Linux games

[W3iRd0]

How hard would it be to try and get a game for linux to run on MaxOSX or XFree86, a game like Half Life perhaps?


Life is pointless, you always die in the end..

[Opie]

probably impossible on all counts.
1, it's statically compiled for x86 (although loki released some ports for PPC Linux)
2, to the best of my knowledge, you can't do things like run hardware-accelerated stuff over X, over the network I mean. Even if you'd want to try, it would, you know, suck. A lot. It would be so damn slow. Although I believe the DRI stuff won't let you, it needs to connect to the local display, not a networked one.

You'd also have to run esound or something to stream the sound over the network, or it would come out of the wrong speakers. Unless you have gigabit ethernet, I wouldn't even try.

The last thing is, even if you found the PPC version of Myth II (for example), I don't believe that OSX currently supports the binary emulation the way FreeBSD does.

Someone will of course correct me if I'm wrong.

[peepster]

You might know this already, but there are a lot of Unix games compiled for Darwin at:
http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/packages/pseudo2/games/

I've only tried xpilot (network game) which works fine.

[Opie]

Originally posted by peepster

I've only tried xpilot (network game) which works fine.
I assumed that by "like half life" the poster meant "binaries". Any properly written source-available anything should work, in theory. Just no chance of binaries without a complete emulation environment.

(idle musing) I wonder what it would take to get BSD's Linux ABI emulation working?