Self-introduction: Aamir Aijaz Bhutto

Tue Jan 12 18:48:06 UTC 2010

Hi Guys,
>From the message above I have deduced some solutions:
1.we need developers to create an environment similar to crossover by
default o the os where these games can run.
2.Have a special tea work on the development of this environment.This
is because this is something that will have to start on alpha.
3.Ask developers to also make the equivalent o linux.To be honest I
think highly unlikely because they will say the ROI is either slow or
0

all these will require a lot of work and thus according to me this are
the lines we can take .Maybe I am not seeing something that you are so
I will ask to have people send me more of their solutions.

frankie

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 9:11 PM, Athanasios E. Samaras
<ath.samaras at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> s.saiganesh
>> “The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One.
>> 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it
>>
>>
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>
>
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