Older computing hardware is getting harder and harder to find. What would have been given away just five or ten years ago can now often only be found for inflated prices. So when I noticed an interesting looking beige box ready to be recycled at my local dump, I did not hesitate to rescue it in order to see what was inside.

Linux graphics support is still remarkably similar to how it was 20 years ago, even with all the progress that has been made in the years since. By the time of Red Hat Linux 9 the Direct Rendering Infrastructure or DRI was firmly in place in Mesa and offered 3D support for a wide number of cards.

My first choice was to run Red Hat Linux 9, for the arbitrary reason that it was the final release of the once dominant distribution and the second to feature the delightful Bluecurve desktop theme for both Gnome and KDE. I knew then that I was cutting things a bit close, but I still found myself disappointed with the outcome.

I had some grief installing Red Hat Linux 7.3 but with persistence I was able to get it installed. In terms of compatibility though Valhalla proved to be far superior, so I decided to stick with it and focus on improving other parts of the system instead.

Dave Taylor can be credited with kickstarting the commercial Linux gaming industry with his ports of the games Doom and Abuse. Before leaving id Software he also graced us with a Linux port of Quake, which was later taken by Macmillan Digital Publishing to form the basis of their retail Quake: The Offering package.

In the same vein as Quake: The Offering, the next game in the series got a similar treatment for Linux with Quake II: Colossus from Macmillan Digital Publishing, containing Quake II as well as its two mission packs The Reckoning and Ground Zero.

The bedrock of almost all the LAN parties played in my household, Quake III Arena also became a trusty reliable for when I felt the urge for a casual bot match. Whenever I felt the need for a fresh Linux installation, Quake III Arena always became the first game I would reinstall. This had as much to do with the game's technical achievements as my fondness for the gunplay.

After completing all of the boxed Quake games for Linux, I was left with indecision. So if I could not settle on a single game to play, why not try one hundred? Made for a time of slow internet speeds and limited storage, these kinds of retail collections allowed users to explore hundreds of freeware and shareware titles from the comfort of a single CD-ROM.

After the demise of Loki Software, one of their former employees found himself forced to work behind a cash register for a living. Desperate to get back to porting games, he found the email address of an artist working for the Croatian developer Croteam, creators of the game Serious Sam; the first of many games to come to the platform thanks to Ryan "icculus" Gordon.

At heart XEvil is a basic deathmatch, but it is the anarchic elements that keep it entertaining. There is no reason XEvil has to die a death, other than its modern obscurity. Another with the talent could revive XEvil and bring all of its features back home again.

Almost from the very start Raven Software and id Software had a symbiotic relationship. Given the Linux friendly atmosphere at id, it is no surprise that some of that would start to rub off on Raven, culminating in Loki Software negotiating to make a port of Heretic II.

In 1998 developer Raven Software acquired the rights to Soldier of Fortune to make a video game inspired by the mercenary magazine of the same name. The plan was the make a realistic tactical shooter, with consultant John Mullins brought in to add both his insights and likeness to the project. Where the controversy laid was in the game's violence.

It is rare for Linux to see support from both sides of an industry battle, but that is exactly where we were with the release of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. With both games aiming to package the full breadth of the online multiplayer shooter experience into a standalone title, the competition between the two was fierce.

One of the selling points of Unreal Tournament pitched to the modding scene by Epic Games was its ability to load assets from the original Unreal into the new engine. After a few years this snowballed into a concerted community effort to make the entire Unreal single player mode playable from within its own sequel.

John Carmack's generosity in releasing his older source code resulted in a proliferation of free first person shooters in the 2000s, but Dutch programmer Wouter van Oortmerssen rejected this path to forge Cube based in the same "just for fun" spirit with which Linus Torvalds first began work on the Linux kernel.

The most appealing aspect of my QDI Advance 5/133 motherboard is its inclusion of AGP, PCI, and ISA expansion slots. By having both dedicated MIDI and 3D acceleration hardware I can dip my toes into two different eras of gaming. As for the actual MIDI tracks produced, well, they have personality at least.

While first person shooters dominated the Linux gaming scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was still more than a place for the venerable strategy genre, with Ubi Soft entering the fray thanks to the work of Linux friendly Philos Laboratories.

Although being sold for Windows, I found a listing for a physical copy of the free game Circus Linux! as published by Alten8. At first I figured it would just be another keep case in my collection with "Linux" on the cover, but with the source code included, I decided it would be trivial to also build the game for Linux.

Given the the company's current focus, the name Hyperion Entertainment seems an odd fit for the modern maintainer of AmigaOS, betraying its earlier status as an Amiga focused video game porting house. One of their ports, that of SiN, to this day remains from them an elusive Linux exclusive.

Sold as interactive storybooks, these took the form of narrated picture books which went over the story from the film while allowing for a certain degree of user agency, typically by allowing a selection of quirky animations to play by clicking around with the mouse.

While their foray into interactive storybooks did fail to impress, it did remind me of BlackHoleSun Software, one of the earliest Indie developers to create games with Linux in mind. Their most famous game Bunnies was released as shareware in 2001, providing a demo version you could later update through use of a retail key. Thankfully, the story does not have to end there.

Some of my first real experiences of using Linux as a child came through the use of Knoppix, one of the first distributions to popularize the use of Live CDs. This allowed me to explore a wide swath of Linux applications. One of these was a role playing game which I recall I never got to work well, but lingered on in my imagination regardless.

If you look at the commercial Linux gaming catalogue at the turn of the millennium, in amongst all of the 3D shooters and strategic simulations being released, one glaring omission seems to have been the lack of any racing games. Loki Software never ported any to Linux, nor did any of the other porting houses. This left a void for the free gaming community to fill.

