
The sad case of Unreal Engine 1 on Mesa and Linux in 2020 - Lammy
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/the-sad-case-of-unreal-engine-1-on-mesa-and-linux-in-2020.15915
======
TeaDude
Argh. Unreal engine 1 can be a real pain, even on windows!

Just recently I tried running Deus Ex and had to use the hacked .exe files and
a custom graphics mode for it to not have serious issues.

Tim Sweeney said he'd like to release the Unreal 1 source code one day (5
years ago) and it's stuff like this that would be sooooo much better even if
we could only get Unreal itself and not further forks like Deus Ex.

(For instance, with doom modding they had to totally reverse engineer STRIFE
but it properly works on modern systems now!)

~~~
flatlanderwoman
I've been playing Deus Ex from GOG.com on Linux (under Wine) myself and it has
worked great.

But I think that an open-source release of Unreal Engine 1 that could
potentially give us the power to fix these issues, would be great. The final
thing that Deus Ex needs before becoming perfect is an open-source engine
(kinda like OpenMW).

~~~
clarry
> But I think that an open-source release of Unreal Engine 1 that could
> potentially give us the power to fix these issues, would be great.

It'd also let us mod things way beyond what's reasonably possible by default,
port the thing to other CPU architectures, port to other OSes..

I'm quite disappointed that the games industry at large doesn't care about
their customers enough to open source their code.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
For anyone who missed it, EA just announced that they will release the C++
source code of Red Alert 1. (It's not completely clear whether they will
release _all_ of the source.) [0]

You're right though, it's a pity this doesn't happen more often. As we've seen
with Quake and classic DOOM, it doesn't even have to amount to a giveaway, as
the game assets can remain payware.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249964)

------
jamiesonbecker
I started hacking on this again as well (especially classic Unreal
Tournament/UT99). Would love to play some Facing Worlds, but was not able to
get it to work on a modern 64-bit MX system w/ nvidia binary drivers..
however, did get UT2004 working! (no sound so far though)

But, heads-up, maybe this will work in your Unreal Engine 1 hacking: the
awesome Icculus put together a small tarball of the needed libc5 libraries..

[http://icculus.org/updates/cod/gcc3-libs.tar.bz2](http://icculus.org/updates/cod/gcc3-libs.tar.bz2)

Check out the thread where I found this -- it's quite a read:

[https://icculus.org/pipermail/ut2004/2005-June/002249.html](https://icculus.org/pipermail/ut2004/2005-June/002249.html)

And, as much as I hate to say it, reading that old 2005 thread still rings
true: Windows apps still tend to work, even 25 years later, but Linux apps
don't tend to work even a year or two later. Backwards compatibility hasn't
really been a thing in Linux, but it should be.

Also see [https://www.smokin-guns.org/](https://www.smokin-guns.org/) (based
on Q3A) and my 64-bit build of it from a few years ago:
[https://github.com/jamiesonbecker/smokinguns](https://github.com/jamiesonbecker/smokinguns)

~~~
flatlanderwoman
Linux has a "fix the source and recompile" mentality to backwards
compatibility.

~~~
zokier
_Linux_ (mostly) doesn't have a problem with binary backwards compatibility.
It's everything around Linux that is generally the problem.

------
zedr
I created a Dockerfile to run Unreal Tournament 1 in Linux using Docker. It
works quite well.

[https://github.com/zedr/docker-unreal-
tournament-99](https://github.com/zedr/docker-unreal-tournament-99)

------
int_19h
The most ironic part is that all the failing games are easy to run with Wine.

~~~
m-p-3
Now I'm wondering if they'd run better through Wine in WSL.

