just a general question… but how is Haiku for Gaming? as in all the latest titles like HL2, Fear, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander, C&C3, etc?
also for old school as well like Commander Keen, Day of the Tentacle, Worms, Cannon Fodder, Sim City 2000, Duke Nukem, etc?
if there is support for those games, i’ll try out Haiku once its released…
As far as latest titles are concerned, I suspect you’re out of luck. AFAIK, none of those have been ported to BeOS/Haiku/Zeta. If they are OSS, there’s a chance that they may eventually be ported and made publicly available, but if they are closed-source, it would require that the vendor opted to support an OS other than Windows/Mac OS X/Linux.
As for “old-school” - you might be surprised. Anything you can locate on http://bebits.com is potentially runnable on Haiku. This would include Quake 1-3, ScummVM (for all those old LucasArts games, Day of the Tentacle, etc.) and some other games.
BeOS/Haiku is NOT a linux-compatible OS (as some people mistakenly believe), so games must be ported to it in order for it to support them.
Big commercial game companies are one of those industries that generally panders to the majority. They probably don’t care all that much about an alternative OS with < 5% marketshare - so most of them probably haven’t even heard of BeOS/Haiku even (which probably have 0.005% marketshare - I dunno) - and if they had, they probably laugh at the thought of supporting it commercially. When it comes to OSS alternative OSes, you are likely to be limited to OSS games and whatever the community has written.
well, looks like i’ll be sticking with Windows then due to the fact that you need a whole new computer for Mac, need to be a geek for Linux, and for this… you need to wait for IF games get ported to it…
It’s the sad truth, yes - and a vicious circle. By continuing to use Windows because it has all the software you want/need, you are helping perpetuate its dominance in the market, and thus encouraging software developers to only develop Windows software.
If this is a problem you want to help solve, you can do so in a number of ways.
Choose as much cross-platform and/or open-source software as often as you can (use FF instead of IE, use OO.o instead of MS Office, etc.) This allows you to relieve your direct reliance on the underlying OS and provides you with real options should you choose to switch down the road.
Stop buying products that ONLY release close-source, single platform games. Now, if you’re like most people, this just isn’t a reality and you probably won’t be happy with an “alternative OS”. If on the other hand you’re looking for an alternative OS because you don’t want to use Windows or Mac OS X, you’ll have to make some sacrifices.
yea, I use firefox and openoffice…
but I still support those game developers who make decent games…
but hey, Im a boy who likes change… but if this boy cannot play games on this change then he shall not change at all…
You can run Windows as well as another OS on your computer. I highly doubt anyone will be using just Haiku when it’s first released - we’re still missing too much software at the moment. I intend to have a Haiku partition, use it for most of my day-to-day computing if I can, and switch to Windows when I need to for software availability reasons.