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Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Support Coming to OpenRA. More Thoughts on Retro Gaming, Corporate Disruption Tactics.

Support for most of the old Westwood Studios games is in OpenRA, a Free and Open Source project to recreate these old video game engines.

(If you want the latest version, it’s available in AppImage or Flatpak.)

If you don’t already have the ISO or disc of an original game, the OpenRA program can pull most of the assets (other than music and cutscenes) from previously released freeware versions of the games.

Most of what you need can be acquired with a disc of Command & Conquer: The First Decade and one of Dune 2000.

Like the others, Tiberian Sun was also released as freeware by EA, which acquired Westwood (unfortunately) and continued the Dune and C&C series (with far less effort).

I don’t know whether the freeware version of Tiberian Sun has the cut-scenes or not. They got some bigger name actors, such as James Earl Jones and Michael Biehn, to play various roles. They had a behind-the-scenes with both of them on the set on the original Tiberian Sun game disc, which I got for Christmas one year in the 90s.

I got a lot of good stuff for Christmas in the 90s, like Star Trek: Starfleet Command, Fallout, the Westwood Studios series…

And the amazing thing about the games was that you have to remember, it was the 90s, computers were slow. Media codecs that could do anything were not abundant.

So a lot of these games ended up being good despite the platform limitations, because they would make their own media codecs and ship them on-disk for music and cut-scenes, and they would get around the CPU and memory limitations by using isomorphic game engines because true 3d on a game that size would really limit the number of copies they could sell, and code optimization was absolutely vital or it still wasn’t going to work at all.

There were still a lot of real programmers in the 90s that became obsessive about writing good code because the computers back then were unforgiving of bloatware. There simply wasn’t a place to put bad code because it wouldn’t fit.

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, a Nintendo 64 port to the PC, was a fairly advanced game for the time. To make the N64 version of it actually work, they even ended up re-writing the sound drivers because the ones that Nintendo shipped in their SDK were taking up too much space and couldn’t handle high quality sound. Then they had other game developers coming to them licensing it, so they had to name it something as a product. “MoSys”

It was just a wild time to be a PC or a Nintendo 64 gamer, especially with the more advanced stuff, which ended up needing a 3dfx graphics card, or the Memory Expansion Pak for the N64.

When I went back to run Rogue Squadron on my laptop, under Linux, I found that RetroArch could run it, but the N64 core that ran everything else fine immediately brought RetroArch to the ground, and I had to bring in a different core and assign it to running Rogue Squadron (and Perfect Dark, Star Wars Episode One: Racer, and Star Wars: Battle for Naboo, I later found.).

Why use the N64 version? Well, because the PC version needed Windows and 3dfx. I don’t know how to set up something like this in Wine. The 3dfx cards didn’t use a standard graphics library (so basically Vulkan before it was cool). They saw how bloated OpenGL was and how expensive it would be to do it in hardware, and they also saw how laughable Direct3D was, and decided to make a “GL-like” that simply tossed everything that wasn’t useful for gaming. And you know what? It worked!

I think one of the things that made games fun was programmers being limited by the hardware and having to go back to see how they could fit it in anyway. Once you weed out the crap programmers that way, games just have a lot less bugs, don’t they?

These newer titles from Bethesda, especially under Microsoft, are just terrible.

Because they sprawl and can’t actually be debugged if you want a product out in time.

Then the “community” becomes GULAG labor because they see that the game is too broken to actually play, and the “done thing” ends up being to go in, as a player, and become an expert in patching it as far as it will go, then applying “mods” that some other people wrote (without being paid by the company selling the title) that fix ~50,000 other bugs that nobody was going to pay to have resolved before the thing went out.

It becomes no fun when you see a game like The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and you end up spending more time hacking the game than you do playing the game, and their later titles suffer from this even more. Especially after Microsoft bought them, and instead of fixing bugs, they added more in the process of harassing Linux users with Wine or Proton.

Thanks to the hard work of people who go back and redo video game engines (or even write new ones), we will always have “something” to do, regardless of how terrible “Microsoft Bethesda”, or “EA Westwood”, or “Microsoft Activision” actually get.

I think this whole “post-corporate thing” is what big game companies are afraid of. That people will find out, or even re-discover, that the old stuff is better than the new stuff.

Companies like Nintendo and Rockstar are very litigious, and Microsoft sabotages too.

In the case of Nintendo and Rockstar, they have lawyers sending out DMCA letters to tear emulation projects and fan games apart, and with Microsoft they do nasty things like that Fallout: New Vegas mod where they kept hiring people working on it, then once it started listing, I think they probably had someone to go in and sneak that batch of freaky perverted sex stuff into the game so nobody would dare open it up and touch it again.

Nobody will ever prove the pervert was from Microsoft, or paid by them, but hiring people to kill the project wasn’t working because someone would just come along and replace them. This is how communities work. So a rather “fortunate” spider came along.

Microsoft disrupts communities. They recently sent a “strike team” full of Internet trolls to try to disrupt Techrights with sockpuppets spewing crap in the IRC channel, and illegal DDoS attacks on the servers. We eventually had to introduce a plug-in for the IRC server to disable access from Tor Exit Nodes to stop the abuse.

I’ve never seen Nintendo or Sony due anything this reprehensible, but lawyer attacks using the DMCA are bad enough.

Their new products are so bad (due to the lack of optimization and bug fixing) that they actually devote more time to disrupting the community with lawyers, criminals, and smut.

In the particular case of OpenRA, I doubt EA can or would do something like this.

The game content is not open source, but they previously released it as redistributable freeware, and the game engines don’t use any EA code. Besides, if they didn’t want it out there, why make it “freeware”? Towing the Windows binaries over into Wine works.

What game engine re-creations do offer is the ability to bypass Wine and some crusty old Windows binaries and fix bugs and use modern APIs.

Once code is portable and doesn’t float around in a proprietary Windows binary anymore, anyone interested can simply recompile it to work on non-x86 systems, like Linux on ARM, and then you’ll be playing 90s PC games on your Raspberry Pi or something in new engines without digging into whether you can tie in bochs or something to run old x86 binaries for Windows 98.

And unlike Microsoft Windows, Linux has a future on ARM because Windows spent decades digging its own grave even deeper with tons of proprietary x86 crap.

Nobody who is dead, out-of-business, or no longer interested in proprietary software can fix it.

So Windows on ARM has this insurmountable chicken-and-the-egg issue, and Intel has already threatened that it won’t go down quietly. They threatened to sue Microsoft if there’s an x86 translator that has anything patented in it.

Going forward, more games that are just Free and Open Source Software to begin with is one solution. The corporate types can only send lawyers out to attack people if it was “theirs” to begin with.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for Tiberian Sun though. That was definitely the most ambitious title before the Westwood buyout.

These corporate mergers of smaller game studios has never added anything of value for video game players. It’s only led to stagnation. Now Microsoft, which has made a series of disastrous and fruitless expensive mergers (like Nokia and Skype) and has laid off tens of thousands of people, brings you “Microsoft Activision” (and more layoffs).

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● 09.01.23

●● Corporate Disruption Tactics and More