Puppy running PC games?

[JontomXire]

It occurred to me last night, when I felt like having a quick bash at Unreal II but could hardly be arsed for the computer to start up, that I have thought of a new possibility for Puppy.

Given that it is possible to run popular PC games under Linux (many years ago some friends of mine used to do it), and given how quickly puppy boots;

It should be possible to create a version of Puppy where you can remaster disks that will give ultra fast boot up of your computer and then run a particular game. You would then (for most games) need to swap the CD, but in essence you would turn your PC into a games console. Simply open the CD drive, select the correct Puppy CD, turn on the PC. Puppy would load an absolute minimal OS, configure all necessary devices, prompt you to insert the game disk (if required), and then run the game once it detected the disk was properly inserted.

The advantages would be:

1) Ultra fast start-up and playing of the game.
2) No wasted CPU cycles because Windoze is running in the background.
3) No accidental pressing of the "Windows" key just when the big end of level baddy appears, waiting 30 seconds for Windoze to display the desktop so you can reselect the game and get back in, whereupon the game either crashes or you find that you died in the interim.
4) Automatic shutdown of the PC when you quit the game.

It probably wouldn't be easy. You would have to find a way for Puppy to detect and allow running of DirectX since most games depend on it, but it must be possible. At the end of the day, all the binaries are x86 processor compatible.

If anyone has any hints, tips, advice, ideas, comments I would love to hear them. A playful puppy is a joyous thing

[Flash]

Great idea. If you did it with multisession Puppy the state would be saved on the CD when you quit.

[papaschtroumpf]

you do need quite a lot of support stuff to be able to play "big" games.
before doing PC games, I would try to do games that have been ported to linux, it's a little easier (otherwise you have to worry about getting the game to run under Wine, which is not that easy even on a full blown distro).

You also probably need accelerated video hardware and supporting software, I don;t know if that is available on puppy.

A lot of those games will actually not require the CD to stay inserted after they are installed, so you might be able to do it all from one liveCD.

Of course "modern" games like Unreal Tournament 2004 or DOOM III require many gigs of space so you can't get away with without doing a hardware install (or remaster a DVD?)

Just be aware that this is a major endeavor.


There are a few games alreasy on puppy and if you want more "action" try to install games like Chromium, TuxRacer, etc...

Another quite feasible project would be to have a "MAME puppy" which would allow you to run old arcade games like PacMan, Galaga, 1941... (hey I was a teenager in the 80s, so I like that stuff)

[nduanetesh]

Papa brings up some excellent points...

A lot of the current major games require *enormous* amounts of hard drive space. I think the complete install of Half-Life 2 is about 3GB! However this might be more feasible with some older big games...original Unreal vintage, original HL, etc...you're still going to have to have a PILE of ram, though, or a hard drive swap partition.

Going with an older game might also give you the advantage of getting around required hardware acceleration. What I mean is, if you've got a pretty current computer, the original Half Life will run great with software rendering. This will get you around coming up with hardware accelerated drivers for your video hardware. I'll echo papa's sentiment that I'm not even sure you *can* use an accelerated driver with the version of X that it included in puppy...and you'd certainly have to compile it in another distro.

Someone else posted a message asking if anyone had every gotten WINE to work in puppy, and the only response was "I've never heard of anyone doing it." So, things look bleak in that regard.

Starting out with games that have already been ported to linux is probably a good idea. I know Id ports all of thier games (not positive that they did Doom3, though), so you could start there...a quick google search should get you some other major titles that have been ported.

of course, all of this sounds like a compromise of your initial dream of firing up puppy to get Unreal II up and running as quickly as possible on as little OS as possible. If you're really set on that idea (and I hate to say this, but I will), you might want to look at one of the knoppix based mini-distros (or even knoppix itself), which have more of the core of a full-blown distro. You should be able to get wine running without too much difficulty, and might even be able to get some accelerated vid drivers going.

If you decide to go for it, good luck. This is a big project, but would be absolutely awesome if you could do it.

ND

BTW, I love the idea of a MAME puppy!!!

[Flash]

For what it's worth, gcombust makes bootable DVDs just fine. I've put Knoppix on a DVD-RW, which would leave a lot of room for a game. (Which would probably run painfully slow unless you had a huge RAM.)

Edit: Oops, I misremembered. I tried to use gcombust to make a bootable DVD but it wouldn't work (requires the paid version) so I used Record Now in Windows.

[JontomXire]

Umm, I don't think people understood - at all.

Firstly, everyone seems to think I meant running the game from the CD. I never did. It's current major games I want to play and they are all many Gb in size. What I meant was to install them in the usual way (to HD), possibly using Windoze to do the install, and just using Puppy to get a quick start on playing them.

As for using WINE, no way. Emulators are always slower, and these games can really eat CPU cycles. Slow performance is not an option here. I'd rather just wait for Windows to boot up 92-3 minutes) than spend half an hour playing Unreal II, Diablo II or Quake III with jerky slow graphics and performance. I might be able to pinch some of their libraries and stuff though.

I don't know how people in the past I talked to ran high performance major games through Linux, but I can find out. Failing that, I was thinking that I could wrap all the Windows EXEs and DLLs with Linux style entry point binaries.

So, this is my very rough idea (and I never thought it would be too easy).

1) Write a program that will generate a Linux style dynamic link library for wrapping a Windows DLL.
2) Identify all binaries and files needed for DirectX. Build a pupget or unleashed package for DirectX 9.0 re-using all the Microsoft binaries. For this to be posible I need there to not be too much (any) dependency on making Windows OS calls or accessing registry etc.
3) For making sure I get the best out of my hardware, particularly given that DirectX probably talks directly to the drivers, I planned on doing something similar for all the driver DLLs and files on my machine.
4) Make an EXE wrapper.
5) Write a program or script that, for a specific game, will create a puppy unleashed package that will use the EXE wrapper to run the specified EXE. Note that re-installing to a different location will require the package to be re-generated.
6) Create a bootup script that offes you a choice of games based on the packages created in the step above.

