First post, by kjliew
I recently acquired 2 *ancient* Linux native games. The initial games were released back in 1999 and the native Linux port were released in 2001. They were targets for 32-bit x86 Linux, kernel 2.1 and built with ancient glibc, gtk, glib, early SDL and OpenAL. I am trying to get them to run on modern Linux such as ArchLinux x86_64 using the lib32 multilib support. They don't have source ports, otherwise getting them to run on Linux will be easy. They are:
- Heavy Gear 2 from Loki Entertainment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki_Entertainment - Shogo Mobile Armor Division from Hyperion Entertainment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Entertainment
Both games comes with software and OpenGL renders. The goal is to get OpenGL renderer to work since software renderer just work. They have similar system requirements, asking for Pentium 200 MMX with 3D hardware or Pentium 2 233 for software-only. In fact, with such system requirements, playing on VM is also quite possible.
The main issue is that none of the modern Linux distros still provide glib-1.2 and gtk-1.2 anymore, so they have to be built separately. Amazingly, those games still works 😀 , but with a few caveats:
- i915, i965 OpenGL driver OK
- nvidia-390xx OpenGL driver OK
- MESA Gallium3D-based OpenGL SIGSEGV (r600, nouveau, radeonsi, virgl, swrst)
Unfortunately, the failure of MESA Gallium3D-based OpenGL drivers is disappointing, it kills modern AMD hardware for Linux retro-gaming (anyone care 😵 ?) It is 100% reproducible with exactly the same core dump and stack trace. It also disallows Linux retro-gaming on Linux VM since the VirGL driver is also Gallium3D-based.