Viewing articles by Hamish

Hamish Paul Wilson is a free software developer, game critic, amateur writer, cattle rancher, shepherd, and beekeeper living in rural Alberta, Canada. He is an advocate of both DRM free native Linux gaming and the free software movement alongside his other causes, and further information can be found at his icculus.org homepage where he lists everything he is currently involved in: http://icculus.org/~hamish

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Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 47: Before I Was Born

By Hamish, 18 Mar 2025

So far the oldest game binary I have launched has been the original Linux port of Doom. This brought me back to 1994, both the year I was born and the year that the Linux kernel reached its milestone 1.0 release. Browsing an old SunSITE archive I came across the jetpack-linux.tar.z tarball, which contained an unusual X11 game built and packaged in June 1993.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 46: Bursting Bubbles

By Hamish, 18 Feb 2025

I have had my fair share of success in running games released up to around 2004 or so, but after that I do begin to encounter more issues with binary compatibility.

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Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 45: Free as in Beer

By Hamish, 13 Jan 2025

For a time the term "multimedia" was one of the hottest buzzwords in the computer software industry. A number of individuals and firms staked both their futures and careers on the creation of bespoke interactive experiences, often in the service of marketing more established businesses and brands. Enter Lost Boys, an outfit based in the Netherlands intent on doing exactly that.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 44: The Legend of Kobo

By Hamish, 15 Oct 2024

A lot of early UNIX and therefore Linux games struggled with the fact that the X toolkit was geared towards constructing staid graphical user interfaces, rather than for the speed and flexibility needed by games. Magic can come out of people working against imposed limitations however, and games like Xkobo succeed by this.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 43: Demons and Angels

By Hamish, 3 Sep 2024

The Spanish game development scene does not get much attention paid to it, especially when compared to some of its other European counterparts, but sometimes you encounter polymaths like Ángel Ortega that deserve to be highlighted. There is a real auteur talent here that was impossible for me not to appreciate.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 42: Upset the Applecart

By Hamish, 5 Aug 2024

While the studio's destiny would later see it become consumed by Microsoft, in its earliest days Bungie instead stayed a Mac focused development house. They would later switch to cross-platform development, which soon caught the attention of a fledgling Loki Software. Bungie would again cater to an underrepresented video game market.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 41: The Worm Turns

By Hamish, 9 Apr 2024

The Allegro library is a cross-platform backend for low-level game routines, which for much of its history was very much associated with the MS-DOS freeware scene that was still going strong well into the early 2000s. Seeing this wealth of game content, the Fedora contributor Hans de Goede decided to see if he could port some of these over to Linux.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 40: The Cyborg Project

By Hamish, 12 Mar 2024

An action platformer first released in 1999, you play as Urban Gutter, a man taken by an evil scientist to a secret military base and changed into a cyborg against his will. The acronym in the title then is a bit odd, but your one goal is to escape and enact as bloody a revenge on the world as possible. Any hope for true catharsis here often gets lost in frustration however.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 39: Beyond Heretic

By Hamish, 5 Mar 2024

I stated before that neither of the contemporary HeXen ports, Linux Hexen and its fork HHexen, supported MIDI music playback through the /dev/sequencer device, but hiding on the venerable SunSITE network I found the only online trace of another early HeXen source port released in December 1999 by Russian programmer Stanislav Nesterov.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 38: The Stagnant Demesne

By Hamish, 29 Jan 2024

When I first got the original Linux port of Doom working it was done to satisfy my curiosity. This being Doom though I soon found myself drawn in, but there were some oddities I encountered. This also made me inclined to try playing all of Heretic and HeXen, a feat I had never managed up to that point. Would I encounter any more issues with these early source ports?

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 37: Dashing Through the Snow

By Hamish, 18 Dec 2023

A common refrain has always been that if developers would just provide access to their source code, then the Linux community would be happy to step in and do the heavy lifting for them; and when Slingshot Game Technology decided to call our bluff and released Soul Ride under the GNU General Public License in 2003, the Linux community did indeed rise to the challenge.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 36: Entertainment for X Windows

By Hamish, 12 Dec 2023

While still being the most elaborate, 100 Great Linux Games was far from the only shovelware set of games released for Linux, with several UNIX CD-ROM vendors also seeking a piece of the action for themselves.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 35: The New Stories

By Hamish, 13 Nov 2023

Just like with the original Quake, it did not take long for established publishers to seek out new and aspiring game development talent to create third party expansion content for Quake II. The first out the gate was Juggernaut: The New Story For Quake II released by HeadGames Publishing in early 1998, soon to be followed by a number of other packs including Zaero developed by Team Evolve.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 34: Abusing the System

By Hamish, 6 Nov 2023

Having already played the Abuse Linux shareware, the next step seemed to be getting my hands on the registered version. Abuse was later picked up to be published by Origin Systems and Electronic Arts in 1996. Clearly not everything was an improvement, but it was this release that would have its source code opened up in 1997, allowing for the creation of source ports.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 33: I Hate Mondays

By Hamish, 30 Oct 2023

After I installed the Flash Player plugin my first thoughts were of Garfield.com, an award winning website which, while a bear to navigate back in the day, was home to a wide array of Flash based games and amusements based around the titular comic cat created by Jim Davis. Caches of the old Garfield.com content can still be found hosted on the Internet Archive.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 32: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

By Hamish, 4 Sep 2023

Over the past few months I have been making a number of upgrades and changes to Dianoga, and the time has come to lay them all out. The first upgrade I purchased at the start of the year was a simple one, but I now had more than doubled the amount of hard drive space Linux had available, and could enjoy more games with my CRT monitor.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 31: The Fear of Loss

By Hamish, 8 Aug 2023

I was trawling through the old web one evening, looking for additional resources on early Linux gaming, when I came across a freeware game I had never heard of before. Little did I know that this was going to be the start of a long and daunting quest; it was really starting to look like Phobia III - Edge Of Humanity had become Linux gaming lost media.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 30: Imperial Purple

By Hamish, 11 Jul 2023

War! Age of Imperialism was in the first instance a board game, designed by Glenn Drover of Eagle Games. Players assume the role of a colonial empire intent on subjugating the rest of the world. Coverage at the time directed much praise to the game's artificial intelligence, which does make for a canny computer opponent.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 29: The Odyssey

By Hamish, 4 Jul 2023

It was one of my regular readers, Grzegorz Budny, that let me know about the driving simulation Odyssey by Car first released by the German independent developer Oliver Hamann back in 2001. The stylized vector looking graphics lend a timeless quality, leaving it a shame that more players will not get to experience the odyssey.

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 28: Losing My Marbles

By Hamish, 6 Mar 2023

Marble Blast was first released in 2002, before being updated to Marble Blast Gold in 2003. The demo can be obnoxious, with it showing a begging screen imploring you to buy the full game after completing each and every level. Considering the state of the registered version as it exists now, this can feel more than a bit galling.

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