GOG now have Epic Pinball and the platformer Jazz Jackrabbit with Linux support

I have fond memories spending hours on the Jazz Jackrabbit Christmas episode that came with some UK based magazine's demo floppies -- way back in 1996 (maybe?). (For me that's an era with very few 'fond memories' to begin with, haha. [high school]) The price is a *little* too steep for me right now, but this is really exciting.

Anyhow, LGR's a huge fan, and he has several episodes on Jazz Jackrabbit; here are the links:
View video on youtube.com

View video on youtube.com

View video on youtube.com

This is great news! I've still got my Jazz Jackrabbit 2 CD somewhere... :-)

Epic Pinball is still my personal "best pinball game ever" (installed it from real cd in my dosbox setup), Jazz Jackrabbit is another fond memory (sonic rabbits with guns, nice soundtrack, ...)

So both oldies but goodies, nice to have them easily available in GOG

They also added Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Collection today, but it doesn't have a Linux download

I am pretty sure the game runs flawlessly on Linux with Wine. So go for it, if you're a fan!

Here's why we didn't offer a Wine wrapper ourselves:

• such wrappers take a huge chunk of our QA & fixing time since we need to be sure they are playable & don't introduce bugs at any point in-game


• they offer a less-than-perfect user experience, since user needs to install loads of 32 bit dependencies and there's no going around that


• they meet, sadly, with poor reception, aka "meh, I could easily just run it with Wine myself"

This could be of course re-evaluated, if there was a huge demand for Wine-wrapped titles.

They also added Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Collection today, but it doesn't have a Linux download

I am pretty sure the game runs flawlessly on Linux with Wine. So go for it, if you're a fan!

Here's why we didn't offer a Wine wrapper ourselves:

• such wrappers take a huge chunk of our QA & fixing time since we need to be sure they are playable & don't introduce bugs at any point in-game


• they offer a less-than-perfect user experience, since user needs to install loads of 32 bit dependencies and there's no going around that


• they meet, sadly, with poor reception, aka "meh, I could easily just run it with Wine myself"

This could be of course re-evaluated, if there was a huge demand for Wine-wrapped titles.

I think this attitude will change over time, especially for older titles as Wine matures. Personally, I would be happy with a wine-port if it was sufficiently old enough and worked so I can't tell the difference.

YES!!! I love Jazz Jackrabbit! Used to play it all the time when i was a kid and thought i'd never get to play it again! Memomry Lane, here i come!

For older games I honestly wouldn't mind if games were wine-wrapped. Old games practically have to be wrapped one way or another anyway, and the key thing is official support; messing around with wine or discovering bugs mid-game is not fun.
For newer or demanding games, I do have a preference towards "native" games, but it's a mild preference; I would instantly jump on an official wine wrapped port of DooM 2016, for example.

I would instantly jump on an official wine wrapped port of DooM 2016, for example.

Off-topic, but: On my computer, DOOM 2016 (Vulkan) runs better on wine, compared to native wind0ze; the latter has some annoying visual artifacts, stuttering at places, etc. -- under wine-staging there's none of that. I have no idea how or why, but it's pretty amusing. The win partition is clean (just a few games) and well-maintained, so it can't be a borked installation.

they offer a less-than-perfect user experience, since user needs to install loads of 32 bit dependencies and there's no going around that

I just tell people to install their system's Wine package & let the package manager take care of the rest.

they meet, sadly, with poor reception, aka "meh, I could easily just run it with Wine myself"

It's a very similar situation to DOSBox really. More experienced users can just set up Wine themselves but that's not an option for newer & less advanced users, for whom Wine can be very daunting & a major hassle to use. Even for more experienced users, some games can still be a huge pain to get running in Wine when you don't know exactly what's needed to get them working.

Plus wrappers can offer more than simply getting the games running; things like save handling, performing some initial display setup etc. to try to make the experience more like playing native games, as I try to do with my wrappers.

On that note, you're welcome to use any of my wrappers to do official releases if you want :) Although some of them may not be possible due to requiring certain native components where licensing may be a blocker (especially where such components are made by Microsoft).

awesome :) my teenage years right there im getting this

I remember downloading the shareware versionsfrom the BBS Software Creations.

other issue with some old gog or wine games : they temporarilt switch the screen resolution and mess up my desktop

DOSBox can be configured so that it does not do this. IIRC you need to open the dosbox .conf file for the game, find where it reads [sdl], then under there find and set the following two settings as so:

fullresolution=desktop
output=overlay

In Wine you can use a virtual desktop to prevent it from changing the system's desktop resolution - if the game sets a resolution lower than your system's desktop resolution then the virtual desktop will resize & it'll effectively run in a window instead. This can be annoying when games run at fixed resolutions or have a limited selection of display resolutions though; it would be really useful if Wine had an option to scale full-screen output to fit your desktop/virtual desktop resolution.

Depending on the game there may also be other options available to prevent unwanted display resolution changes (e.g. widescreen fixes).

they meet, sadly, with poor reception, aka "meh, I could easily just run it with Wine myself"

This could be of course re-evaluated, if there was a huge demand for Wine-wrapped titles.

The upside can be convenience, but downside of Wine wrappers is that it would take you effort to keep Wine updated in it, since otherwise it will be fixed to certain version which you picked to wrap with. The benefit of decoupling Wine from the game are improvements in the Wine itself which will appear over time. Of course regressions can appear too, so it's a trade-off.


