The Linux Gamers' HOWTO

Peter Jay Salzman

p@dirac.org

v0.9.17, 2002-09-03


Table of Contents
1. Administra
1.1. Authorship and Copyright
1.2. Acknowledgements
1.3. Latest Version and Translations
2. Definitions: Types Of Games
2.1. Arcade style
2.2. Card, logic and board games
2.3. Text Adventure (aka Interactive Fiction)
2.4. Graphical Adventures
2.5. Simulation (aka Sims)
2.6. Strategy (aka Strats)
2.7. First Person Shooter (aka FPS)
2.8. Side Scrollers
2.9. Third Person Shooters
2.10. Role Playing Game (aka RPG)
3. Libraries
3.1. What is Glide2?
3.2. What is Glide3?
3.3. What is OpenGL?
3.4. What is Mesa?
3.5. What is DRI?
3.6. What is GLX?
3.7. What is Utah GLX?
3.8. What is xlib?
3.9. What is a widget set?
3.10. What is SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer)?
3.11. What is GGI?
3.12. What is SVGAlib? Frame buffer? Console?
3.13. What is OpenAL?
3.14. What is DirectX?
3.15. Clanlib
4. Definitions: Video Card and 3D Terminology
4.1. Textures
4.2. T&L: Transform and Lighting
4.3. AA: Anti Aliasing
4.4. FSAA: Full Screen Anti-Aliasing
4.5. Mip Mapping
4.6. Texture Filtering
4.7. Z Buffering
5. XFree86 and You
5.1. Getting information about your X system
5.2. Playing Games In X Without a Window Manager
6. Various Topics
6.1. Memory Type Register Ranges
6.2. Milking performance from your system for all it's worth
6.3. About libraries on Linux
7. When Bad Things Happen To Good People
7.1. RTFM!
7.2. Look For Updates and Patches
7.3. Newsgroups
7.4. Google Group Search
7.5. Debugging: call traces and core files
7.6. Saved Games
7.7. What to do when a file or library isn't being found (better living through strace)
7.8. Hosed consoles
8. Hardware
8.1. Which video card is the best?
8.2. Which sound card is best?
9. Miscellaneous Problems
9.1. Hardware Acceleration Problems
9.2. Hardware acceleration works only for the root user
9.3. Why isn't my sound working?
10. Emulation and Virtual Machines
10.1. Apple 8-bit
10.2. DOS
10.3. Win16
10.4. Win32
11. Interpreters
11.1. SCUMM Engine (LucasArts)
11.2. AGI: Adventure Gaming Interface (Sierra)
11.3. SCI: SCript Interpreter or Sierra Creative Interpreter (Sierra)
11.4. Infocom Adventures (Infocom, Activision)
11.5. Scott Adams Adventures (Adventure International)
11.6. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (Origin, Blue Sky Productions)
11.7. Ultima 7 (Origin, Electronic Arts)
11.8. System Shock (Electronic Arts, Origin)
12. Websites And Resources
12.1. Meta gaming websites
12.2. Commercial Linux Game Resources
12.3. Other Resources