Gog.com Now Supports Linux (opens in new tab)

There are hundreds of private servers out there. I know of at least six that are near-perfect recreations of vanilla, BC, wrath, and even cata. If the main game died, these private servers would continue to exist. Most of them are actually self-funded and self-sufficient as is. I played expensively on a Cataclysm private server, because I had quit in the first patch due to brokeness and never had a chance to actually see Deathwing (in its intended form at level 85) because Pandas had come out by then.

In reality, the game has gone away. Every time a new expansion has come out and reset everything millions of people had their old game taken and were given a new game. And sometimes, they didn't like the new one, and sought the old one. And even if it is illegal, the market is providing their demands. There are even a few open source projects for server cores to run WoW on.

I'm sure WoW's community would find a way to keep the game alive with relatively few alterations. There's no reason someone can't write a third-party world viewer and/or server that would still allow people to enjoy a more or less authentic WoW experience.

I actually think it'd be really exciting for someone to write a compatible client for a 3D game like that and release it. What would FreeTF2 look like? The idea of multiple clients implementing a proprietary game netcode and all simultaneously playing together is really interesting to me, at least.

This has happened with Second Life but only because Linden Lab explicitly facilitated it. They actively encourage third-party developers and release the code of their official reference client. Second Life The Network is also basically just a bunch of scripts and textures coming down the pipe so it's easier to implement than say an unofficial client for an FPS or RTS, which is very likely much more opaque.

I agree about WoW. I've never played it, but I could imagine loving it. Chances are I never will though.

> I don't think developers are the problem.

It depends on the project. So I guess big commercial titles have other problems. Smaller groups though -- whether indie game studios or just individuals making freeware games (Dwarf Fortress, anyone?) -- they're usually what the developers make of it. And it very often is the case that the developers do not care about others' freedoms or portability and all that. It's too much work, nobody uses that platform, we don't care about minority users, whatever. The same old excuses, which are mostly BS.

Yup, and that's very nice. It still would be better to get the source and native ports with enhancements that make the games more accessible, less buggy, prettier, etc. Also, performance matters. Emulating a bunch of hardware is not cheap.

Agree. Also, it'd be nice if abandonware somehow got legal recognition. I don't think it helps anyone that there are games which are not being sold, not really owned by anyone (the company went bankrupt), not generating anyone any revenue, and not legal to do things with.

Emulating hardware takes tons of processing power. If you think our hardware is up for running games for modern OSen in a VM, you're probably assuming paravirtualization with hardware assistance. This works when you are running current hardware with current software designed to make use of these features. As soon as the implementation or hardware changes, you're likely to be out of luck. I would worry that a Linux from 2014 will not run on a 2024 Linux system without full virtualization. Heck, I don't even know if I'm still running amd64 ten years down the line.

Try boot a 2004 Linux in Qemu without using kvm, kqemu or the like. Play a game in it. For the heck of it, try emulate a machine with a different ISA.

Nvidia. Installed System Shock 2 (through Steam) on my Linux machine at work. Ran it, cool, left the game and resolution was stuck at a really weird one (on 1 of 2 monitors) and I had to fix a problem.

Same game on Windows, likely no problem to fix.

Issues for sure still happen with Linux gaming. Many games are fine though, of course.

It had low performance, but once I figured out that the keybindings were all empty and you had to restore them to default everything kinda worked ok. Low FPS, but playable on my Nvidia GTX760M laptop.

Yeah, I've heard complaints about short support periods, weird bugs and games that just crash, but performance seems as good as Nvidia's from what I've read.

This seems to suggest that Nvidia's drivers are vastly superior on new OpenGL 4 features, though they do come from Nvidia: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_apite... It's probably cherrypicking benchmarks a bit, but cherrypicking shouldn't have that dramatic results... Seems like I'll be sticking with Nvidia.

FlatOut is a Windows game. As for DOSBox, if a game works on it in Windows it will work on it in Linux as well.

I agree. I should have said something more like "diminish their efforts" rather than "minimize their accomplishment". My point is the marketing claim that these titles are appearing on Linux for the first time is a stretch.

But they say "Linux" nearly everywhere, not "Ubuntu" or "Mint" (even though they're the only supported distros and the rest is best-effort tarball). There's inconsistency between iconic and textual data.

Obviously, one can't support "Linux" - that's abstract shortcut title for plethora of various GNU/Linux-based OSes. Yet, I think Tux is universally recognized symbol for those.