Classic LucasArts games emulator DREAMM adds early Linux support

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualOut of curiosity, what justification would you accept?

Honestly: none. But this one is particularly selfish I think. Plus I don't believe your software have to be proprietary to have "exclusive right to commercial exploitation". You can make money from Free Software, and that's not necessarily a bad thing...
I agree with what others said, especially Purple Library Guy (who's surprised?).

Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualOut of curiosity, what justification would you accept?

Honestly: none. But this one is particularly selfish I think. Plus I don't believe your software have to be proprietary to have "exclusive right to commercial exploitation". You can make money from Free Software, and that's not necessarily a bad thing...
I agree with what others said, especially Purple Library Guy (who's surprised?).

Also "exclusive right to commercial exploitation" will almost never happen for a project like this, it's a far to volatile mine field to be able to exploit, I mean look at what have happened to the few projects that have tried so far, GTA, Dolphin and so on.

Quoting: MilaniumI think it is not Open Source because he is using various existing Open Source projects and bundles them under a new name. One developer, so many engine ports. It seems very fishy.

That should be quite easy to find out by looking at the binary though.


Last edited by F.Ultra on 24 June 2023 at 2:07 pm UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGames that aren't open source are normal, and there are various reasons that isn't likely to change unless our whole economic system changes. Game engines that aren't open source . . . I kind of hope gradually become eclipsed by ones that are. But emulator things for making old games work that aren't open source are . . . problematic IMO. Especially when there's just one guy doing it. He loses interest or gets hit by a bus and then it just quietly rots because nobody can ever update it again, and so much for preserving the game. Not a basket I'd want to be putting my eggs in.

Amusingly, even if something is open source, if someone doesn't maintain the code, it'll stop working. Xkobo is an example, the C source is out there, but modern gcc doesn't like it too much. It's still built for NetBSD 9.0 though!

Quoting: MilaniumOne developer, so many engine ports. It seems very fishy

You misunderstand how DREAMM works. It's not an engine port like ScummVM, it's more like DOSBox with additional hooks for each game (*). That does mean it needs considerable less custom work for each game.

(*) This is an analogy. I'm not saying he's literally using DOSBox.

While I disagree fundamentally with Aaron Giles about most of what he does here (including the closed source nature of DREAMM), you are way out of line with that accusation. There's nothing fishy about the project at all.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGames that aren't open source are normal, and there are various reasons that isn't likely to change unless our whole economic system changes. Game engines that aren't open source . . . I kind of hope gradually become eclipsed by ones that are. But emulator things for making old games work that aren't open source are . . . problematic IMO. Especially when there's just one guy doing it. He loses interest or gets hit by a bus and then it just quietly rots because nobody can ever update it again, and so much for preserving the game. Not a basket I'd want to be putting my eggs in.

Amusingly, even if something is open source, if someone doesn't maintain the code, it'll stop working. Xkobo is an example, the C source is out there, but modern gcc doesn't like it too much. It's still built for NetBSD 9.0 though!

Yes, but if anybody is interested enough, they can take over.


Last edited by Eike on 25 June 2023 at 12:20 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGames that aren't open source are normal, and there are various reasons that isn't likely to change unless our whole economic system changes. Game engines that aren't open source . . . I kind of hope gradually become eclipsed by ones that are. But emulator things for making old games work that aren't open source are . . . problematic IMO. Especially when there's just one guy doing it. He loses interest or gets hit by a bus and then it just quietly rots because nobody can ever update it again, and so much for preserving the game. Not a basket I'd want to be putting my eggs in.

Amusingly, even if something is open source, if someone doesn't maintain the code, it'll stop working. Xkobo is an example, the C source is out there, but modern gcc doesn't like it too much. It's still built for NetBSD 9.0 though!

Yes, but if anybody is interested enough, they can take over.

It is rarely that easy though. It is the beautiful lie about open-source we tell ourselves to sleep well at night, but when a project grows to the point slaapliedje is talking about people have already moved on.

Past a certain point there is so much work involved that you are better off paying an expert to do it for you anyway, like GOG or the man, the legend: Ethan Lee (@flibitijibibo).

Quoting: shorbergIt is rarely that easy though.

It really is. If there is no source code you have to reverse engineer everything or write everything from scratch which is an incredible amount of work (several years worth). Think of all the game engine recreations.

Quoting: Klaas

Quoting: shorbergIt is rarely that easy though.

It really is. If there is no source code you have to reverse engineer everything or write everything from scratch which is an incredible amount of work (several years worth). Think of all the game engine recreations.

Obviously this depends on how obfuscated the original developers made their code.

For example; I remember hacking around Ultima IV on the 800xl. You could scan through the disk with a hex editor for your character names, then change sectors to 99 and you'd end up with 99 stats (if I recall the hit points only went up to 800, so in the game you'd see I999, but the two bits were 99 99). In Ultima V on DOS, they made it a tiny more difficult... They were using proper hexadecimal. So 63 was 99. In Ultima IV, I'd pretty much figured out how to decode the entire map, with each square being raw on the map, 00 being deep water, 01 being shallow water, etc. Don't recall all of it now, but I had graph paper out and repaired a couple sectors that didn't copy (I believe the copy protection was the cause of that!). This was all done when I was like 10-11. If there is a will, there is a way... or so they say!

Granted things these days are far more advanced, but look at all the crazy stuff kids do these days with minecraft.

Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualOut of curiosity, what justification would you accept?

Honestly: none. But this one is particularly selfish I think. Plus I don't believe your software have to be proprietary to have "exclusive right to commercial exploitation". You can make money from Free Software, and that's not necessarily a bad thing...
I agree with what others said, especially Purple Library Guy (who's surprised?).

Sorry, I don't login much anymore. Took a while to see this reply.

But my point is free software means you give up your exclusive right to commercial exploitation. Read Drew DeVault's post on this: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your-monopoly.html

Anyone can exploit free software for commercial gain. That's an important feature of free software.

Quoting: omer666

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: CyrilNot open source, so not interested... And the reasons given, seems too much selfish for me.

Out of curiosity, what justification would you accept?

I don't think there's a more common reason for releasing an application under a proprietary license than, "I would like to reserve the exclusive right to commercial exploitation."

Interesting to note the developer of this emulator originally worked on official ports to other operating systems for LucasArts in the '90s.

Can't talk in Cyril's name, but we've seen many such (really good) projects, like Kega Fusion or pSX just to name a few, disappear with their dev altogether after a few years.

Let's say it's okay if you've got one of these games laying around but you can't take this as a permanent solution for playing these until it's open sourced or it's become an official way of running them bundled on Steam.

I'm the first to advocate for free software, and it would be good for DREAMM to be released under a free license for the reasons you state. I was curious about what reason would not be "selfish" enough for Cyril to accept to release your software under a proprietary license (and I got my answer).