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Is there a way to emulate old linux games?
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crocket
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 17, 2019 9:57 am    Post subject: Is there a way to emulate old linux games? Reply with quote

Old linux games may not run on recent Gentoo systems because they may depend on shared libraries that are not in the system or in the games.

How shall I emulate those games? It's possible to emulate windows games with wine, but what about old linux games?
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bunder
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 17, 2019 11:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

maybe in a chroot with those old libraries... but that would mean finding them and possibly building them by hand.
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cboldt
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 17, 2019 8:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just put the old library (not part of the portage system) in /usr/local/lib, and edit a file in /etc/env.d to add "/usr/local/lib" to the LDPATH variable. Run `env-update` to rebuild /etc/ld.so.conf so it contains the added library path.

There can be issues with libraries just added that way, duplication of names, library is not compatible with the system for other reasons, etc. Many ways for things to get messy, but if the work is contained in /usr/local land, the trouble is at least isolated. I used this method for years to keep WordPerfect running, transported from a completely different distro, and no way to build from source code.
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crocket
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 17, 2019 11:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Game emulator run on archives. Can we not do the same for old linux programs?

I created a launcher for dosbox that mounts a zip file on a temporary directory on /tmp and merge it with ~/.local/share/appDir via unionfs to save every change in ~/.local/share/appDir.
The static part remains in the zip file. The changed files are in ~/.local/share/appDir. I created a dosbox launcher because DOS programs save config files and data files in the application directory.
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Hu
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Using LD_LIBRARY_PATH lets you influence the search order without reconfiguring the system. This lets you keep the obsolete shared libraries in a private directory where nothing will accidentally use them.

Is there a reason you don't just recompile the games?
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crocket
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 6:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hu wrote:
Using LD_LIBRARY_PATH lets you influence the search order without reconfiguring the system. This lets you keep the obsolete shared libraries in a private directory where nothing will accidentally use them.

Is there a reason you don't just recompile the games?


Linux proprietary games don't come with source codes. Game publishers publish only binaries. How are you going to emulate the old games after 3 decades in the same way that we emulate SNES games?
What about playing them after 5 decades?
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Hu
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 19, 2019 12:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You didn't specify that the source code had been lost. Yes, some proprietary-oriented publishers issued binaries without corresponding source, but there are also open source games, some of which predate heavy graphical gaming, and you could have been asking about one of those.
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 19, 2019 7:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

crocket,

You can probably set of a virtual machine with a contemporary to the game install.
I still have a set of Red Hat 6.1 install CDs from 1999, which is what started me in Linux.
If you want to play with 20 year old Red Hat, I can host them.

Gentoo was getting started about then too. The ebuilds will be in CVS.

Games that use the 16 bit virtual mode that 32 bit CPUs provided will be more difficult as that is not supported on 64 bit CPUs.

I suspect that MAME will work too but you will have to package the game and its dependencies correctly.
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crocket
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 19, 2019 11:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

NeddySeagoon wrote:
I suspect that MAME will work too but you will have to package the game and its dependencies correctly.


I prefer something like MAME because it can be run on multiple platforms.
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EartGrille
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 22, 2019 7:15 am    Post subject: Mame Reply with quote

How do you think about MAME?
It emulates popular arcade cabinets as well as classic computing systems like the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and even early Apple computers.
However, MAME itself has a fairly minimal graphical interface, so I usually use it with MESS to play game from APKNite because it uses MAME as a backend to provide a much more robust graphical experience.
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