Self-introduction: Aamir Aijaz Bhutto

Tue Jan 12 18:11:31 UTC 2010

Heeeeelo and welcome!
Since I have been around for almost 24 years now, I will tell you a story
about games on home micros (Spectrum/CBM64/CBM128/Arcon/Atari/Amiga) /
consoles (Atari 2000/Sony etc)/ Personal Computers (such as AMSTRAD
CPC/Commodore+ /QL+ etc) / IBM Compatible Personal Computers (today's P.C.s)

It was back then (mid '80) that home micros got to the point when they could
support 4 colors out of a palette of 16 and offered the possibility to game
developers to create titles that could be acceptable by the market. Back
then the publishers had to maintain more than one development team
programming for different hardware platforms mainly under some assembler.
Each of the home micros had it's own capabilities and used a set of special
routines stored in ROM to expose functionality
(sound/graphics/input/joystick/midi etc) not to mention the full
incompatibility of file systems.
Back then it was just a dream to have an "engine" available for more any
platform that would enable developers to create games; it was all from
"scratch" for each hardware platform. By the time, developers managed to
create a functional code base (please do no think of objects) that enabled
them to include already tested code to perform some standard operations
(kind of functional functions library)  creating a layer of abstraction that
could be used to create the "back-bone" for the titles, but again had to be
either compiled or cross compiled for a specific target hardware. The
process was hard and costly. This was the reason that some publishers
targeted one or two platforms leaving the rest.
At later stages when the home micro category died, consoles was revived
together with IBM Compatible PCs. Some of us remember our first EGA video
addapter that actually supported 32 colors from a palette of 256 then came
VGA (256 colors and 640X480 resolution yeeeey), now first video cards
supported 2 colors (Hercules) or 4 colors (CGA) , but with 256 colors on
screen, it was a revolution so the developers that supported
Amiga/AtariST/CPC 64/CPC 128 found a new platform (with more RAM but less
hardware capabilities) that offered a common API available under a lot of
different languages and manufactured by various manufacturers all over the
world.
At the same time all the prices was dropping creating a potential large
market for software.
Since it is all about cost and ROI, it was more or less "default" to release
titles for Microsoft DOS (or IBM DOS initially) since this was the operating
system that IBM and other vendors include in their packages. Some of the
vendors still preferred to sell boxes without any operating system (you
could buy and use SCO unix, Thoroughbred and other strange acronyms).
When Linux came to O/S world, it was mainly a "toy" for hard-core
programmers  / unix users / students / universities. It was OPEN, something
you really could not find in other O/S. If something was broken, you could
take some time to fix it and then publish your fix for comments to the rest
of the world.
Through the time, Linux became a real desktop operating system (if I may, I
would say that Fedora together with Ubuntu and Knopix was the distros that
made that happen) .
All the above just to make a point: If we can convince Publishers to hire
some developers to port their engines to Linux, this would enable all the
rest of developers that use the engine to create a Linux release in a very
short time.
But then again it would not be open.
Maybe if the community could spin a project to provide a game engine that
would be open sourced and scriptable supporting open 3d graphics models etc.
Basically the same with Java or Flash based games but more close to the
hardware (imagine a full 64 bit game that could allocate and use more than 2
GB or RAM and "talk" to your GPU directly for rendering/pre-render etc).
Just a thought (and a lot of history)

Cheers

Sakis Samaras

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 6:11 PM, sai ganesh <ganesai at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/11/2010 8:21 PM Nicu Buculei wrote
>
>> Note he said *favorite* game, not *some* game or a *casual* game. There
>> is this category of users (I am part of it) for whom a Windows PC at
>> home is pretty much a game console (but with better games than an
>> ordinary game console).
>>
>>
> absolutely true i am a part of that league too.
>
>
>
>> Unfortunately here we can't do much beyond getting an as good as
>> possible Wine, is all about 3-rd party entities porting their games to
>> Linux (some argue this will happen when Linux will have a large enough
>> market share).
>>
>> --
>>
> hope the days are not far away where 3-rd party entities are releasing
> games for linux. i think quake 3 is already a member of it.and what about
> cedega? may that can help a little.i think this is the only area of concern
> for marketing linux to students who happen to be gamers.the first thing they
> ask is "can i play call of duty 4 in linux".hopefully a solution will be
> found in the years to come.
>
>> <marketing at lists.fedoraproject.org><https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing>
>>
>
>
> --
> s.saiganesh
> “The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One.
> 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it
>
>
> --
> marketing mailing list
> marketing at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
>
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