OT: games on linux (was OT: SCO Forum)

[Fairlight]

Gah, I deleted the message I meant to respond to when I was in a hurry to
do something else.

I was gonna say:  SURE you just installed Quake3 and Unreal for the
benching.  *snicker*  I believe you.  Honest!  :)

If you want a REAL benchmark, try The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.  Very,
very taxing on a system, both CPU and GPU.  Not sure what ATI you have (if
you said, I already forgot the model number), but if it's supported, it
would be interesting to see how it runs on that.

BTW...under what program do you run the games?  VMWare?  WINE?  Something
else entirely?  One of the things that always held me back from making
linux my full desktop was the lack of native games and the immaturity of
the emulation.  I gave up on it about the time they actually got StarCraft
working under WINE (although I think with no sound...DMA was always an
issue with sound, which is why dosemu never got proper sound support).
Have they fixed the sound issues nowadays, and under what, if so?

I'm betting SCO wouldn't recognise most of that hardware--especially the
touchpad.  Frankly, it surprises me that -linux- recognised and used all of
it as well.  It's come a LONG way since '93.  The amount of driver support
is really astonishing.  The HAL has obviously gotten better as well.

I'm not sure I could be convinced to give up my Win2K though, if you can
believe that.  For the desktop, I mean.  Server-wise, no contest.  But
there'd pretty much have to be 100% game and multimedia compliance for me
to switch my desktop.  And when last I tried xanim (SuSE 9.0 locally), it
was dodgy even on some MPEG formats, much less some AVI encodings.  It
still wasn't ready.  And if one is just going to run everything
Windows-like under emulation, why not just run the actual OS; at least it's
a supported configuration if you have issues and need support from the
studio.  And studios are next to useless even when you do meet the specs.
If your drivers aren't the 100% latest release (even if said release is
BUGGIER than the release you're on), they don't know how or don't care to
deal with you.  That's the answer to everything:  Update all drivers.
Beyond that, they want a dxdiag (can you -get- that under linux?), msinfo
dump (ditto?), and -then- never get back to you.  :-/

Actually, I mean...you got ATI drivers...are they Linux native, or for an
emulator?  Or both?

But seriously, I can't see there being any recourse if a game failed to
run properly in that environment--you're not even using the specified OS,
technically.  (The two games you mentioned were never natively ported, to
the best of my knowledge; I thought they stopped Quake at Quake 2, and
Unreal was never ported, although Descent was.  If I'm wrong, do tell.)
That'd be enough to put me off, simply because of historical precedent.

Remember when Franklin ][e and Laser 128's were all the rage?  All cheaper
and Apple ][e compatible, right?  Not -exactly-.  Apple kept some registers
in their system a secret, and those were not available in the clones.  Some
games and applications used those, so the clones were effectively about 95%
compatible.  Fast forward 9 years to Win95, and another 11 years to WinXP,
and tell me that the emulation teams got every part of the Windows API that
a game is going to need.  I don't believe it.  Most, possibly.  Not all,
I'd bet.  There are going to be shortcomings.  And the last thing I want
when I'm trying to actually do something is to encounter a shortcoming. :)

I'm thinking linux as a hybrid recreational/business desktop for me is
pretty much never going to happen until games start being natively ported
as a matter of course.  That may or may not happen.  Part of it is hindered
by developers like Valve.  Want to know why Half-Life never had more than
the server ported to linux?  Client was written using MFC.  That's HL, not
HL2 (which may be the same case, but I never bothered finding out).  The
guy that did the Quake 2 port was going to try it until he found out about
that little hitch.  It's less likely today with OpenGL support, but there
are still a LOT of games that only do DX support.

When they started slowing down on porting things like that, I pretty much
gave up most of the hope of ever dumping Windows.  Actually, I rather like
Win2K after over a year using it.

If we could get actual commercial game ports for 95%+ of the games out
there, and some -robust- multimedia players that don't fall down on common
encodings, yeah, I'd consider it again.  I doubt it'll ever happen, but I
happen to believe in the occasional miracle.  :)

mark->
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