The result will be heavily machine specific, but by hopefully automating most of the process of creating the distro, people will be able to turn their slow-booting PC into a fast booting games arcade relatively simply.

If it all works at all.

I plan to start simply with the easy bits. Start by creating the EXE wrapper, create a simple program in Windows and run it under Puppy. Then move up to wrapping DLLS. Step by step getting more complex and building on the stuff developed and the knowledge gained in the previous step.

I now expect that everyone will laugh at me and dismiss the idea out of hand. I wouldn't be surprised if it never happens, but if so it's because I am too busy with an awful lot of other projects.

[papaschtroumpf]

LOL! WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator", because it is not.
In fact it is simply a set of "wrappers" and "replacement" DLLS for windows, very similar to what you are talking about doing if I understand you right, but DirectX is something that is not supported (cedega makes some attempts at supporting DirectX for some games).
Sounds like a tall endeavour, so my hat to you if you can pull it off!

[Guest]

Kinda thinking the development time\process would be a hell of alot longer than waiting for windows to boot.

If it's that much of an issue just leave ya PC on...hahahahahaha or buy an XBox.....

Anyways the mission statement (one of them) of puppy is to bring older hardware back to life

[JontomXire]

And there was me thinking it stood for WINdows Emulator

Thanks for the info. Sounds like porting WINE to Puppy might be the first thing I do.

What is Cedega? It sounds like something I should look into.

[Jesse]

Hi,

I used to play Starcraft & Diablo II heaps on a mandrake install, under wine.
It ran great, it was more stable than the windows computer my flatmate used to play the same games with. heh, he hated that

If you want to play the latest games, you've got to got for XWindows version 4.4, and have your video hardware accelerated drivers loaded, also having alsa installed and configured properly, is almost necessary if you want sound. Wine ain't perfect, theres certainly plenty of room for improvement, but it is usable.

Jesse

[wscarl]

The CPU speed is not as important as the video card and Memory. Example I resinly load SimCity 2 on the kids computers, It ran well on the 1gig cpu with 512ram and 64meg Nivida card while bearly run on 2.4 cpu with 256ram and 64meg Intel card. Note: the box stated that Nivida or ATI needed only a 1gig cpu as recomenned white the Intel needed 2gig cpu as recomenned to run!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Mr Doolie]

MAME Puppy! YEAH! Never though of that! Thanks for the idea.

Now...to figure how to get MAME to auto-run when Puppy comes up. How you do dat?

[theelf]

Can't run kpacman without kde but there is a pacman that will

[Pizzasgood]

The CPU speed is not as important as the video card and Memory. Example I resinly load SimCity 2 on the kids computers, It ran well on the 1gig cpu with 512ram and 64meg Nivida card while bearly run on 2.4 cpu with 256ram and 64meg Intel card. Note: the box stated that Nivida or ATI needed only a 1gig cpu as recomenned white the Intel needed 2gig cpu as recomenned to run!!!!!!!!!!!!

There is no SimCity 2. That leaves three possibilities: SimCity 2000, SimCity 4, or Sims 2. If you are referring to SimCity 2000, those stats are whacked, as it came out back in the nineties. If you are referring to SimCity 4, it's possible, but I run it on a 450 mHz PIII, so they're still off. So, you must be reffering to Sims 2, which I've never tried. They sound reasonable for it, though.

But yeah, a good graphics card makes a big difference. When I put in my 64 meg Geforce card, everything sped up. Seriously. The old one (I have no idea what it was) actually held my poor 450mHz system back that much.

Hmm... Starcraft + Wine = Goodness? I'll have to try that. I haven't had time to mess with Wine yet, but I will (I'm also underage, but that won't stop me if it means Starcraft in Linux )

[Lobster]

Maybe some of these games will run on ReactOS

http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/index.html

[gliezl]

does anyone know how to compile the Cedega CVS to work with Puppy 1.0.5?

[sunburnt_]

Here is a link on making Q3 run on Linux directly!

http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wfs ... ticleid=30

I found this link at Google.com, I'm sure there's lots more of them.
Lots of the first person shooters have been ported to Linux I think.
They're so popular the Linux guys wouldn't let Win have all the fun!

[~newbie]

HOWTO Compile Cedega

But I'm not sure if it is possble to work in Puppy...

Can someone help?

[rarsa]

Puppy running PC games?

Ain't that the only kind it can run? I guess puppy cannot ride a bicicle.

PC = Personal computer.

Maybe you meant DOS games or Windows games.

OK, now to the real meat of the thread wich I hadn't even read until now.

There are great older games that are designed for DOS and ran great in old computers. That means that they should run well in newer computers even under an emulator.

I thought about this yesterday when one of my sons stopped playing his PSP to install Windows 98 on a spare HDD to play some really old games.

One of the interesting things is how after the hype, people come back to games with great game play over games with great graphics (of course games with both get my money).

He was playing a Doom clone called Duke Nuk'em. After a while he didn't even noticed the pixelized graphics.

Someone posted info about a DOS emulator. I thought at that time 'who would want DOS?' and made a comment to that effect. Now I will go back and try it.

I'll keep an eye to see if someone can have cedega working.

There is already a WINE usr_more.sfs posted somewhere. I haven't tried it. have you?

[MU]

There also is an OpenGL-Port of Duke3D, but I could not find the Linux-files.
http://jonof.edgenetwork.org/index.php?p=jfduke3d

Puppy has the old non-GL-version of Duke:
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?t=4776

But that isfun, too
Mark