GamePad: A New Open Source And 100% Linux-Dedicated Game Platform
Linux is considered an "unofficial" gaming platform; the support and target audience provided to it is not a primary priority for most gaming organizations. This has seen some change starting from 2021 onward, as big players like Valve, the CodeWeavers group and the community have made tremendous changes over the past few months, allowing Linux to truly become a viable platform for gaming. Further, more and more indie development teams strive to use cross-platform rendering engines in order to have their game able to compile and run on Linux.
GamePad: A New Open Source And 100% Linux-Dedicated Game Platform
When it comes to gaming, the majority of user's thoughts are often directed towards popular AAA games which are usually written for the Microsoft Windows platform. This is understandable, however, it is not the only and sole availability. Please refer to #Game environments and #Getting games further down the page where you can find software to run games from other platforms.
The APIs above forward their graphical calls to the underlying driver which then proceeds to talking to the GPU hardware. AMD users fortunately have opensource drivers released by AMD itself. This is already a huge issue resolved. Nvidia users have to rely on other alternatives, which often comes packed as blobs. (microcode and firmware being fed through, as a result of Nvidia driver reverse engineering)
Instead, several opensource equivalents have been written which attempt to provide identical functionality, ultimately achieving the same result from a graphics point of view. These equivalents have their "own" written substitutes which attempt to "re-invent" what the original SDK calls would possibly achieve from a black box point of view. Popular ones include:
In some cases like those mentioned above, it may be necessary or desired to run a second X server. Running a second X server has multiple advantages such as better performance, the ability to "tab" out of your game by using Ctrl+Alt+F7/Ctrl+Alt+F8, no crashing your primary X session (which may have open work on) in case a game conflicts with the graphics driver. The new X server will be akin a remote access login for the ALSA, so your user need to be part of the audio group to be able to hear any sound.
For Source games, the ingame setting `dsp_slow_cpu` must be set to `1` to enable HRTF, otherwise the game will enable its own processing instead. You will also either need to set up Steam to use native runtime, or link its copy of openal.so to your own local copy. For completeness, also use the following options:
On that account, GamePad, a new entrant in the open game platform, launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for its latest Linux gaming platform. Started in April 2019, GamePad is inspired by digital distribution platform, GOG (Good Old Games) for video games and films, to provide 100% Linux dedicated game platform.
Batocera.linux is an open-source and completely free retro-gaming distribution that can be copied to a USB stick or an SD card with the aim of turning any computer/nano computer into a gaming console during a game or permanently. Batocera.linux does not require any modification on your computer. Note that you must own the games you play in order to comply with the law.
The objective of this page is to build a comprehensive list of open source C++ libraries, so that when one needs an implementation of particular functionality, one needn't to waste time searching on web (DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing etc.).
Sharable user-defined feeds identify gaming resources to collect and execute withinthe context of the browser. Resource types include game content (binaries, etc.)as well as game-related meta-information and assets (artwork, etc.).
In several of the cases listed here, the game's developers released the source code expressly to prevent their work from becoming abandonware. Such source code is often released under varying (free and non-free, commercial and non-commercial) software licenses to the games' communities or the public; artwork and data are often released under a different license than the source code, as the copyright situation is different or more complicated. The source code may be pushed by the developers to public repositories (e.g. SourceForge or GitHub), or given to selected game community members, or sold with the game, or become available by other means. The game may be written in an interpreted language such as BASIC or Python, and distributed as raw source code without being compiled; early software was often distributed in text form, as in the book BASIC Computer Games. In some cases when a game's source code is not available by other means, the game's community "reconstructs" source code from compiled binary files through time-demanding reverse engineering techniques.
