"Phase 2" running on Linux (using WINE)

After releasing “Phase 1” (which was actually quite some long time ago) several people were asking for Linux support, but actually I wasn’t keen of having to port the game over to Linux (and I haven’t changed on that since then), so there never was (and never will be) a port for Linux. And as it seems it was also not possible to get the game running using WINE due to the fact that it used GDI+ for doing several imaging related things.

But just recently I finally threw out all references to GDI+ and decided to set up Linux on an old PC that I use to test my games against older lower-end hardware specs. So after the torture of getting OpenGL hardware acceleration up and running I got everything in place and started “Phase 2” using WINE and guess what, it actually worked! Although the performance is not that great it’s still nice to see, especially since the hardware is very low end (AMD Athlon 2600+, 2GByte RAM and a GeForce 4 TI440 with 128 MByte VRAM) and doesn’t even support OpenGL pixel shaders (hence the dull look of the game) I was actually glad to have it running.

So at the end of the day this means that “Phase 2” should be able to work with Linux using WINE, and when you have the right hardware or if you’re willing to trade-in some visuals for performance it should be possible to play “Phase 2” with Linux. I hope some people out there refusing to work with windows are glad to hear this.