Games Archive

Mac Doom 3 performance issue revealed

Bare Feats, a popular site devoted to Mac vs PC benchmarks, benchmarked Doom 3 on the Mac to investigate what are the issues with Mac's slower performance in Doom 3 compared to the PC. They even contacted the developers responsible for the port who explained that it indeed has to do with Mac's architecture, gcc's slower optimizations and the OS X itself. From the article: "PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed."

Gaming on Linux

Linux has so far failed to establish itself as a gamer's operating system of choice. Attempts to create multi-OS compatible games and current attempts to build a bridge between Windows-based games and Linux have yet to bear much fruit. How might things change in future?

NoGravity Game Open Sourced

One of the most prolific games of the BeOS platform was SpaceGirl (later renamed to "No Gravity"). The game is now being ported to Windows and Mac OS X (using DX and, software GL and GL) and also it has been fully open sourced. Hopefully, we will see a Linux/Unix and a PocketPC port soon (for the 2700G Intel accelerator found on Dell or other VGA-capable PDAs, e.g. the VGA Zaurus).

Games Knoppix Review

Games Knoppix is an entertainment-oriented version of the popular Debian-based LiveCD known as Knoppix. The idea behind Games Knoppix is excellent -- a LiveCD that you can give to your friends to show them some of the more frivolous aspects of GNU/Linux. Disappointingly, however, many of the games on the CD do not work, many more are duplicates of the same game, everything is in German, and there are driver problems with both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel options. Linux.com has the review.

Commodore 64 Lives!

Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer, has re-created the entire Commodore 64 on one chip and inserted it into a joystick, with several games, (like the cool Atari-in-a-joystick games) allowing nostalgic thirtysomethings to relive their youths. A NYT/news.com article has an interesting profile of Ellsworth, her creation, and other projects she's worked on.

BlitzMax for cross-platform games development

BlitzMax is the new, next generation game programming language from Blitz Research. BlitzMax provides developers with a complete cross-platform 2D programming solution for OSX, Windows and Linux. The OSX version has just been released, with Windows and Linux versions to follow shortly. For more details, please visit www.blitzmax.com or read the official press release. Blitz3D is also available.

TransGaming Announces Cedega Time Limited Demo

Linuxlookup.com is reporting on how Transgaming released a time limited demo of its flagship Linux product, Cedega. The Cedega Time Limited Demo will be available only for a two week period, from November 2nd to November 15th and can be downloaded at www.transgaming.com. Cedega allows hundreds of the top triple ‘A’ PC titles to run on the Linux operating system, seamlessly, transparently, and out-of-the-box with equivalent game-play and performance as the original PC version.

Where are the Good Open Source Games?

Despite the impressive list of achievements of open source software, it can be argued that there have not been any world-class games created under the open source banner. Sure, several old games like Doom and Quake have been gifted to the open source community, but there are no comparable original creations in this area. One should not expect this situation to change anytime soon, because the open source development model does not make sense for game development.