Quoting: gbudnyHow good were closed source drivers for Matrox cards?

I don't think there were any closed drivers from Matrox, nor was there much need for them as Mesa was in its own first golden age at the time. Only Nvidia and for a period ATI embraced binary blob drivers for Linux, which set the free graphics stack back years in the mid to late 2000s. Things are so much better again now at least with AMD and Intel.

They do ship a modified version including their own Matrox HAL library it seems though:
https://www.matrox.com/de/video/apps/drivers/graphics/download?id=143 [External Link]

Quoting: gbudnySometimes, people sell old graphics cards for a few dollars because they think it's a piece of useless junk.

I was working on another old computer with my brother the other week, and inside his big antistatic bag of old expansion cards was, unbeknownst to him, a Diamond Stealth II S220 (Rendition Vérité V2100) graphics card. While useless for Linux this is still a very collectible and historically significant graphics card, as the Rendition Vérité was the first series of video cards to support 3D acceleration in Quake weeks before the Voodoo did.

My brother had no idea that the card was that valuable, nor did the person who sold it to him at a flea market. It was actually part of the same $1 CAD lot of cards that my Sound Blaster 16 PnP came from.

EDIT: Not entirely useless on Linux as 2D support for the Vérité was released through the back door:
"I got on to the beta tester team with Rendition and they were constantly upgrading the drivers and making them better and faster but the manufacturers couldn't be bothered with updating their drivers ... I also got the Verite engineers to "leak" the 2D driver specs because there wasn't a way to make it work with Linux. So I tried shopping the specs around to different Linux distros (there were only a few back then) and Redhat turned me down flat and Debian did too after a few weeks but I finally got the interest of some German programmers at SUSE and they got them to work (2D only) in no time and because of the way Linux works you could download them from SUSE and they would work in Redhat or Debian or any other distro"
Source: https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/rendition-gone-but-not-forgotten.278896/post-2010465 [External Link]

This Linux Gazette issue seems to confirm that it was done through SUSE too:
https://linuxgazette.net/issue31/gm.html [External Link]

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: HamishI need to switch my focus to the farm as I will be calving and lambing before long.

Isn't that something the cows and sheep should do?

All jests aside, they are honestly pretty good at it, but you still need to check on them at all times of the day and night just in case. I also treat umbilicals and give selenium shots among other things.

Quoting: gbudnyI never had a chance to use Matrox cards Linux. I watched somewhere it was tricky to install drivers back then. In my opinion, Matrox Parhelia still looks like a nice alternative for the old PCs.

Certainly by the time of Red Hat Linux 7.3 any Matrox G200 or G400 card should just work out of the box with DRI drivers. The G400 MAX would be a compelling alternative for Dianoga, but they are about as expensive as Voodoo cards are these days.

The Parhelia is its own beast entirely, but Matrox have always been good at providing long term support for their products, including on Linux.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeHave you, or are you going to do an article on Myth II?

Yep, I do have Myth II and I do intend to cover it at some point. It's funny though, I built the computer with the idea of playing Loki games in mind, but instead I have kept diving down all these other Linux native rabbit holes, as they seem more at risk of disappearing from the internet.

This is going to be the last article for awhile as I have burned through the topics I had stockpiled, and I need to switch my focus to the farm as I will be calving and lambing before long. More instalments will come as I finish them, but they will not be every week. Hope you all enjoyed the ride. :happy:

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The Marble Blast Gold demo can be downloaded here:
https://marbleblast.com/index.php/downloads/mbg/download/28-marble-blast-gold/13-marbleblastgolddemo-1-4-1-sh [External Link]

Marble Blast Web can be played here:
https://marbleblast.vani.ga/ [External Link]

The Marble Blast Haxe Port can be found here:
https://github.com/RandomityGuy/MBHaxe [External Link]

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Quoting: Lightkey..and then they just point to Holarse for the Linux version instead of hosting it themselves, those freeloaders!

Looking back with the Internet Archive they used to use Tucows to offload the Linux hosting too:
https://archive.org/details/tucows_327831_MOBILITY [External Link]

Both uploads of the demo are setup to launch at 1024x768 which is blocked in the shareware, meaning you have to edit the MOBILITY.INI file to even get the thing to launch...

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Quoting: gbudnyI waited for it, and I think it's my favorite article from your retro series. I like to read when users publish how to solve different issues with games for Linux.

I will admit, being able to say that I have played the original Linux Doom port with a serial mouse in 2023 is a proper nerd flex. :wink:

Quoting: gbudnyDave Taylor probably didn't spend too much time working on this version of Doom. I suspect that Doom for NeXTStep is similar to this one.

