Interesting article, games

Benjamin Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Fri Mar 5 09:52:36 EST 2010


On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
>>  I remember that!  Computers with the hottest graphics hardware on
>> the planet, and Doom still did all rendering in software and just
>> blitted bitmaps to X.  :)
>
> Didn't Doom use OpenGL as its engine?  Id is one of the reasons DirectX
> didn't wipe out OpenGL.

  Nope, Doom used a one-off, all-software rendering engine.  Doom ran
on MS-DOS, in the days of Windows 3.x, before 3D hardware acceleration
was really available on the IBM-PC.  Heck, the fact that it used i386
protected mode was something of a big leap forward.  I still remember
the "DOS/4GW" banner from startup.  One of the reasons Doom received
so much praise is how it managed to get so much done on a fairly
craptacular OS and hardware platform.

  I seem to recall once reading that the id Software level designer
ran on SGI's using OpenGL, and that was initially a barrier to
bringing a designer to the consumer market.  Third-parties ended up
building stripped down map editors -- they just drew a top-down line
map instead of visualizing, but they could run on the pee sea.

>> > That mainstream OS is probably the iPhone OS, not MacOSX.
>>
>>  I wonder, if Droid takes off like iPhone did, will that bring more
>> interest to Linux?
>
> You mean Android right?  Droid is one model of phone using the Android
> platform.

  Yes and no, because...

> I've read of fragmentation in the Android market.

  Exactly.  Droid seems like the first Android phone that's getting
marketing budget, mainstream attention and adoption, and also has an
impressive feature set.  While widespread use of Android as a generic
phone engine might be good for Linux tech, it's not going to help the
desktop market much because it's not going to be attracting
application programmers.  But if Droid gathers the kind of developer
ecosystem that iPhone has, *that* might be a gateway drug for the
Linux desktop.

-- Ben



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