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gaming in linux

From Elliot

Answered By Karl-Heinz Herrmann, Heather Stern, Robos, Daniel S. Washko

i understand that you can download some patch to allow quake 3 Arena and unreal tournament windows versions to run on linux,what do i need to download to allow this,

[K.-H.] I thought there are native versions of these games for Linux...

[Robos] Well, in order to get Q3 to play under linux you need the *.pak files and the linux binary of the game. This binary is available from id itself, they have a "demo" version for linux. If you have the full *.pak files this demo will grow to a full version (haven't done this, I bought the linux version).

are there any other games that can do this such as counter stkrike/half life soldier of fortune etc.

[K.-H.] There is a linux distribution coming with a specialized wine version which seems to be able to run many popular windows games. erm.... can't remember the name, sorry. Maybe search through linuxgazette -- I think I picked it up here some few months ago.

[Heather] Mandrake Gaming Edition. Hmm, maybe they'd let him upgrade his regular Mandrake over to it.

[Robos] Concerning Counter-Strike, three days ago I finally managed to get CS to run with transgaming.com's WineX. You can check out their WineX at their sourceforge-site for free (no support then of'cos). After installation (I`m not entirely sure how's best: doing it their Readme-way: ./tools/wineinstall

did not work for me, but at least this created all the necessary files and dirs. When I did it with good'ol: ./configure, make depend, make, make install

it worked...) do a: wine hl.exe -- hl.exe --console --game cstrike

(you have to have the halflife dir in the "c" path). The menu works really slow, but the game is normal speed. My sound is kinda broken, but that is probably my bad onboard-sound...

The transgaming-folks have a list of games running as well as a rate how good somewhere on their site, take a look. As do the wine folks at codeweavers.com.

And there is a halflife-wine howto and others at linuxgames.com.

i am currently running mandrake 8.1 and have xfree 4.1.0 and have just installed the latest nvidia drivers,

[Daniel] Make sure you nvidia drivers are running properly: Fire up the gears screen saver and verify they are not running at 1 fps. If they are, read the Nvidia howto thoroughly.

so it would be great to be able to use some games in linux,

[K.-H.] xpingus, tuxracer, bzflag, parsec,...

[Heather] Oh yeah, I didn't even go into how many "clone" games we have of popular games - stopped counting how many minesweepers, tetris, and solitaire too. We've more "asteroids" clones than you can shake a joystick at, too.

But also: Lincity:Simcity :: Maelstrom:Asteroids :: crafty:Warcraft ... uh or was that aleclome? Maybe I should check the Debian "availables" list for the word "clone". Or Freshmeat.net for it. Hmm, had to narrow it down to "clone game" in order to get 61 projects show there, all of whom have a very good likelihood of being playable stuff

[K.-H.] then there are many commercial ones from a company porting them to linux (mostly 1st person ego shooters) and there is civilisation (call to power) somewhere out there as well.

[Heather] I'm looking at Myth II and Terminus on my desk -- Myth II was a Loki project, Terminus by Vatical says "PC - Mac - Linux" on the package front. In short they don't care which OS we're running, let's just get to the gaming. An excellent attitude, in my opinion.

thank you in advance from elliot,

ps i have read that winex has just ported Max Payne to linux making it the first ever direct x 8 game to be supported under winex. that is great and hopefully this means that linux will soon be able to equal windows in terms of games availabilty and entice a few more newbies to linuxing..............

So far, so good, you would think. About 4 of a gang of answerfolk had the time as well as any past experience in the use of WINE to give him some comment about how to get his games going. The same fellow also got other threads, one in where I commented to Jay that by my admittedly wimpy requirements, WINE runs acceptably on a mere Pentium II. It certainly runs better than VMware -pretending- to be a P150. But, for some reason, he decided to mail again.

Perhaps our mail wasn't as readable without the sort of threading I added above? -- Heather

where would i find the excecutible files to run windows versions of quake 3 arena, unreal tournament , i know i can use winex but ive read in a linux pocket book that i can download a "linux patch" i have bean told that if i download the linux quake 3 arena demo and i have the windows pak files it will make it the full version what games also allow me to do this counter strike perhaps? and which type of file should i look for on the websites, they are excecutible right?

any help would be great as i have a pile of windows games that i would love to run in linux but hoepfully not through winex or a windows compatibility layer eg. win4lin/vmware

thanks from elliot.

[Robos] OK pal, have you even read what I've told you the last time you asked? And it really isn't difficult to find the demo of q3-linux. Google: q3 linux demo -> 9th hit.

Because of id's engagement for opengl their games are easy to port to linux, macos and I even saw quake1 for neXt IIRC. But, those other a**holes like to stick to win crap directx and since that is only on win you're fscked. How about you don't write to us that you want to play games under linux but rather to the ones that make the games? Then they see that there is a market and will produce accordingly.

Concerning CS: if you would have tried what I told ye you would have noticed that there is no performance loss (as far as I was concerned) in the wine emulation, so whats the point?

[Heather] There's two problems here, and their solutions do not really belong in the same paragraph.

If you want Linux to run a piece of software you already bought for Windows - whether it's a game or something else - then you are almost certainly going to find that WINE is part of your solution. This is not about whether you are old enough to play with alcohol WINE is the way that UNIX-like operating systems these days, just happening to include Linux at the forefront, run the MSwin "protected mode exec" file format and answer MSwin library calls. Heck, sometimes it even works pretty well. WineX helps because it means we can then answer the library calls to that bare-metal abuse the MSwin developers call "DirectX".

WINE home page: https://www.winehq.com

DirectX support for WINE: https://www.transgaming.com

Sites specifically about gaming under Linux: https://www.linuxgames.com https://www.linuxvoodoo.com/games

There are occasionally people who will write readers for some data normally sold on CD to MSwin users. One such example is Robert MIbus' "ency", which reads the Star Trek Encyclopedia discs. You're more likely to want one of the GUIs other people have wrapped around it, but those are easy to find from his site. If you mail him how cool it is, tell him his Comp Ops says "Hi!"

Star Trek Ency Reader: https://users.bigpond.com/mibus/ency

If you want "purity" - a real Linux binary - in many cases like Quake they exist. Go to linuxgames.com or freshmeat.net and look them up. But if they do not, you will have to TELL THE MANUFACTURER that this is something that you will spend money on at the mall. Otherwise every time you buy an MSwin game just to run it under WineX they will tell themselves they have another happy Win2000 customer. They just can't tell by the Visa receipt that you use Linux, folks.

And all of this aside, we have squadzillions of native games for Linux that have never been in shrinkwrap. Not all of them are clones of anything nor even available for Windows. ("Thomas T Tuxedo, A Quest For Herring" comes to mind.) The index servers have troves of them. Some of them are even GLitzy (okay, bad pun. OpenGL is very cool.) Go forth and have fun!

Freshmeat, games and entertainment (almost 2000 projects when I looked): https://freshmeat.net/browse/80

TUCOWS, linux games index: https://linux.tucows.com/games.html

This page edited and maintained by the Editors of Linux Gazette Copyright © 2002
Published in issue 77 of Linux Gazette April 2002

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