– By Grant Gross –

The news of Loki Entertainment Software‘s demise came late Wednesday in the form of a leaked memo to resellers. In the memo, company president Scott Draeker explained that the company was shutting down operations January 31, and stopping end-user support for its games immediately, after three years of being the most high-profile Linux gaming company.

The announcement didn’t come as a complete surprise to the Linux gaming community — Loki had filed for bankruptcy in August 2001, but Draeker said then he was optimistic the company was in business “for the long haul.”

Loki continued to release new Linux ports of popular Windows games, even after the bankruptcy filing, shipping Kohan and Postal Plus between late August and mid-October. Loki also ported games such as Tribes 2, Alpha Centauri, Quake III Arena, and SimCity 3000 during its lifetime, but the main criticism of the company was that the Linux ports often appeared many months after the Windows versions.

Draeker responded to questions from NewsForge Thursday in what he says will be the only interview about Loki’s closing. We asked him about what went wrong at Loki, his future, and Loki’s competition from efforts such as TransGaming Technology‘s three-month-old effort to use WineX to allow Windows games to run on Linux.

NewsForge: When did you decide it wasn’t working? You seemed hopeful after the
bankruptcy filing that things would work out.

Draeker: Based on monthly sales figures when we filed, we had every reason to
believe the reorganization would be successful. What happened is those
sales fell off dramatically over the holidays. With lower-than-expected
revenues we were digging a hole each month.

NewsForge: What do you think went wrong?

Draeker: If we had come into 2001 in better shape, we could have ridden out the slow months and done well going forward.

NewsForge: What happens to the games? Does another company get the rights to distribute your games? Some of NewsForge’s people want to know if you’ll be selling them off for cheap? 🙂

Draeker: We’ve been working with our resellers to make sure they have adequate supplies of products and anticipate they will continue selling Loki
products. I don’t think there will be any huge discounts right
away — maybe in six months they’ll discount whatever is left.

NewsForge: What’s next for you personally?

Draeker: My immediate plans are to take a break and recharge my batteries. After that I’ll start looking at different opportunities.

NewsForge: What happens to Loki’s employees? (There were about 10 before the latest news, Draeker says.) Have they all been laid off?

Draeker: We laid off our development and support staff last Friday. I understand at least one already has an employment offer elsewhere.

NewsForge: How are you feeling about this big change in your life?

Draeker: Relieved! We did everything humanly possible to make this work. It was hard to make the decision to shut down. It was hard to lay people off.
But it was the right thing to do. And I’m relieved that it’s over and
that all of us can start focusing on The Next Big Thing.

Loki has been a great experience and the Linux community is great.
Starting Loki will always be one of the proudest moments of my life.

NewsForge: What happens to your public CVS repository and the projects it hosts?

Draeker: We’d like to find someone to continue hosting it.

NewsForge: How do you feel about the future of Linux gaming? Do you think there’s enough of a market for a company to port Windows games to Linux?

Draeker: It’s problematic. After three years I know it can be done. The market is there. But it’s also very challenging. We did it out of conviction, which
is why we lasted as long as we did.

NewsForge: How about original games native to Linux?

Draeker: If I were going to start a new Linux game company tomorrow that’s what I would do.

The idea with Loki was never to create a thriving Linux porting business.
We wanted to create a Linux gaming industry. If you want a perfect
example of the difference, just look at Mac gaming. There are many games
available for the Mac put out by several great Mac porting companies. But
no one develops new games for the Mac. As a result Mac gaming is always a
second cousin to Windows gaming. Games come out after the Windows
versions do. They look and feel like Windows games, not Mac games. And
there’s nothing you can play on a Mac that you can’t also play on Windows.

We saw porting as a transitional stage. By porting games we were able to
develop the software infrastructure needed for gaming on Linux. We were
also able to prove that a market for Linux games exists. The next step
would have been to use what we had created to start making original games
for Linux. That has always been our ultimate goal — we wanted Linux to
have its own unique, compelling games. Think how many people would be
running Linux on their desktop if Diablo had come out for Linux six months
before Windows!

NewsForge: Or how about the TransGaming model of using WineX?

Draeker: The arrival of TransGaming to me is the clearest indication that Loki
failed to jump-start a Linux gaming industry as we’d hoped, because
TransGaming has nothing to do with Linux games. Their message to game
developers is: “Use DirectX and develop for Windows. We’ll help you sell
your Windows products to Linux users.”

TransGaming’s strategy is the same one Corel used in its Linux
applications business. In the end I don’t think they’ll be any more
successful than Corel was.

