Windows to PC games

[lewashby]

I have a little programming experience and I'M just getting into Linux. I was wondering, how big of a deal would it be to convert some of your old classics like Half-Life and Tomb Raider from Windows to Linux? Sorry to ask such a stupid question on such a technical forum.

[JasonHippy]

Unless you happen to have access to the original source code for Half-life or Tomb Raider, then you have no hope of being able to port them over to run natively on Linux. But there is nothing to stop you from creating your own Half-life or Tomb Raider clone using an open source game engine. Obviously, because of copyright you wouldn't be able to call them Half-Life or Tomb-Raider. Perhaps you could call them No-Life and Sarcophagus-Snatcher heh heh! :) But that would be a pretty massive undertaking.

Personally I think the best bet would be to simply try running your old windows games with Wine. You may have varying degrees of success with this. Some windows games/programs will work fine in wine, others will need a bit of messing with, or will be unstable. And then there are those that just flat out won't work at all. So it's a bit of a lottery there!

I think the winehq website lists a lot of windows games and programs that work with wine as well as how well they run and any configuration changes that need to be made to get them to run.

Another option might be to install the games on a virtual windows machine using something like VMWare (so you're running a virtualised windows pc from within Linux). But unless you've got a pretty powerful PC, I can't imagine many games running particularly well with this option.

Dual booting your pc would also be an option (Windows and linux installed in different partitions on the same machine), that way you just install your games in your windows partition and boot into windows whenever you want to play them.

But as I said, personally I'd go with using wine. I'm pretty certain that Half-life is one of the many windows games that will run under wine. I'm not sure about Tomb Raider though!

Cheers for now,
Jas.

[khakilang]

If you can port Window game to Linux than perhaps you can do Warcraft too.