Once games, or software in general, become an obsolete product for a company, the tools and source code required to re-create the game are often lost or even actively destroyed and deleted.[242][243][244][245][246][247][248] For instance, with the closure of Atari in Sunnyvale, California in 1996, the original source codes of several milestones of video game history such as Asteroids and Centipede were all thrown out as trash.[249][250]
Using the techniques listed above within a "bottom-up" development methodology process, the re-created source-code of a game is able to replicate the behavior of the original game exactly, often being "clock-cycle accurate", and/or "pixel-per-pixel accurate". This approach is in contrast to that used by game engine recreations, which are often made using a "top-down" development methodology, and which can result in duplicating the general features provided by a game engine, but not necessarily an accurate representation of the original game.
An Android-based open source OS that incorporates many optimizations, features, and that supports many more devices. What's more? It's available for just about any Chromebook, PC or tablet released in the last 5 years.
Everything that we make is 100% open source and developed collaboratively by people from all over theworld.Even if you're not a programmer, you can get involved and make a difference.We are constantly looking for people to help out with the following activities on our project.
Governments at all levels (national, state, federal and international) have opted to deploy Linux across their computer systems for a host of reasons. Some are purely technological, with the governments in question preferring the open-source benefits of the OS. Others are financial, as Linux is typically far less expensive than buying a license for Windows. Still others are political, as organizations like the World Trade Organization have actively pressured governments to shun Microsoft products. In any case, here are some of the governing bodies that now run Linux on their computers.
According to Linux.com, the United States Department of Defense is the "single biggest install base for Red Hat Linux" in the world. Nor was it an unconscious choice, as Brigadier General Nick Justice, the Deputy Program Officer for the Army's Program Executive Office proclaims "open source software is part of the integrated network fabric which connects and enables our command and control system to work effectively, as people's lives depend on it." Justice went on to state that "when we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source", and that he was indeed Red Hat's "biggest customer."
The city of Munich, Germany has "chosen to migrate its 14,000 desktops to a free Linux distribution, rather than a commercial version of the open source operating system" according to a 2005 ZD Net report. The distribution Munich chose was Debian, and is said to have "considered several alternatives before choosing Debian", settling on it ultimately because of price and the degree to which it could be customized to meet Munich's municipal computing needs. The German Foreign Office, as well as the city of Vienna, also opted to make the switch to Debian in 2005.
French Parliament opted in November 2006 to dump Windows in favor of Ubuntu Linux, according to ZD Net, the move was part of a comprehensive shake-up in the software run on Parliament computers, resulting ultimately in "1,154 French parliamentary workstations running on Linux, with OpenOffice.org productivity software, the Firefox Web browser and an open-source e-mail client." Despite the training costs, Parliament officials named cost savings and technological superiority of open-source software for parliamentary purposes as reasons for the switch.
In 2002, the government of Pakistan launched a Technology Resource Mobilization Unit to promote the spread of open-source software (including Linux) throughout that country. The unit (comprised of academics, businesspeople and government officials) has largely succeeded in educating computer users throughout Pakistan about what free software has to offer. As a result, Pakistan is using Linux in many of its public schools and colleges and plans to ultimately run it on all of its government computer systems. In countries like Pakistan, where little money is available for government investment in technology, Linux and other open source software is appealing from a cost perspective.
Wired.com reported in 2001 that the government of Mexico City had concluded that "they can no longer justify the ever rising cost of Microsoft Windows when the cost of Linux software is very low." In an interview with Wired, the city's technical coordinator, José Barberán, "announced plans to switch city computers to the Linux operating system and to use the money it saves to fund social welfare programs." At the end of the day, when faced with pressure to increase social spending, "cutting costs by moving to open-source software was a logical choice for the mayor."
Perhaps taking a cue from the U.S. Postal Service, the Czech Republic's own post office successfully migrated to Linux in 2005, according to Europa.The chosen distribution of Linux (SuSe) now runs on "4,000 servers at 3,400 post offices across the country, as well as at 12,000 client terminals used by 20,000 employees." Once more, cost was a driving force behind a large state institution switching from Windows or other providers to free, open-source Linux.