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Comment by azeirah | Hacker News Reader

> No way you could run Linux binaries or MacOS classic binaries from '98

Can you give me a few examples of linux binaries from 98? I would like to give this a go, I think I have a pretty reasonable way to go about achieving this.

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I'd just use an old game (for a really hard test). Like Quake maybe: https://github.com/Jason2Brownlee/QuakeOfficialArchive Or the server for easy mode.

Let us know how it went. ;)

Games of that age are probably getting well into the era of "requires SVGAlib, must run as root". They haven't aged well.

No, most of them run in X-Windows, using protocols that are still supported even by xwayland, because they weren't originally written for Linux (or IBM-compatibles) at all. Some of them fail to cope with TrueColor visuals but most are fine. You can get old source code from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/X11/games/. Binaries are maybe trickier; maybe start with http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/dists/slink/...? Most of those are going to depend on old shared libraries for things like Xlib, though. (Notice that half the game names start with "x"!)

Debian Slink was formally released in 01999, but most of the packages in it are from 01998. I just installed xkobo from http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/dists/slink/... with `sudo dpkg -i` but now it wants i386 versions of libc6, libstdc++2.9, and xlib6g. ldd says:

  libXext.so.6 => not found
  libX11.so.6 => not found
  libstdc++-libc6.0-1.so.2 => not found

If anyone is adept enough with Debian to explain how I can do this without breaking my amd64 install, I'd be obliged. (Maybe I need to debootstrap in a chroot or something? It's probably still possible to download slink CD install images.)

Ah, most of what you've got there looks like small "desktop toy" games, like minesweeper games and whatnot. I was thinking more along the lines of full-screen, possibly 3D, games of the sort that got ported by companies like Loki back in the day. Those took a long time to become runnable under X11.

> Maybe I need to debootstrap in a chroot or something?

Probably. Even then you might run into some compatibility issues - IIRC, some of the really old code paths used for system calls (like the vsyscall DSO) have been removed in modern Linux kernels.

xkobo in particular is a twitchy 2-D bullet-hell shooter, and the current version of it (kobodeluxe) is built with SDL and supports fullscreen mode. But I'm pretty sure xkobo did run in a window. Certainly the other games there I remember (xjewel, xgalaga, etc.) did.

I'm not familiar with Loki's work at all, though the name seems familiar.

I think the removed-code-paths thing is mostly an issue with libc5, isn't it?

I ran into a problem with really old code paths in August when I tried to compile PFE 0.9.14 (a Forth implementation, not a game) from 01995; it was trying to call `uselib`, which I think has never existed on amd64.

FWIW `ldd` reported that xkobo had successfully mapped "linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f3c000)" (with no filename); as I understand it, this is the vDSO that replaced the vsyscall mechanism, so at least for stuff built for Debian Slink I don't think that problem in particular will occur.

Which games ported by Loki didn't require X11? I remember playing Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Majesty on Linux in mid-00s, and they were all X11 ports.

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