Re: Linux Gaming
On Saturday 01 June 2002 02:12 am, Paul Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 12:26:48AM -0700, ben wrote:
> > send me a list of what he'd need to do the same, and i'll work on
> > enabling the transition.
>
> At the time I did this, I was taking a PII 450 with a 15GB drive, 100MB
> RealTek nic, and a nVidia GeForce2 AGP and 256MB of RAM. More is better
> on the processor, video card and RAM. I would recommend at least a 1GHz
> CPU, 384MB RAM, and any current nVidia card. Pick a sound card that the
> kernel itself can handle. My ISA soundblaster 16 still rocks the house.
>
> For a box primarily used for gaming, go with a base Debian install with
> as few daemons as you can get away with. Run the MTA from inetd. Go
> with sid so you always have the newest X; STAY AWAY from KDE and Gnome;
> it'll slow down your machine dramatically and you're gonna have a bad
> time. Use the most minimalistic WM you can tolerate (though one Linux
> gamer I know doesn't even have a wm installed on his LAN party box).
> It's not that all these things take up huge amounts of resources, it's
> that you can squeek every last drop of power out for the game and
> reclaiming a few CPU cycles and even a little bit of RAM gives the game
> that much more power when you need it. Especially considering if you're
> at a LAN party, getting absurdly high frame rates at high resolutions
> and deep color depths is where it's at (I never understood this part for
> anything other than a DSW, if I play on a resolution higher than 800x600
> or 1024x768, I start to lose the ability to orient myself quickly and
> keep a razor-sharp aim at higher resolutions (past that, to me, the
> picture starts to feel a bit too concave. I'd rather have a narrow
> range of vision and depend on audio in my headphones than try to aim
> with the field of vision of an insect crammed into a 21" CRT.)
>
> It has dramatically sped up the LAN party set up and take down process
> when I've served DHCP, and it didn't take anything away from the game
> that I noticed.
>
> Selection is a little bit slim pickins, but out of the bigname stuff, we
> have everything you can find on ftp.lokigames.com, and all idSoftware
> games from Doom I to Wolfenstein 7: Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
> (Linux got Quake III before Windows did, id develops thier games on
> Linux and backports to Windows, so id games run pretty damn well, and
> thier most recent releases run flawlessly). We have a Civilization
> compatible clone, FreeCiv, in main, as well as Linux gamer classics like
> xpilot and for the truly old-skool, the bsdgames. I had a generic login
> on my gaming box (since it only came up at LAN parties, I even installed
> Debian on it at a LAN party to demonstrate it to friends) that had no
> password so folks could log in and play hunt in putty from thier
> machines when everybody else was playing WarCraft (cult hit among my
> group, the rest of us hate the brutally slow gameplay, even if though
> it's a nice change of pace late in the party).
>
> > forgive the ignorance, but what's ut?
>
> Unreal Tournament.
>
> The good news is, for all the stuff Loki Games ported over and all id
> Software's stuff, if you have the Windows version already, you can just
> snag the Linux binaries off the appropriate website, the installer will
> often copy the data files off the CD to the drive, and then you don't
> have to carry around a box of CDs to deal with the anti-piracy BS the
> Windows folks have to deal with on a lot of those games.
>
> UT, Quake III and Return to Castle Wolfenstein is like crack, adrenaline
> and caffine to me. 8:o)
thanks. i appreciate the time you put into the response. quake III is the
key. if i can get that running on my machine, then half the battle is won.
am i correct in assuming that, in the game world, there ain't no such thing
as free beer, and that linux gaming requires buying m$ versions for the data
files required?
is there a port of resident evil? my kid gave me an elaborate critique on the
the movie, evaluated on how true it was to the game. actually, i think that
milla jovovich is his second serious movie star crush--after anna
paquin--since he selected 'joan of arc,' of his own free will, on a recent
video hunt. i guess i can google the answer to the question above.
bottom line--thanks, balloo. the more i can replicate what he's got on his
doze box, the more i can lure him away from the devil. he's the best kid you
could imagine, but it always freaks me out that he knows more about m$ie than
i ever want to learn. makes my life feel like the omen, sometimes.
ben
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