Re: games on Debian
Thanks, and also, I'd like to first see if there are any that are just Linux
that I can install, before going the wine route.
Thanks
----- Original Message -----
From: "Geoff Shang" <geoff@QuiteLikely.com>
To: <debian-accessibility@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2025 9:24 AM
Subject: Re: games on Debian
On Tue, 11 Nov 2025, K0LNY ?? wrote:
> I was thinking of trying wine in my shiny new Debian Trixie, so I might
> discover if some Windows games for the Blind will work.
I've not used the GUI much in Debian, but I did once get Top Speed 3
and Super Egg Hunt working well enough to be playable (this was over 10
years ago now).
Self-voicing games are going to be simpler. I understand it's possible to
install SAPI5 support and a SAPI5 TTS (like Espeak), but I've not actually
tried it.
I'd like to see if I can get Crazy Party working under Wine. This will
definitely require a TTS. I do have the Crazy Party server running on a
Linux VM under Wine, that was relatively simple to get going. Let me know
if there's anyone interested in how I did it.
> I thought that before I went through the trouble of possibly finding out
> that they don't work, I'd ask here to see if there some Blind friendly
> games for Debian?
For audiogames specifically, you may well be able to play some natively
but I don't expect to see any in the main Debian repo.
Doing a search on audiogames.net turned up 15 results for Linux. The only
one I recognised was the Linux RSGames client, which I remember playing
with once but not sure if I ever got it to work. Still, it might be a
good place to start.
I've played Quentin C's Playroom on a number of platforms that are not
Windows via their web interface. It's been a few years now but I
remembered it being pretty good and feeling pretty responsive. I
successfully played itin Firefox, even on Windows, so I would expect it
to work in a GUI browser on Linux without much trouble, though as I say
it's been a few years since I used it.
If you're more into text, then there are some options that are in Debian
and more you can get elsewhere.
If you like interactive fiction (think the old Infocom games from the
80s), Debian has several z-code interpreters, both for the console and for
the GUI (personally I've used frotz and jzip). If you have any of the
Infocom games, these will run fine under these. There used to be several
z-code games in Debian, such as Jigsaw which I never got around to
finishing, but they don't appear to be in the Debian repo anymore.
Debian also ships Inform, which is a language compiler which allows you to
create your own z-code games. Debian only ships Inform 6 which is more of
a programming language, Inform 7 is more like written English but it's not
in the Debian repos.
There are other interactive fiction formats, such as glulxe and tads.
I've not looked at these but they seem just as valid as z-code (glulxe
seems to be a successor to z-machine). However, there only seems to be a
single interpreter for each in the Debian repos, with the tads one
(gargoyle-free) being an x-based app whereas glulxe runs in the console.
Gargoyle seems to run a whole lot of exotic interactive fiction game
formats, so if it's usable, it may be worth looking at as it will allow
you to play a wider variety of games.
There are lots of interactive fiction titles of varying quality available
for free. Good places to look are ifdb.org and ifarchive.org.
There are at least three implementations of the classic Colossal Caves
(adventure) game from the 1970s in Debian. There is a version in the
bsdgames package, there is a c-based implementation from 1995 in the
open-adventure package, and there is a Python clone of the original
Colossal Caves in the colossal-cave-adventure package.
In addition to adventure, the bsdgames package also contains a bunch of
mostly text-based games which have literally been around for decades,
including monopoly and trek.
There are many other games in Debian, there is a whole section of the
Debian package repository dedicated to them. I've not checked out most of
them and I've no idea how acccessible any of them are. But therer's a lot
to look at if you're interested, and it will cost you nothing but time and
energy to check them out.
Let us know if you find anything good.
Cheers,
Geoff.
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