Hi,
first of all thanks for your work!
I think it is a little bit hard to combine gaming and Haiku-OS now at the current state of the OS because of the supported GFX cards and OpenGL and so on, BUT …
...of course there aren't many games in Haiku but there's still some interesting games
You are right, but that is changeble to a little better situation.
IIRC there has been a lot of small games back in the BeOS R4/R4.5/R5-days. And a couple of them should be working on Haiku-OS, Rocks’n’Diamonds for example. But we are now in a situation where next release (maybe even beta 1) is recogniseable at the horizon.
And that’s a point where Haiku-OS users could step in to help the developers. They could:
- try to get as much games (with it’s sources if possible) back from the BeOS days
- try to write receipes to create HPKGs of them
- testing, testing, testing (which is fun, because it means to play a lot …
)
- try to get a software repository that fits OR provide an own (games-)repository
Oh yes, i remember also the FPS shooters i.e. Quake2@BeOS and QuakeIII-Arena, even Doom and that Duke Nukem port (named “Dave Gnukem” on BeOS). Also a FreeCiv clone and OpenRaider (free Tomb Raider clone from a russian developer iirc) and so on.
You will find a lot of them on BeShare networks and anywhere on the net on personal homepages of BeOS/Haiku enthusiats.
There has also been 1 or 2 Game CDs for Zeta back in the days, but i never got one of them and so i am not sure if that things has been “native” Zeta games or if them have to be played by an emulator.
I’m not a pro-gamer or so, but the man/woman getting QuakeIII-TeamArena running (with netcode!), playable and hpkg-packaged on Haiku’s upcoming beta version will get 100,00 EUR donated by me. (Just for the memories of my youth being back on my loved OS
) I think it should be doable, even with SoftwareGL, the current CPUs are more then strong enough therefore.
EDIT: Readers, don’t get me wrong, first of all we (the users) sould be the strong arm of the Haiku-OS community that helps the developers by installing, testing and reporting bugs.
So, everything at the proper time. Step by step.
greets,
prOSy