NewsForge: What advice would you give to anyone who wants to start a Linux gaming company?

Draeker: Cut your teeth in the established gaming industry first. If you can
successfully complete a title there then you have a shot at doing it for
Linux.

NewsForge: What happens to the Nokia Media Terminal project (in which Loki games were to be distributed for the Nokia hardware)? Does that move forward without Loki?

Draeker: I don’t think this affects the Media Terminal at all. If it did then
Nokia would have bailed us out.

Anonymous Reader writes, “Here’s an article by Stephen H. Wildstrom, on BusinessWeek, saying that there are alternatives to MS-Office, but ‘they’re not worth the trouble’. (Just as a side note, he is the same person who wrote, a few days before the UPnP bug on WinXP, that ‘the real strength of XP is that it brings the stability and security of Windows 2000 to home users’. :)” Here’s what he says: “My principal criterion for an acceptable Office substitute is that it be able to open, create, and save files in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats with as little fuss as possible. The price for StarOffice’s power is complexity at least as great as that of Office, made worse by the unfamiliarity of the program’s design. In the end, if you must work with Office files regularly, there really is no substitute for Office itself; the savings just aren’t worth the hassle.”

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_04 /b3767021.htm

Anonymous Reader writes, “It looks like the music industry is coming to some kind of agreement with Napster. Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel agreed to a one-month delay last night to allow a settlement to be hammered out.” The story’s at MP3newswire.net.

Anonymous Reader writes, “ From Slashdot: ‘Caldera International has done a very good thing. They have released the “Ancient” Unices they inherited when they purchased SCO under a “BSD-style” license. The license is available here, instructions on finding the source are here. Caldera (and before that SCO) had required people to obtain a free (as in beer) but somewhat restrictive license in order to get these old sources. The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it’s still very cool.'”

– By Jeff Field –

A while back, I reviewed the Soyo Dragon, an AMD Athlon motherboard based on the popular KT266 DDR Athlon chipset. Soyo has followed up with a new board, the Dragon Plus, and I will highlight the changes, performance and added features of this new board.
It’s all been done before
The first thing you might notice from my original review and comparing photos of the Dragon and the Dragon Plus is that the boards look similar. They use the same color PCB and PCI slots, and the connectors are in the same place.

Yet, under the Dragon Plus’ chipset fan you will find the most crucial difference. There you will discover that, rather than the KT266 Northbridge chipset of the Dragon, the Dragon Plus sports the KT266A instead. What difference does a single letter make, you ask? All the difference. With this change in chipset, the Dragon Plus gets a big gain in performance, putting it in league with RDRAM-based Pentium IV motherboards. The chipset increases the memory bandwidth available to the CPU, helping performance in memory intensive applications, such as games.

The other addition Soyo is pushing on this board is a smartcard reader, which doubles as a front USB port. This device reads smartcards, such as “smart” credit cards, not to be confused with Smart Media cards used for devices such as MP3 players and digital cameras. Unfortunately, I do not have any smartcards, nor do I know anyone who uses them, so I was unable to test this addition. Still, the unit also includes front USB ports, which I have found invaluable because I regularly detach and reattach my digital camera, and I no longer have to reach around the back of my PC to do it.

Benchmarks
For my benchmarks, I have included the results of a Pentium IV 1.9GHz with RDRAM compared to an Athlon 1800+ with DDR on the Dragon Plus. While the Pentium 4 has a pure clock speed advantage, it will become obvious where the best performance is.

Performance
System Specifications
Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz)
Soyo Dragon Plus! Motherboard
256 Megabytes CAS2.5 Crucial PC2100 DDR SDRAM

Western Digital 7200 RPM 10.2 Gig Hard Drive
3Com 3C905TX-C 10/100 NIC (PCI)
400 Watt ATX 2.03 Power Supply
Gigabyte GF3000 GeForce 3 64MB AGP
Slackware 8.0 with Kernel 2.4.14 and XFree 4.1.0
Pentium IV Configuration:
Pentium IV 1.9GHz (Socket 478)
TH7II-RAID Motherboard
256 Megabytes Kingston RDRAM

Kernel compiles
In order to test both the board’s stability and speed, I ran three sets of Linux kernel compiles on this board. One is a normal, “uniprocessor” make, or make -j1, which is the default. This uses one process, and does not always maximize system usage. I then did make -j2, which spawns a second process. The last test I run is with make -j3, spawning two extra processes. I do this for several reasons — to find the “sweet spot” for the board/CPU, as well as to stress the system as much as possible when trying to rate its stability. Also, the kernel is extremely useful as a measure of integer performance. In order to compile the kernel, I untarred kernel 2.4.6, ran “make config” and used the default values.

