So you are taking my word for this. Why does that make me nervous? :P

Interesting. Yes, the best way would be a standard compressed file (zip, tar.gz, tar.bz2, 7z) with all the game data. Most of the times the engine ports and GNU/Linux systems already have install scripts for the data, or they can be done really fast. Distributing game data with an installer would be a problem again. I'd like to help if needed.

I'd appreciate all the help I can get. :) I know how to create an executable zip-file but haven't learnt how to make a proper installer file yet.

Let me know if there are other games you would be interested in and I could contact the owners to the rights for them as well.

Do you know who owns the rights to: Jagged Alliance 2, Homeworld and Star Control II?

You shouldn't need to do an installer, some of us don't even want it. Distributing just the game files would make it easier to use the game on any distro without installer compatibility problems.

If there was enough interest in such thing I guess distros would get their own installers for the game data files. At least, I'd try to make them installable with Debian, I could ask the Debian games team about this.

I'm thinking about the ScummVM games. The original engine source wasn't released but the new one works very well.

Ok, cool.

Don't think it will be possible to get the rights to Lucasarts games. :) But Sierra and others might. Who owns the rights to these? "Sierra's AGI and SCI games (such as King's Quest 1-6, Space Quest 1-5, ...), Discworld 1 and 2, Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Gobliiins 1-3, The Legend of Kyrandia 1-3"

I want to note that we're talking about very old games that most nostalgics may already own or may have downloaded from abandonware sites. It would be interesting to have legal means to own some of these games, but I guess not many people would be interested in such old games distributed this way. Maybe selling a ScummVM Sierra pack would be commercially interesting or it would be marginal, I don't know. Doom 3: BFG is a different case, I think more people would buy it.

Flight of the Amazon Queen and Beneath a Steel Sky are both freely distributable and already included in several distributions. I don't know about the rights to the other games.

Yeah, I don't know how commercially viable those old games are either. But retro seems to be "in" at the moment at least. :)

Doom 3: BFG is a new version right? Only for Steam perhaps?

I've sent an email to id Software anyway.

Quoting: "FireFlower Games, post: 7601, member: 409"Doom 3: BFG is a new version right? Only for Steam perhaps?

That's the thing - they released Doom 3: BFG purely as a Steam and console exclusive release, but they also put out the source code which allowed people to make a complete source port of the game (minus Steamworks integration) for other platforms. But you still need the Steam data to play ATM.

I see. Let's see if they will reply.

Haven't got a reply from any of them yet. Seems they're not interested.