@xmorg I know your pain. I was going through some of the older loki games a couple of months back and the amount of overides I had to do, you practically need a chroot environment of red hat 5 or something for all the old libstdc++5 or whatever it’s called and god knows what else. I was collecting all the information together, should put them on a blog somewhere.

In actual fact, getting older Linux games running on modern distro is harder then getting modern windows games running on Linux. Hell, Mass Effect 3 worked perfectly out the box! <3 wine (hate that its needed but were all realists here)

2) Using too many dependencies. This often triggers dependency hell. Case and point, Dwarf fortress: I don’t understand why in the world you need openAL just to play a friggen ogg file?!? Tested on two distros and i cant get sound to play natively. use the Kiss method please! Note: nwn, used only sdl, opengl glu… thats it!

3) write your sound routines at a higher level, or not for a specific sound driver. some games force alsa/pulse audio/etc which sucks for people using “the other” unless you are doing something fancy why not just use sdlmixer?

4) for open sourcers, besides #2, clean up your code and release something that compiles on something more than just your machine. Often downloads of os projects end in disappointment because the three step process of prep/make/run doesn’t work. throughly document all of your dependencies and don’t assume someone has what you have on your machine at compile time.