Viewing articles by Hamish

Hamish Paul Wilson is a free software developer, game critic, amateur writer, cattle rancher, shepherd, and beekeeper living in rural Alberta, Canada. He is an advocate of both DRM free native Linux gaming and the free software movement alongside his other causes, and further information can be found at his icculus.org homepage where he lists everything he is currently involved in: http://icculus.org/~hamish [External Link]

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Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 9: Ancient Archaeology

By Hamish, 17 Jan 2022

After the demise of Loki Software, one of their former employees found himself forced to work behind a cash register for a living. Desperate to get back to porting games, he found the email address of an artist working for the Croatian developer Croteam, creators of the game Serious Sam.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 8: Shovelware with a Penguin

By Hamish, 10 Jan 2022

After completing all of the boxed Quake games for Linux, I was left with indecision. So if I could not settle on a single game to play, why not try one hundred? Made for a time of slow internet speeds and limited storage, these kinds of retail collections allowed users to explore hundreds of freeware and shareware titles from the comfort of a single CD-ROM.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 7: The Arena Eternal

By Hamish, 11 Oct 2021

The bedrock of almost all the LAN parties played in my household, Quake III Arena also became a trusty reliable for when I felt the urge for a casual bot match. Whenever I felt the need for a fresh Linux installation, Quake III Arena always became the first game I would reinstall. This had as much to do with the game's technical achievements as my fondness for the gunplay.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 6: A Lone Marine Battled

By Hamish, 2 Aug 2021

In the same vein as Quake: The Offering, the next game in the series got a similar treatment for Linux with Quake II: Colossus from Macmillan Digital Publishing, containing Quake II as well as its two mission packs The Reckoning and Ground Zero.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 5: Quaking in My Boots

By Hamish, 29 Mar 2021

Dave Taylor can be credited with kickstarting the commercial Linux gaming industry with his ports of the games Doom and Abuse. Before leaving id Software he also graced us with a Linux port of Quake, which was later taken by Macmillan Digital Publishing to form the basis of their retail Quake: The Offering package.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 4: Installing Red Hat Linux 7.3

By Hamish, 22 Mar 2021

I had some grief installing Red Hat Linux 7.3 but with persistence I was able to get it installed. In terms of compatibility though Valhalla proved to be far superior, so I decided to stick with it and focus on improving other parts of the system instead.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 3: Installing Red Hat Linux 9

By Hamish, 15 Mar 2021

My first choice was to run Red Hat Linux 9, for the arbitrary reason that it was the final release of the once dominant distribution and the second to feature the delightful Bluecurve desktop theme for both Gnome and KDE. I knew then that I was cutting things a bit close, but I still found myself disappointed with the outcome.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 2: Selecting a Graphics Card

By Hamish, 8 Mar 2021

Linux graphics support is still remarkably similar to how it was 20 years ago, even with all the progress that has been made in the years since. By the time of Red Hat Linux 9 the Direct Rendering Infrastructure or DRI was firmly in place in Mesa and offered 3D support for a wide number of cards.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 1: Dumpster Diving

By Hamish, 1 Mar 2021

Older computing hardware is getting harder and harder to find. What would have been given away just five or ten years ago can now often only be found for inflated prices. So when I noticed an interesting looking beige box ready to be recycled at my local dump, I did not hesitate to rescue it in order to see what was inside.

A look at the Penumbra Collection on Linux with Mesa in 2020

By Hamish, 22 May 2020

The Penumbra Collection is always going to hold a special place in my heart. It pains me to see, in spite of the still excellent support that Frictional Games gives to our platform, that the state of the Penumbra Collection for a number of Linux users has become such a mess.

The sad case of Unreal Engine 1 on Mesa and Linux in 2020

By Hamish, 4 Feb 2020

Community support for Unreal Tournament was able to breath some new life into the game, even with the limitations of the closed binary. By 2018 however the game was no longer launching for Mesa users. For an engine with such a pedigree on Linux this outcome is still disappointing.

Some thoughts on Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power

By Hamish, 26 Nov 2019

To say that I began playing Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power with low expectations would be an understatement. Immediately put off by the 3D viewpoint, the game acquired such a poor reputation that Frozenbyte went as far as to publicly apologize to quell a significant fan backlash. Four years on though, how does Trine 3 fare as a game?

The sad case of Trine on Mesa and Linux in 2019

By Hamish, 19 Nov 2019

Lacklustre Linux sales and internal restructuring appear to have taken Frozenbyte out of the Linux market for good, and with even their old games struggling to run well on the Mesa graphics stack, it marks a sad end to a series that once provided so much colour to our platform.

Playing Prey on Linux in 2018

By Hamish, 14 Feb 2018

Continuing on from my previous articles on how to get both Doom 3 and Quake 4 running on modern Linux systems, I felt the time was right to look at Prey, another id Tech 4 based game with a native Linux port. It did not take me long to discover that the main issue people were likely to run into with Prey had nothing to do with the game itself.

Playing Quake 4 on Linux in 2018

By Hamish, 14 Jan 2018

Having already gone to the trouble of getting the original Doom 3 binary working on my modern Arch Linux system a few months back, it made me wonder just how much effort it would take to get the closed source Quake 4 port up and running again as well.

Playing Doom 3 on Linux in 2017

By Hamish, 31 Oct 2017

With the release of the source code to both Doom 3 and the later BFG Edition, there now exists three options for Linux users wanting to play the game. Having gone through Doom 3 again, I decided it was time for me to compare them and give my thoughts on both the game and which of the three versions are best for Linux users in 2017.

Some thoughts on Ziggurat

By Hamish, 10 Apr 2017

Classic first-person shooters are without question my favourite video game genre, and it would be nice to be able to sit down and play more Indie games that can satisfy both my classic FPS craving while at the same time pushing the genre forward. Ziggurat attempts to do both, and it wins my respect for that.

Some thoughts on Hard West

By Hamish, 17 Mar 2017

Hard West is a hard game to recommend to anyone unwilling to subject themselves to a trial by fire. If it were a horse I would say that it tried to buck me at every possible opportunity. It almost succeeded too.

Some thoughts on The Original Strife: Veteran Edition

By Hamish, 8 Mar 2017

Strife: Quest for the Sigil was both a critical and commercial disappointment for Rogue Entertainment in 1996, and the source code to the game was mislaid by its developers. Years later work begin on reverse engineering Strife using the released Doom code. Night Dive Studios would later use this community project to craft The Original Strife: Veteran Edition.

Some thoughts on the Shadowrun series

By Hamish, 23 Jan 2017

Shadowrun was not only the first CRPG series I found compelling enough to play through all the way to the end, but one that I also found myself invested in enough to purchase additional instalments soon after playing the first.

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