"I did this 'cause Linux gives me a woody. It doesn't generate revenue. Please don't call or write us with bug reports. They cost us money, and I get sorta ragged on for wasting my time on UNIX ports anyway." - Dave D. Taylor, README.linuxx

Quoting: gbudnyI don't know if you have plans to write the article about Mobility for Linux.

That's the second old German shareware game with Linux binaries you pointed me to. I appreciate it. :grin:

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Quoting: CybolicI think you got this link wrong though:

Quoting: HamishA detailed overview of Abuse versions can be seen in this VOGONS thread:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=6363 [External Link]

Maybe you meant to link to this one? https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=44100 [External Link]

Yep, that would be correct. This is probably one of the articles that I spent the most time doing research on, and I ended up having a massive text file full of links. I guess I must have copied the wrong VOGONS thread over. I never did get XFree86 to launch at 320x200 by the way, but I was able to expand the Abuse window in the end.

Quoting: CalinouI gave Abuse a try recently, but I couldn't stand the low framerate.

I definitely intend to come back to Abuse in a later article, once I can get my hands on a CD-ROM. The original registered version direct from Crack dot Com would be best, but I could make do with the later Electronic Arts or Origin version as well thanks to the source code release.

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Quoting: LightkeyBernd Kreimeier! Squee~ *girlynoises*
A name I haven't heard in a long time. Sorry, I know this is getting off-topic, I only know him from his Loki Software days, where he was responsible for OpenAL and as a German myself, from his science-fiction short stories in the c’t magazine I was reading at the time I thought he wrote those just as a hobby but looking at Wikipedia, it seems it was his job early on, where he even wrote some novels that I should check out some time.

Yeah, that scans, since his initial interest in the Doom source code was for a book deal that fell through:
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Bernd_Kreimeier [External Link]

These articles are kind of just old Linux storytime at heart, so no worries about getting off topic. :happy:

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderThey are rage....... Brutal....... DOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!

Nothing Brutal about Linux Doom, I can tell you that much. It can not even run SIGIL without a visplane overflow:
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Visplane_overflow [External Link]

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The article on a.out support by Jason Heiss can be read here:
https://aput.net/~jheiss/aout_redhat.shtml [External Link]

The Linux Doom FAQ by Steve VanDevender is archived here:
https://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/~stevev/Linux-DOOM-FAQ.html [External Link]

A review of Doom by Michael K. Johnson for Linux Journal can be found here:
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1 [External Link]

The files for the original Linux Doom port are mirrored here:
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/games/doom/!INDEX.html [External Link]

My fake /dev/sndstat device can be seen here:
https://icculus.org/~hamish/dianoga/sndstat [External Link]

The RPM package for Abuse can be downloaded from here:
https://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/contrib/libc6/i386/abuse-1.10-5.i386.rpm [External Link]

An RPM package for the patched Linux Doom binaries can be downloaded here:
https://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/contrib/libc6/i386/doom-1.10-7.i386.rpm [External Link]

A press release on Red Hat partnering with Crack dot Com be be read here:
https://www.redhat.com/ja/about/press-releases/press-crackdotcom [External Link]

A detailed overview of Abuse versions can be seen in this VOGONS thread:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=44100 [External Link]

The Linux Game Tome page for Abuse is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070227220513/http://happypenguin.org/show?Abuse [External Link]

Security reports on the exploits found with the SVGALib version of Abuse can be read here:
https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/19279 [External Link]
https://vulners.com/packetstorm/PACKETSTORM:15084 [External Link]

An article on the Quake source code leak from Wired can be read here:
https://www.wired.com/1997/01/hackers-hack-crack-steal-quake/ [External Link]

An interview with Dave Taylor on Linux gaming by Harley Jebens for Gamespot can be read here:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/okay-dave-taylor-why-linux/1100-2467851/ [External Link]

An interview with Dave Taylor on Linux gaming by James Hills for GA-Source is mirrored here:
https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/ddt.shtml [External Link]

And my launch command for Abuse is as follows:
sudo /usr/games/abuse.x11 -2 -size 640 480 -grab_pointer

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Quoting: mr-victory

Quoting: HamishNope, for the same reason most older web browsers no longer work with modern websites

Welp, I could browse just fine from an iPad 2 running iOS 9 so I thought maybe there could be a chance.

Well, there is always The Old Net:
http://theoldnet.com [External Link]

Which GOL is just old enough for:
https://theoldnet.com/get?url=gamingonlinux.info&year=2010&scripts=false&decode=false [External Link]

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