Apt is a good call. It predates yum, which itself predates yumv2-oops-dnf, and that beautiful porting gift from the Brazilian folks is still working hard at RPM management faster and more consistently than yum v1/v2 ever will.
Try PCLinuxOS (conectiva’s great-grandchild) - its template creation is horrible as they’ve forgotten how to anaconda, but otherwise it’s amazing.
Uhm. Doom was originally released in 1993. 30 years ago. Dragon age Origins was released in 2009. 14 years ago.
So…
Not quite. got a couple years before that’s true.
FWIW, the first game I beat was the OG legend of zelda. I was 7, it was my dad’s game and i wasn’t supposed to be playing it for some reason. I got caught when my dad was strugling on the puzzles in the water temple and I gave some helpful advice… (“We won’t tell mom about this. now where did you say I go?”)
the first PC game I got heavily into was Age of Empires, though, a lot of my friends played starcraft, and insisted it was better than AoE; so I played one game with them. (They were all so very patronizing… so I let them be patronizing and then turned my ally to hostile and carpet-nuked the entire map.) (yeah. I went back to AoE after that, lol.)
incidentally, I noticed that the doom comics were issued in '96 when I was double checking my facts. It’s maybe annoying that I’m old enough to remember sneaking a copy of it
I have seen multiple streamers have problems with it on Windows, but for me it works completely fine on Linux with PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1 (even mods work).
There is a large address aware (LAA) patch for windows too that fixed it for one streamer, but you have to download a patched executable.
Plenty of old apps still run fine. I’ve got VB6 apps I wrote in the mid 2000s that still run. A previous employer has DLLs from 1999 still running in production on Windows Server - VB6 COM components with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in total. I’m reasonably sure than Office 2000 still works, too.
You do sometimes have to change the compatibility settings and run the apps as administrator (since they were designed for Windows 9x which didn’t have separate admin permissions) but often they work.
Even some 16-bit apps work fine as long as you use a 32-bit version of Windows (Windows 10 or older; 11 dropped the 32-bit build). The 64-bit versions of Windows don’t have the NTVDM component that’s required to run 16-bit Windows and DOS apps. It’s an optional component on 32-bit Windows and you need to manually install it.
A lot of effort is put in to backwards compatibility in Windows - Raymond Chen has blogs and books about it.
it often was hit or miss with games though. I remember some games from 95/98 to run on 2000, then not on XP, somehow on Vista and 7, but not on 10. And other games ran on XP, but not Vista and 7…
The disc copy of Fallout 3 will not install on new windows due to games for windows no longer working. At least last time I tried to install it that was the case.
It’s usually the apps themselves doing weird things - Using undocumented APIs, expecting the system to be set up in a particular way, relying on bugs in the OS, etc. Windows tries, and actually emulates old bugs for popular apps so they continue to work, but it can’t be bug-compatible forever.
Apps/games that work on XP should mostly work on newer versions as long as you set them to run with Windows XP compatibility (in the settings of the EXE), but there’s definitely edge cases.
Drivers are definitely out. Some games are really iffy. Especially from the Win 9x era, where they’d do stupid things like look for a 9 in the version string of Windows, or get the amount of RAM as a 32 bit signed int, so refuses to install if you have 4GB RAM or more.
We had a lot of dodgy old DOS programs that were fine under Win98, but XP broke them.
Installing 25 year old binaries on Linux is rather interesting - relevant for stuff like some of the old Loki ports. Problem is mostly that they’ve been written with kernel 2.2 in mind, which does have different behaviour for quite a few things - you generally can find old libc versions compatible with the binary, but those libc versions don’t necessarily play nice with the kernel.
There are some compatibility flags which made things work last time I checked - but not sure if that’s the case, and it definitely won’t work forever, given that 32bit x86 support is likely to be dropped eventually.
It's funny, the only Linux software I've ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.
I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri didn't run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.
There’s a lot of enterprise stuff that only ships as binaries. I had some fun in the late 00s trying to find the most recent distribution still shipping packages for egcs as that was the only compiler supported by the Lotus Domino SDK.
(For the younger ones here: There was some disagreement about gcc development, which resulted in the egcs fork. It got merged back into mainline gcc by he late 90s already, though)
At the time when the Loki ports happened it was a great thing - before that you pretty much had doom and quake available. Nowadays things are better with steam, but it’s quite likely that we’ll see some stuff break there in a few years as well, at least for older games.
Add comment