Gentoo Technologies founded a new company, Gentoo Games, which is set to release numerous gaming titles on self-booting CDs, fully configured to work on i686s+ with the latest Geforce and Radeon (8500+) graphics boards. First title to come out is America’s Army. Another similar distro is Morphix.
Gentoo Technologies Forms Gentoo Games
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I downloaded this yesterday and spent until the wee hours last night playing it. It works great. I did not have a single problem and performance was good.
Can someone please post the MD5SUM for the AmericasArmy ISO as when I burnt it to CD it doesn’t work properly. I’ve downloaded it 4 spearate times now. Same thing everytime. It’s driving me nuts!
If you don’t know how to do it, just type:-
MD5SUM aa-20030513.iso
and paste the number returned here.
Thanks in advance
Seen from the point of user experience, they seem trying to morph the PC into a game console.
If this works: Great, but I suppose due to the great diversity in modern PC technology the games will only run on a small number of machines.
Perhaps a 2-Step approach would be better: Make a “base” System which boots the machine, THEN insert a second CD with the game, which then gets started automagically. This way you can upgrade the base distro to make use of newer hardware, or release different versons for different hw. Doing so, they’ll have a greater chance getting the games working on more hardware, and they can ensure that you can play the old games on new hardware.
But the best I’ve seen from GentooGames so far is the logo. That looks very stylish. On just can not loose with such a cool logo 😉 !
MfG
Sebastian
This means people won’t need to have Windows in their pc and they would be able to play games even if they have linux.
Take an America’s Army CD with you to a friend’s house and play, to an internet cafe and play, to school and play, the possibilities are endless.
Too bad America’s Army is plagued by campers and slow pokes, they really ruin the game.
NOW U GOT ME THINKIN!!!
except…..my school has crappy graphics cards that need their windows drivers to do anything…
Will this Live CD thingy work ona ny other distribution?
BTW another cool game is Kbounce, just found it now in SuSE 8.2, it is a strategy game, simple objective and graphics, but it is really fun and gets hard.
% md5 aa-20030513.iso
MD5 (aa-20030513.iso) = c9413b5477a06d95e7cc31a92685bcf9
🙂
One argument people make when confronted with the issue of games on lInux is that people with Linux should just get game consoles. These bootable CDs look like a nice alternative for those with out consoles.
thats fantastic .. i guess they’ve given up on gentoo 1.4 (waiting since sept 2002)…
I’m a linux user (amongst a couple of other OSes). But let me get this straight…you’re supposed to reboot your computer to play a videogame? I thought the days of using a bootdisk to play a videogame died about 10 years ago. Why would I want to ruin the uptime of my XP or Linux box to play a bootable Gentoo game? This is ridiculous. I hated the bootdisk concept with DOS back then, and I was glad to see it go with the onset of gaming in Windows 95. This is so backwards that I can’t believe anyone in their right mind would want to do this.
Gentoo has done a great job with this CD. It works well and the only problem I had was that I’m deaf now: They decided to max out the system AND game volumes, so when the gunfire started I nearly went into shock. DON’T WEAR HEADPHONES LIKE I DID!
Of course the framerates were crap compared to playing in Windows, but that’s to be expected with Linux and ATI drivers.
Don’t be so ignorant.
They are merely applying Gentoo the way it was meant to be applied. It’s a meta distribution; ideal for buildnig your own distributions.
1.4 is still being as actively developed as it ever was. And it’s still on schedule; to be released when it’s ready.
If you are ready to use Gentoo (and that’s a big “if”), don’t wait for the final 1.4. Gentoo is not like the average distribution. The only thing you’ll notice with the release of 1.4-final is that your weekly “emerge world” is a little larger than usual. The notion of distinct releases don’t make a whole lot of sense with Gentoo.
Can you install the game on your HD in Linux?
I would say, this game runs on Windows a lot faster than this CD, but I don’t know what result it will be when it’s on the HD. This CD will not allow me change the /etc/X11/XF86Config, which it just keep change back to the default. It’s killing my eyes by only 60Hz and pretty too much lagging.
>% md5 aa-20030513.iso
>MD5 (aa-20030513.iso) = c9413b5477a06d95e7cc31a92685bcf9
Thanks, as I thought, mine doesn’t match. Time to download it yet again! 🙁
Can you install the game on your HD in Linux?
You will in about a week. Gentoo worked something out with Ryan Gordan to get a few days exclusive.
>>>> Can you install the game on your HD in Linux?
>> You will in about a week. Gentoo worked something out with Ryan Gordan to get a few days exclusive.
Or you can grab the game of the Gentoo AA disc if you don’t mind the extra download. That’s what I did when the Gentoo CD decided it wouldn’t start XFree86 for me.
From the console, which it did manage to boot, I mounted one of my Linux partions and copied everthing in ‘/opt/armyops170/’. If it won’t get as far as the console then you will have to extract it from livecd.cloop, which is an ext2 image with a bit of a script preceding it (so it could be a little tricky).
