much hassle.
First of the announcements was that Battle Chess 4000 is now available on Steam, and it comes straight out of the gate with builds setup for Linux too. On their Twitter, Interplay mentioned:
As part of the drive to bring our classic pool of games to an entirely new generation of gamers, we will also update our back catalogue today, providing Tux & Apple support for heavyweight titles such as Earthworm Jim, Stonekeep and Descent!
Tux and Apple being Linux and macOS if that wasn't clear.
Going over their list of games on Steam there's quite a few. Here's some that added Linux builds recently:
- Battle Chess
- Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess
- Castles
- Cyberia
- Descent
- Descent 2
- Dragon Wars
- Ignition
- Lost Eden
- M.A.X.: Mechanized Assault & Exploration
- Prehistorik
- Prehistorik 2
- Redneck Deer Huntin'
- Redneck Rampage Rides Again
- Shattered Steel
- …and so on, with more to come
Worth noting that Descent 3 already had Linux support, as porter Ryan Gordon did some work back in 2020 to re-port the game along with many tech upgrades for modern Linux gaming.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: slaapliedjeQuoting: foggerYou can already play those games easily on Linux with DOSBox. I don't know why they are selling those games on Steam or GOG when most of those those games can be downloaded for free, legally, at archive.org.Ha, Archive.org is an interesting situation. There is no legal definition of 'abandonware'. But archive.org also won't listen to dmca take downs from what I've seen.
But let's be fair here. Steam is a click and play set up, and with Boxtron you can even have extras like MIDI autodetected and set up for you. Downloading things from archive.org requires the set up of dosbox, and all the settings that entails, so isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. While most of us on here can do it, for the (hopefully) plethora of new users that'll hop on board via the Steam Deck, they won't want to mess with dosbox.conf.
Great points. DosBox can be hard to setup and funky with displays/resolution/audio and controls, last time i tried it was a less than pretty experience.
I wonder if its possible to use remote-play-together on these old dosbox games via steam for two player?
Quoting: slaapliedjeBe nice if the Steam Deck had Boxtron already installed so you could just pick that option for games using DOSBox. Actually, it'd be nice if my distro had that.Quoting: foggerYou can already play those games easily on Linux with DOSBox. I don't know why they are selling those games on Steam or GOG when most of those those games can be downloaded for free, legally, at archive.org.Ha, Archive.org is an interesting situation. There is no legal definition of 'abandonware'. But archive.org also won't listen to dmca take downs from what I've seen.
But let's be fair here. Steam is a click and play set up, and with Boxtron you can even have extras like MIDI autodetected and set up for you.
Quoting: ArtenI think they feel the money of future SteamDeck owners in the water :-)
ElectricPrism Oct 15, 2021
Quoting: foggerYou can already play those games easily on Linux with DOSBox. I don't know why they are selling those games on Steam or GOG when most of those those games can be downloaded for free, legally, at archive.org.
Who would win? Free and complicated or one click installs.
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 15 October 2021 at 3:55 am UTC
Quite a number of titles I do recall, just not sure I want to go too far down memory lane :).
Also, MDK is already there, but only for Windows. Lets hope they release it to Linux soon.
But beware: there is plenty of people complaining about the quality of the DOSBox setup, so make sure the game you want was already bug-fixed after the launch.
Quoting: M@GOidAlso, MDK is already there, but only for Windows. Lets hope they release it to Linux soon.
It has been my understanding that Shiny suffered a catastrophic storage failure with the source code for the original MDK, so there's no fixing or updating it. This is why MDK2 got the HD treatment but not the first game.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me