Railroad Tycoon II • Hacker News Board

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#11

Post by leg » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 1:08 PM UTC

red_trumpet wrote: post #5

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #4

> Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com. Sadly, for Windows only :(

If you are running Linux, it seems to work well with Proton, though I didn't check it myself: https://www.protondb.com/app/7620

I've played 100s of hours of if under Proton on Linux. Works great.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#12

Post by linsomniac » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 1:42 PM UTC

ylee wrote: post #8

I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home. In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights ; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients…

That reminds me of 1999, where I threw a party to help my friends modify their Celeron 300A CPUs so they could run dual-socket. My dual 300A running at 450MHz would run Starcraft under WINE faster than Windows could run it because at the time Windows couldn't do multi-core. Under Linux one processor would run the graphics (in X) and the other would run the game mechanics, and it would blaze.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#13

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

ylee wrote: post #8

I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home. In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights ; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients…

I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it.

However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see which company has bigger budget to spend on lawyers, whatever.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#14

Post by Asooka » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #4

> Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com. Sadly, for Windows only :(

The Linux version would almost certainly not run on any current Linux. I have a vague memory of trying to run the demo nearly 20 years ago and it failing due to requiring some now-deprecated X11 extension. If you want to try, the Internet Archive does have a Loki software demo CD, which includes Railroad Tycoon 2: https://archive.org/details/linux-games-cd

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#15

Post by jcranmer » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 1:52 PM UTC

red_trumpet wrote: post #5

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #4

> Where to Get It: Railroad Tycoon Platinum is available as a digital purchase on Steam and GOG.com. Sadly, for Windows only :(

If you are running Linux, it seems to work well with Proton, though I didn't check it myself: https://www.protondb.com/app/7620

I've recently been running it via Proton on Linux, and it runs quite smoothly.

(Haven't tried any multiplayer on it though; the game is old enough that networking doesn't automatically mean "use TCP/UDP/IP," so I can see that stumbling bad on modern OSes.)

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#16

Post by esafak » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

Is there a board game equivalent? I'd like to play with my kid, without us staring at a screen.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#17

Post by giarc » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #16

Is there a board game equivalent? I'd like to play with my kid, without us staring at a screen.

Ticket to Ride. Has a kids version that I play with my kids from time to time. There's also a very popular adult version plus lots of add-ons I believe.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#18

Post by yxhuvud » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

So many words and not even mentioning RRT3. The successor was a departure in some ways, but so great and dynamic in other ways.

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#19

Post by yread » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #16

Is there a board game equivalent? I'd like to play with my kid, without us staring at a screen.

There is also 1830 and few others

https://www.dicebreaker.com/themes/train-game/best-games/bes...

Re: Railroad Tycoon II

#20

Post by baq » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #13

ylee wrote: post #8

I played the Linux version the article mentions while at Goldman Sachs; a colleague on the Red Hat coverage team gave me a boxed copy of Corel Linux including the game. The port ran very well on my Red Hat Linux box at home. In retrospect it was part of a brief flurry of Linux ports of major games. I also got to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Neverwinter Nights ; in both cases the publishers made Linux clients…

I feel relying on WINE and Proton instead of building a proper GNU/Linux ecosystem will eventually backfire, it didn't happen already because thus far Microsoft chosen to ignore it. However as Steam vs XBox slowly escalates, Microsoft might eventually change their stance on the matter, forcing devs to rely on APIs not easier to copy, free licenses for handhelds, taking all Microsoft owned studios out of Steam, see wh…

WINE and Proton piggyback on Microsoft's guarantees of Win32 stability. As long as that remains in place (which should be for all intents and purposes forever given MS's customers) they can't really do anything about it.

So, next time you hear the joke about Win32 ABI being the only stable ABI on Linux, remember it's funny because it's true!