Ex-Linux-Fanboy's Journal: You know, those old Loki games no longer work

Once upon a time, there was a company called Loki that ported commercial games to Linux. This company did not last very long: Their combined sales of all of their games (they released about two dozen games) was the same as a single moderately successful Windows game.

The games, horror beyond horrors, did not include source code. They were in a binary format that Loki went to great effort to make as compatible with as many Linux versions as possible. The binaries were statically linked and the installer didn't use any distribution-specific packages.

Despite this, I can't play these old Loki games on my Linux distribution. I'm using a 64-bit version of Ubuntu which has no 32-bit binary support. Even when I was using 32-bit Ubuntu, the sound was so bad in the Loki games I could not enjoy the games.

So, how to I play these old games? I play the Windows versions, which work with absolutely no problem in Windows XP, and should work just fine when and if I upgrade to Windows Vista. Everything works: Sound, networking, everything.

Why is it that Linux does not let me play these old games, but Windows does?

- Sam