My mother's favourite game on Linux is without a doubt Frozen Bubble. It is a casual game in all of the best ways; one you can dive into and learn at your own pace thanks to its simple but repeatable formula. Consider this to be a snapshot in time back to 2002, from right before the game was to take the world by storm.

Back when I first played through Quake: The Offering I found that I enjoyed the two mission packs even more than I did the original Quake campaign, and while these were the only official addons sold for Quake, several third party expansions and total conversions exist that also had retail releases. Two of these, Shrak and Malice, were published in 1997 by Quantum Axcess.

It turns out it was Knoppix 3.4 released in May 2004 that obsessed me as a child, providing me with some of my earliest steps into a larger world. Not only that, but the CD-R it was burned on still reads even after all of these years. Considering the volatility of such media, this surprised me.

I have mentioned before how I was unable to get Dave Taylor's original port of Doom to work as it was built as an outdated a.out binary rather than ELF. Since then, I stumbled on an article by Jason Heiss that describes how to load the binfmt_aout kernel module to attain a.out binary support, as well as installing packages from earlier Red Hat Linux releases to provide the necessary libraries.

Marble Blast was first released in 2002, before being updated to Marble Blast Gold in 2003. The demo can be obnoxious, with it showing a begging screen imploring you to buy the full game after completing each and every level. Considering the state of the registered version as it exists now, this can feel more than a bit galling.

It was one of my regular readers, Grzegorz Budny, that let me know about the driving simulation Odyssey By Car first released by the German independent developer Oliver Hamann back in 2001. The stylized vector looking graphics lend a timeless quality, leaving it a shame that more players will not get to experience the odyssey.

War! Age of Imperialism was in the first instance a board game, designed by Glenn Drover of Eagle Games. Players assume the role of a colonial empire intent on subjugating the rest of the world. Coverage at the time directed much praise to the game's artificial intelligence, which does make for a canny computer opponent.

I was trawling through the old web one evening, looking for additional resources on early Linux gaming, when I came across a freeware game I had never heard of before. Little did I know that this was going to be the start of a long and daunting quest; it was really starting to look like Phobia III - Edge Of Humanity had become Linux gaming lost media.

Over the past few months I have been making a number of upgrades and changes to Dianoga, and the time has come to lay them all out. The first upgrade I purchased at the start of the year was a simple one, but I now had more than doubled the amount of hard drive space Linux had available, and could enjoy more games with my CRT monitor.

After I installed the Flash Player plugin my first thoughts were of Garfield.com, an award winning website which, while a bear to navigate back in the day, was home to a wide array of Flash based games and amusements based around the titular comic cat created by Jim Davis. Caches of the old Garfield.com content can still be found hosted on the Internet Archive.

Having already played the Abuse Linux shareware, the next step seemed to be getting my hands on the registered version. Abuse was later picked up to be published by Origin Systems and Electronic Arts in 1996. Clearly not everything was an improvement, but it was this release that would have its source code opened up in 1997, allowing for the creation of source ports.

Just like with the original Quake, it did not take long for established publishers to seek out new and aspiring game development talent to create third party expansion content for Quake II. The first out the gate was Juggernaut: The New Story For Quake II released by HeadGames Publishing in early 1998, soon to be followed by a number of other packs including Zaero developed by Team Evolve.

While still being the most elaborate, 100 Great Linux Games was far from the only shovelware set of games released for Linux, with several UNIX CD-ROM vendors also seeking a piece of the action for themselves. These were often more spartan sets of software packages made in line with their other offerings, including not just games but also the libraries and utilities associated with them, as well as emulators, screensavers, and software toys.

A common refrain has always been that if developers would just provide access to their source code, then the Linux community would be happy to step in and do the heavy lifting for them; and when Slingshot Game Technology decided to call our bluff and released Soul Ride under the GNU General Public License in 2003, the Linux community did indeed rise to the challenge.

When I first got the original Linux port of Doom working it was done to satisfy my curiosity. This being Doom though I soon found myself drawn in, but there were some oddities I encountered. This also made me inclined to try playing all of Heretic and HeXen, a feat I had never managed up to that point. Would I encounter any more issues with these early source ports?

I stated before that neither of the contemporary HeXen ports, Linux Hexen and its fork HHexen, supported MIDI music playback through the /dev/sequencer device, but hiding on the venerable SunSITE network I found the only online trace of another early HeXen source port released in December 1999 by Russian programmer Stanislav Nesterov.

An action platformer first released in 1999, you play as Urban Gutter, a man taken by an evil scientist to a secret military base and changed into a cyborg against his will. The acronym in the title then is a bit odd, but your one goal is to escape and enact as bloody a revenge on the world as possible. Any hope for true catharsis here often gets lost in frustration however.

The Allegro library is a cross-platform backend for low-level game routines, which for much of its history was very much associated with the MS-DOS freeware scene that was still going strong well into the early 2000s. Seeing this wealth of game content, the Fedora contributor Hans de Goede decided to see if he could port some of these over to Linux.

While the studio's destiny would later see it become consumed by Microsoft, in its earliest days Bungie instead stayed a Mac focused development house. They would later switch to cross-platform development, which soon caught the attention of a fledgling Loki Software. Bungie would again cater to an underrepresented video game market.

The Spanish game development scene does not get much attention paid to it, especially when compared to some of its other European counterparts, but sometimes you encounter polymaths like Ángel Ortega that deserve to be highlighted. There is a real auteur talent here that was impossible for me not to appreciate.

A lot of early UNIX and therefore Linux games struggled with the fact that the X toolkit was geared towards constructing staid graphical user interfaces, rather than for the speed and flexibility needed by games. Magic can come out of people working against imposed limitations however, and games like Xkobo succeed by this.