I haven’t tried this CD yet (KGet is downloading), but I think a self-booting CD may not have the same performance of a Gentoo that sits on your hard disk and bsdrocks reported that he can’t change XFree settings.
IMHO If there will be a way to install on the hard disk it will be cool.
I would say that counting uptime on your PC is ridiculous.
“But let me get this straight…you’re supposed to reboot your computer to play a videogame? I thought the days of using a bootdisk to play a videogame died about 10 years ago.”
I totally agree, this just seems crazy to me. Restarting my Windows XP system every couple of weeks is painful enough, I can’t imagine rebooting just to play a game. I suppose if you only use the computer for games it’s not an issue. But if that’s true, why would you buy an expensive PC rather than a cheap games console? The last time I looked you could get an xbox for not much more than a decent graphics card.
Personally the only time I play games is when I’m waiting for something to download, or I want a quick break from work. I wouldn’t play a game that doesn’t run nicely in the background while I’m doing something else, let alone one that requires a reboot. Even the Acorn computer I was using 15 years ago let me run most games without having to exit other apps. This really is like going back to the bad old days of single tasking OSes, I just can’t see why this is a good idea.
The sweet thing about this is having a CD you can run a game from for after hours LAN parties at work, that keep you from installing the game on the PC. Or how about LAN parties? Pass out copies of the CD so you can be sure everyone has a copy of the game. Maybe even a way for companies to distribute game demos.
BTW, I’m typing this from mozilla on my Gentoo Game CD boot, while installing Gentoo on a new MB and CPU. Another great use.
Let’s not be so shortsighted on the cool things that these things can do. What may seem to be useless to some, is full of possibility to others.
People complaining about the game cd are missing the point. If you want to play America’s Army by installing that is fine. Do it that way. The point of a game cd is:
1: No installation. This is great if you are low on harddrive space, or just don’t want to leave any tracks.
2: Efficient. Playing a game on top of a normal operating system leaves all kinds of processes running that you likely don’t want. Playing on a stripped down linux kernel gives you only what you need. This means you’ll get more out of that hardware.
3: Portability. Take it to a friends, pop it in and go. Take it to work, pop it in and go. Headed to a lan-party? Bust out 8-10 copies and dish em to your friends. Everyone pops in and reboots and you are home free.
The game cd is a great idea and it really does work well. I don’t see why anyone would complain about something so handy. All it does is add a new way to do things. You can still install the game if it pleases you.
I agree with this, the more choices you have the better. You can both install it to HD or you can reboot. The usual game CANNOT be run by rebooting. This game CD only adds one option of running the game. Thats great! But I bet if I made a game that could be run through the USB port there would tefinetly be someone there to nag nag nag and say “I refse to crawl down on the floor and plug it in, this suxxor!”.
Well people, if you think it sucks, simply dont use it! The choice is yours.
And to the whiners that dont want to reboot: to me it sounds like you were not going to play AA anyway but would rater choose games like tetris, solitare and stuff. Short games that only takes that much time.
either it doesn’t detect my VIA onboard sound or it’s not being put out correctly — how do I get to the sound config (NOT right click desktop..)?
This would seem like a good future for gaming on linux! After all, you could more game companies to support this. Most mainstream games demand your computer’s full attention anyway. Look around the net for how much time people waste trying to get things just right. Manufacturers’ would have only 1 disc to support for each hardware type. This would also lead to better games, because like on consoles, they’d have fewer options to fix it after the fact. Also, they wouldn’t loose anything, they could still set up the normal windows install using the files from the disc.
All they’d have to do is to hack PGP keys in to chloop and have you get the keys online for maximum security too!
It’s a neat idea, but I can see a problem here.
A PC isn’t a games console, there are a vast number of hardware configurations being used. Now this isn’t a huge problem if you’re distributing something simple, but for a game that uses the up to date parts of the graphical/sound systems then it is. With a full OS you can tweak and add drivers to get everything working, but once it’s on the CD the drivers it has available to it are fixed, so the game CD will become outdated as people change their hardware to newer versions.
From the sounds of things you can install to HD which solves the problem, but that defeats the whole purpose of the run from CD idea. As a way of distributing demos, or short lifespan games it works, I’m just not sure it works over a longer timespan. Guess in the end I suppose it depends on how much these things will cost.
I asked the question and I get the point, at least some got mine. I just wanted to simply know if I could install it on my LINUX distro so I could play the game when ever I feal like it and not reboot.
I use Libranet 2.8, shameless plugggggggggggg.
I run advance CD on a old 200+ something pentium for my parents, It is stripped from everything except the cdrom, soundblaster card and Graphics card. I resoldered two gravis GRIP gamepads to accept two old two button joysticks.
Advance CD is a linux distribution with advanceMenu and advanceMame on it. The complete setup is much nicer too handle then the c64 it is replacing. My parents are delighted with it and my mother (72) beats me with pacman and frogger handsdown
.
I think that people are somewhat missing the point, even some of those that think the GameCD is a good idea. The most important thing about this initiative is the side-effect: by producing the Linux-based GameCD, Gentoo Games will be producing Linux-based games. This will be beneficial to anyone who wants to play games in Linux.