Any fellow Linux users on here?

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I hate to sound like a traitor, but WSL(2) is such a good antidote to distro-hopping.

Sort of defunct really, especially for gamers. It presents the wrong experience to people new to linux, one of it's greatest properties is that it's just so much faster than windows, but you're not going to experience that inside a virtual box with the Windows Desktop still running in the background.

And if you're already a linux user then you're not going to waste your time mucking around with windows.

Running games in Wine is a better experience than in windows, under spec hardware is often no longer under spec. My older machine only has a GTX 1660 graphics card but it still plays No Man's Sky with all the graphics settings set to high.

 

[Crabcore]

Running games in Wine is a better experience than in windows, under spec hardware is often no longer under spec. My older machine only has a GTX 1660 graphics card but it still plays No Man's Sky with all the graphics settings set to high

That's a good point; I totally forgot about gaming. I'm just really surprised at what can be done at the application level, but I really do need to see how good Wine and / or Proton is lately. I had some mixed feelings about Lubuntu, but if you know of anything that's really stable for old setups I'd love to give that a spin as well!

 

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....if you know of anything that's really stable for old setups I'd love to give that a spin as well!

I just use wine itself and winetricks without the third party front ends to set my games up.

The trick is to create a fake windows drive (Wine Prefix) that mimics the era of the games you want to play. There's no limit to the number of these you can have, I have different prefixes for different eras and I still occasionally play games from back in the 90s.

The confusing part for a lot of people when setting these up is the different versions of DirectX, Dot Net etc that you need to load, a lot of people think they can just try different versions without realising that a newer version doesn't overwrite the older one. You can have several different instances of DirectX installed simultaneously which won't run anything.

For most cases from around the year 2000 up to the late 2010s DirectX 9.36 seems to be the best version, it supports more games than any others. And Dot Net 4.0 or 4.2. And you'll need the VB 6.0 runtime files.

When you get that all set up the way you like it you then have to be careful when installing games - don't let them install their own versions of DirectX or other runtimes if they're going to attempt to replace what you installed manually beforehand.

This is what I'm playing at the moment:

 

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....if you know of anything that's really stable for old setups I'd love to give that a spin as well!

Just thought I should add - some very old games actually require an old graphics card if you want them to display properly. For these I use an emulator - Emulator of retro x86-based machines

I've tried just about all of them and this one is by far the best. Create a virtual machine then grab your virtual DOS floppies and start installing. I use mine to run Win98 for a couple of older games.

 

[Judge]

Sort of defunct really, especially for gamers. It presents the wrong experience to people new to linux, one of it's greatest properties is that it's just so much faster than windows, but you're not going to experience that inside a virtual box with the Windows Desktop still running in the background.

And if you're already a linux user then you're not going to waste your time mucking around with windows.

Running games in Wine is a better experience than in windows, under spec hardware is often no longer under spec. My older machine only has a GTX 1660 graphics card but it still plays No Man's Sky with all the graphics settings set to high.

Interesting idea running Windows 98 virtually (and presumably sandboxed) through Linux. An alternative I've never contemplated. One critical question though. Some of the games you list are of that period, indicative of my legacy computer running Windows XP offline.

Is it even possible to run a 16-bit program through a 32-bit OS that runs virtually on a 64-bit Linux platform? Or do you run it all on a 32-bit platform ?

My older computer that still runs Linux Mint uses my old Nvidia GTX 1660. But it's still on an Asus 64-bit motherboard. I'm just assuming that it would still be limited to 32-bit apps only, even when running in Windows 98SE. Or am I missing something ?

The biggest disappointment of Windows 7 for me was not being able to run ANY of my cherished 16-bit Windows programs. Luckily they still run on my legacy computer, but it runs terribly slow with 1.5 GB of RAM on a 25-year old hardware platform.

 

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Is it even possible to run a 16-bit program through a 32-bit OS that runs virtually on a 64-bit Linux platform?

Yes. That's exactly what I'm doing.

The fact that my main operating system is 64 bit is meaningless. The emulator I'm running will allow you to make many different configurations of machines and you can install suitable old fashioned operating systems on them. But the sole reason I use that emulator is because some early games specifically require an older video card like the S3 Virge.

I also have a Wine Prefix dedicated to 32 bit Windows from the late 90s and early 2000s. That's how my PGA Tour is set up. Monopoly as well, I think that's from 2001. When making a wine prefix specifically 32 bit it also supports 16 bit and even some old 8 bit programs.

Even though my OS is 64 bit I have installed both 64 bit and 32 bit versions of Wine.

 

[Judge]

The fact that my main operating system is 64 bit is meaningless. The emulator I'm running will allow you to make many different configurations of machines and you can install suitable old fashioned operating systems on them. But the sole reason I use that emulator is because some early games specifically require an older video card like the S3 Virge.

I see. So compatibility of older software is dependent on a virtual software platform, independent of 64-bit motherboard and Linux OS. Very interesting....

 

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I see. So compatibility of older software is dependent on a virtual software platform, independent of 64-bit motherboard and Linux OS. Very interesting....

Food for thought - even back in the days of DOS and the 386 computer your BIOS was a 128 bit system.

 

[Judge]

Food for thought - even back in the days of DOS and the 386 computer your BIOS was a 128 bit system.

I just recall that when I installed a 64-bit version of Windows 7 onto my then new 64-bit motherboard, that I could no longer run any 16-bit apps back then. Though most of them are so old that they default only to 4:3 aspect ratios, back when widescreen monitors didn't exist.

Sadly at the time while I had both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows 7, I never thought the 32-bit version would run on my 64-bit system. If I could have done that, I presume I could have maintained running all those older 16-bit apps through Windows 7. Sadly I tossed out my Windows 7 disks long ago, assuming they were worthless. My bad.

Oh well, these days I'm content enough to stick with Linux.

 

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Sadly I tossed out my Windows 7 disks long ago, assuming they were worthless. My bad.

Laws are different here, and therefore also public attitudes.

In Australia when I buy a disk it is not the physical media that I'm buying, what I'm paying for is access rights to the data contained on that medium. If I've paid for it once I have legal access to that data set for the rest of my life and never have to pay for it again. In fact in Australia it's recommended standard practice to make backup copies of any media we buy to prevent accidental data loss.

So I have no compunction at all about downloading copies of things I've previously paid for. Technically if I can't produce my old receipts then I'm breaking the law but to be honest no one really cares about that here.