Quoting: thelimeydragon

Quoting: rea987Will there be a Rune review on legacy and modern hardware?

I've played Rune on modern hardware. To get it to work correctly I had to use the taskset command. The game does not seem to like multi-core CPUs and acts extremely weird unless forced to a single CPU.

I do own Rune and I have played through the demo on Dianoga, but it is too much for the hardware. Even on Windows 98 it struggles. I do have some plans for it in the future but that is beyond the scope of what I am covering right now.

As for my running the game on modern Linux, I already detailed that in a previous article:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/02/the-sad-case-of-unreal-engine-1-on-mesa-and-linux-in-2020/

OldUnreal saved the day for Unreal Tournament but Rune is still difficult.

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Quoting: LightkeyThere actually were quite a few strategy games, even though none of them were classic RTS titles (Theocracy might be the closest, would be great if you made a retrospective on that, even if it would be just complaining about how buggy it is).

Theocracy is a fantastic suggestion that had slipped my mind until now. The game has to be ran at 16 bit colours and also has issues with newer glibc versions, so a perfect fit for Dianoga. It also seems to have been sold like Terminus with the Linux version included alongside the Windows release, so it should not be that hard to find.

At first it looked like the only place selling a dedicated Linux release was Amazon Germany, so I was considering sending you a private message about it, but I think I can get it in English instead.

Quoting: LightkeyCase in point: SimCity was released for Linux around the same time as DOOM (both shareware). I have yet to find out which of the two was the first commercial game released for Linux.

My understanding is that SimCity was a UNIX port that just happened to work on Linux, rather than a dedicated port to Linux such as Dave Taylor did for Doom, Quake, and Abuse. An academic distinction though.

Quoting: GuestThe joys of playing around with X settings manually back then! Wait...was that before X.org? I think it was still XFree86 back then.

As mentioned in the article, my install of Red Hat Linux 7.3 Valhalla is still using XFree86 at least. And powering just a 15" LCD monitor playing games at a paltry 640x480 to boot. :tongue:

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For the hell of it I just played through "AS-Overlord" again on my Arch Linux machine using the OldUnreal 469 Patch and the difference between the two was night and day. Honestly was a little hard to adjust. :dizzy:

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Quoting: thelimeydragonIs Sim City 3000 on the to-do list? :p

It definitely would be if I had the Linux version of it which I do not have at present sadly. I really should play a simulation or strategy title at some point just to break up all of the first person shooters, but they really did dominate the Linux gaming scene at the time and for a good while afterwards too.

It does strike me that Loki Software never ported any cRPGs over to Linux. We did get Neverwinter Nights from BioWare themselves in 2002 at the very least. Things have improved a great deal there.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThe requirements on those should be fairly low, and it would be impressive to see how they run on a Pentium 2 or 3.

Based on my own experiences trying to get certain Indie games working on my brother's older but still much newer laptops you might be surprised. Despite how they look they are not programmed anywhere near as efficiently as actual retro titles. It still might be worth a go though.

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The final Game of the Year Edition installer can be downloaded here:
http://www.ut-files.com/index.php?dir=Patches/&file=ut-install-436-GOTY.run [External Link]

The UTGLR 3.6 renderer can be grabbed here:
http://www.ut-files.com/index.php?dir=Video_Renders/OpenGL/&file=utglr36_for_linux.zip [External Link]

A review of the game by Matt Matthews for Linux Games is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20001101213320/http://www.linuxgames.com/reviews/ut.html [External Link]

A review of Unreal Tournament for linuxgaming.net is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030530121235/http://linuxgaming.net/modules.php?name=Reviews&rop=showcontent&id=13 [External Link]

A detailed retrospective of the game by LGR including on Linux can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRF06DpQE0c [External Link]

And my raw Unreal Tournament timedemo data can be found here:
http://icculus.org/~hamish/dianoga/ut99-timedemos.txt [External Link]

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Quoting: GuestThat doesn't mean there can't be popular approaches however, and actually it's highly likely that only a couple of package formats will be required (probably only .deb, and a tarball as a distro-agnostic approach) to cover the majority of users.

Just as an aside, I must admit to getting some small satisfaction when using Red Hat Linux 7.3 at how it was RPM packages that were the expected default with the software available at the time, with .deb packages being an afterthought. By the time I was using Fedora as my daily driver that had already switched outside of enterprise environments, so it did sometimes feel like you were being treated as a second class citizen.

Of course now I am on Arch with the wonder that is the AUR. I actually just setup vkQuake and Yamagi Quake II on my brother's new Pangolin laptop running Fedora 35, and I just got lazy and copied over the builds I made on my Arch machine using makepkg. These worked great, and better than the actually packaged version of Yamagi Quake II for Fedora which refused to play the music and videos properly.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySays it also supports doing various old Linux distributions. Maybe I could use it to play my old Loki games.

What is the support for GPU pasthrough like with this I wonder?

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Quoting: holisticboyDon't get me wrong, I prefer Goldeneye any day, but merit where merit is due in terms of the technology in SoF!

There was a mod for Blood II: The Chosen called "Limbloss" that functioned in much the same way but was a lot less elaborate. As for location based damage, SiN had that using the same engine years earlier. But neither of those games had the full power of the GHOUL system.

Quoting: rcritDon't want to be a downer, I've generally enjoyed this series, but this article seems more like a review of SoF than "getting old games to run".

Not sure what your point is here? If the article was just on what I needed to do to get the game running then it would be five paragraphs long and dry as birch bark. Loki did a good job on this, not much to talk about. I started this project by saying it was just a bit of fun, and it will remain so.

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The Soldier of Fortune song can be heard here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpRgTDPjMTY [External Link]

A review of the game by J. Neil Doane for Linux Journal can be read here:
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4381 [External Link]

A review of the game by Matt Matthews for Linux Games is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011223131525/http://www.linuxgames.com/reviews/sof/ [External Link]

And my launch command for Soldier of Fortune is as follows:
sof +set gl_dynamic 0 +set cl_lights 0 +set gl_gentextures_broken 0 +set gl_detailtexturing 0

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