Last edited by Shmerl on 1 December 2017 at 1:26 am UTC

This could be of course re-evaluated, if there was a huge demand for Wine-wrapped titles.

Though I agree with adamhm above as well, that when some game requires a lot of effort to run in Wine (too many tweaks), easy wrapper can be really welcome, especially by Linux newcomers.

Speaking of such wrapping. May be you can ponder this idea, or circulate it around. GOG team can help Wine developers with some remaining issues in The Witcher 3 (graphics and performance), and then wrap TW3 in Wine to make an official release, or may be even use Winelib (since you have access to the sources)? It wouldn't be any worse than how Feral are wrapping games. I'd consider it even better since you'll help a FOSS project in the process. And in addition it will redeem CDPR from the failure of TW3 Linux release and will uphold the failed promise.


Last edited by Shmerl on 1 December 2017 at 1:42 am UTC

There is a open source engine recreation called openjazz.
It touts multiplayer support.


Last edited by sr_ls_boy on 1 December 2017 at 2:20 am UTC

(...)May be you can ponder this idea, or circulate it around. GOG team can help Wine developers with some remaining issues in The Witcher 3 (graphics and performance), and then wrap TW3 in Wine to make an official release, or may be even use Winelib (since you have access to the sources)? (...)

I admire your enthusiasm :) However I can tell you already this won't happen because of several reasons:

• GOG does not participate in process of developing CDPR games


• You are seriously overestimating our resources here - Linux version of Witcher 3 would require literally hundreds, if not thousands of QA hours


• Even if we went for it, the end result would most likely offer significantly worse experience than the Windows version, and I am pretty sure nobody from Linux community wants that :)

In the future, please direct CDPR games-related inquires to the studio directly:

• https://twitter.com/cdprojektred


• http://en.cdprojektred.com/

Last edited by linuxvangog on 1 December 2017 at 8:58 am UTC

You are seriously overestimating our resources here

If GOG Galaxy ever makes it to Linux, it could be interesting to have a PlayOnLinux style system included in it. The advantage is that these configurations would be sorted out by the community instead of requiring a lot of QA from GOG. While not being "official" support, they would be easily accessible to those that do not have the time or interest to set up Wine for a specific game.

• GOG does not participate in process of developing CDPR games

Sure, but how is it worse than you not participating in development of other games, yet you might wrap them in Wine potentially? In this case CDPR are your sister company, so if CDPR wanted, they could provide you with more than your regular partners, i.e. for instance simply with sources of CDPR games.

And on a side note, for example Humble Bundle while being primarily a distributor, actually hired developers to make Linux ports. Something that GOG can ponder as well.

You are seriously overestimating our resources here - Linux version of Witcher 3 would require literally hundreds, if not thousands of QA hours

Yeah, that may be. I'm not saying GOG should just do it randomly. It's something CDPR should help with I suppose, and allocate some resources to it. After all it was their promise which they blew, it's only fair for them to do something about it :)

Even if we went for it, the end result would most likely offer significantly worse experience than the Windows version, and I am pretty sure nobody from Linux community wants that :)

It's not uncommon for wrappers to perform worse than native versions. That doesn't stop Feral and even CDPR themselves from using them no? TW2 itself is a wrapper using eON after all. So with some effort, Wine wrapped TW3 can have acceptable performance.

In the future, please direct CDPR games-related inquires to the studio directly

I did that already naturally, but they lately aren't communicating anything, let alone answering proposals :) I thought GOG team are just in a unique position to move this forward, but as you said, without some backing by CDPR, it's of course a resource draining task. But you can at least pass this idea around ;)


Last edited by Shmerl on 1 December 2017 at 1:39 pm UTC

Though I agree with adamhm above as well, that when some game requires a lot of effort to run in Wine (too many tweaks), easy wrapper can be really welcome, especially by Linux newcomers.

Plus it would add to the number of games with official Linux support and in turn help grow the platform in general.

The upside can be convenience, but downside of Wine wrappers is that it would take you effort to keep Wine updated in it, since otherwise it will be fixed to certain version which you picked to wrap with. The benefit of decoupling Wine from the game are improvements in the Wine itself which will appear over time. Of course regressions can appear too, so it's a trade-off.

On the other hand having wrappers use whatever version is installed on the user's system would be a nightmare to support, and a terrible thing from a user experience perspective. It wouldn't be a good experience to have games fail to run properly/at all right from the start due to having an older version of Wine or newer version with regressions, or to have games suddenly stop working due to a Wine update introducing regressions.

Using an older Wine version isn't that critical of an issue IMO as long as the game itself runs fine with it. Updating the Wine version periodically for any performance improvements they bring (and compatibility improvements for people wanting to use third party tools, mods, etc.) should be done but it doesn't need to be a frequent thing; perhaps just once a year or so to keep up with stable releases - that's what I'm planning to do with my wrappers.

Just bought Jazz Jackrabbit... So many good memories!

Now all we need is Jazz Jackrabbit 2 - I never got to play that one, so I'd love the chance to do so...

If anyone's interested, I put together a Wine wrapper for JJ2: https://www.gog.com/forum/jazz_jackrabbit/jazz_jackrabbit_2_for_linux