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Comment by TeaDude | Hacker News Reader

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!)

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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).

> 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.

They might want to avoid 3rd party licensed software issues, and/or possibly in their archaic restricted mindsets, any user enjoying a decades old game ported to current hardware becomes one less customer purchasing a new title.

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

Check GMDX. Also, The Darkest Mod.

Does it get that bad? I had various issues with UE1 applications but most of the time just adding a modern OGL/DX9/10/11 renderer library solves everything.

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