How topical! I spent most of the morning staring out the window at a crew digging up the street.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI really liked that theme too...

Good old Bluecurve!

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This looks very impressive and ambitious for an indie game. 15 hours gameplay, animations and voice acting...

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Quoting: IggiA few findings already with long gaps, but nothing has beaten Noctropolis so far:

Turok: 21 years
The Labyrinth of Time: 21 years
Inherit the Earth: 20 years
Silver: 18 years
Broken Sword / Circle of Blood: 17 years
Broken Sword 2: 16 years
Vangers: 16 years
Shadow Warrior: 16 years (for an official Linux port - the game was playable before due to the Build Engine source code release)

Interesting, quite a few golden oldies in that list!

Also, didn't know MobyGames had such a useful API.

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I'll just casually drop this image here, like so. To balance things out and bring some peace and amity to this thread.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySweet! Linux is getting games a mere ten years after release! That means the gap is shrinking, right? :wink:

I am curious what the longest gap is between initial release and a Linux port. Noctropolis comes to mind. Released in 1994 for DOS and ported by Night Dive in 2017. That makes the gap 23 years, does any game beat that?

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Just some further points for the bUt It iS imPosSibLe crowd...

• Windows is well documented and for the fiddly bits you certainly can refer to Wine. As longs as you don't Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V I'm sure the Wine devs would be fine with someone else reading the code. If not, you just use as chinese wall technique and have a third party write documentation from the Wine sources.


• Wine was MIT licensed up to 2002 so that's a good starting point for the basic bits if you want to build something proprietary.


• Making a targeted effort, like a specific game, or game engine is much easier than providing support for the whole Windows ecosystem.


• There's something of a mono-culture when it comes to game engines. Bringing up the first UE game is presumably hard, the second one probably a lot easier. Most older games used custom engines.


• They are using DXVK which is a pretty major building block for any game. Likewise, bringing up a Vulkan or OpenGL game would not be too hard.

Also, efforts like these tend to get easier with time. People learn, share experience, develop better tools. To quote Terry Pratchett:

"No matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it'll become a whole lot easier and will therefore be done a lot. A huge mountain might be scaled by strong men only after many centuries of failed attempts, but a few decades later grandmothers will be strolling up it for tea 'and then wandering back afterwards to see where they left their glasses."

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySome people much more knowledgeable about such matters than me are saying that doing what's needed for making games run is really a very small subset of what Wine has to do, and so the task is feasible. I'm kind of surprised that games only use such a small subset of what software more broadly uses; I guess if I thought about it I would have figured that games do the kinds of things programs generally do, except with more demanding graphics, and so making games work would need a fairly large subset of what Wine does.

This sounds like a very targeted approach, supporting a specific title or game engine. For any given game, sure 90% of the API is probably unnecessary- But if you want to support every title from the Win95 era up to the as of yet unreleased title that requires Windows 11 I would guess much of the API is necessary.

Also. as TheRiddick pointed out, this effort doesn't need to concern itself with DRM, anti-cheat, launchers. game store fronts and all the other stuff.

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Quoting: a0kamiAlso go check Marc Ten Bosch and his Miegakure project, I used to get the 2 people confused.

It's been 13 years!

Someone should give Bosch the Douglas Adams treatment. Have his publisher lock him in a hotel room and don't let him out until he finishes the damn thing!

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Quoting: tohurwon't admit it because they would have to abide by the GPL

LGPL and no. If it's internal to the company they can do whatever they want. (L)GPL covers distribution of the software.

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