Kernel 2.4.6 Compile Times (Minutes:Seconds) Lower numbers are better
Board	-j1	-j2	-j3
Soyo Dragon Plus	2:57	2:49	2:46
Abit TH7II-RAID	3:33	3:20	3:23

As a platform, we see that for tasks such as compiling, the Soyo Dragon Plus and other KT266A DDR-based solutions like it have a clear lead over a Pentium IV even with DDR. These numbers may not seem like a lot — 20 seconds isn’t a long time, but that is a 22% increase in time taken to complete a compile. Spread this over a compile that may last hours, and the big picture becomes clear: For compiling, Pentium IVs clearly have a disadvantage.

Quake III Timedemos
Quake 3 Timedemos are perhaps the best way to measure 3D Gaming performance under Linux. Timedemos used the four.dm_66 demo included with the latest version of Quake 3 Arena. To run a timedemo, hit the “~” key, type timedemo 1, followed by demo four.dm_66. Once this completes, hit “~” again to see your results. High-quality results were done by turning texture and color depth to 32-bit, filtering to trilinear and texture detail to its highest setting. The tests are run at screen resolutions of 640 by 480, 800 by 600, 1024 by 768, 1280 by 1024 and 1600 by 1200.

Quake 3 Arena Timedemos (Frames Per Second) Higher numbers are better
Board	640×480	800×600	1024×768	1200×1024	1600×1200
Default Quality
Soyo Dragon Plus	217.5	214.2	184.1	125.3	90.2
Abit TH7II-RAID	220.3	218.6	186.0	125.3	90.2
Highest Quality
Soyo Dragon Plus	216.6	197.2	146.2	97.2	71.2
Abit TH7II-RAID	219.5	199.7	145.4	97.3	71.2

Here we have less of an obvious answer; the scores are now nearly the same between the two platforms. Thanks to the GeForce3 at the higher resolutions and the CPUs and chipsets in the lower resolutions, it seems we have what could be called a tie, effectively — a couple frames per second difference is enough to be a fluke in most cases — results differ each time they are run, within a frame or two. What this means is that these two are effectively equal.

Conclusion
As a motherboard, the Dragon Plus is everything the Dragon was, plus a bit more, with the increased performance, the smartcard reader and the Front USB ports. It is, in my opinion, at the top of the KT266A-based boards, and Athlon boards in general, both in terms of performance and features. If the question is between a DDR Athlon platform and an RDRAM Pentium IV platform, the answer at the moment is certainly the Athlon. A recent bug has cropped up between Athlons and the Linux AGP driver, but workarounds are available. The Soyo Dragon Plus is an all-around great board, and is available from NewEgg for $146 plus shipping.

Slashdot has a link to an apparently legit letter sent out to retailers saying the Linux gaming company is closing up shop.

From EWeek:
“As the Linux community prepares to congregate next week in New York
for the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, the center of attention, as
always, will be Linux creator Linus Torvalds. A little more than a
year ago Torvalds released the 2.4 kernel and has spent much of the
year working on numerous 2.4.x versions to further stabilize and
strengthen Linux. After handing the 2.4 kernel over to Marcelo Tosatti
to maintain late last year, he turned his attention to the 2.5
development tree. Torvalds took time out to exchange e-mail with eWEEK
Senior Editor Peter Galli about his work on and vision for 2.5.”

David Weinehall: “Seems like objections never arise before I declare my intent to
make a final release. Then again, this caused some very important
fixes (and some less so) to make it into the upcoming 2.0.40.
Again, if you find any reason for not releasing 2.0.40 yet, or
something that you consider worth including in 2.0.40, please
speak up as soon as possible.”

Download: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.0/testing/patch-2.0.40-rc2.gz
2.0.40-rc2

o       Fix ICMP bug                            (David S. Miller)
o       Add autodetection for wd1002s-wx2       (Paul, who appears to
        in the xd-driver                         have no last name =])
o       Fix path MTU discovery for              (Kirk Petersen)
        transparent TCP sockets
o       Revert array-size change in             (me, on advise from
        include/linux/module.h                   Jari Ruusu)
o       Remove workaround for gcc-2.4.5         (Adrian Bunk)
        | This is basically a whitespace-
        | change, since it removes code
        | inside an #ifdef #endif clause

“So here goes pre7.”

pre7:

- Make ext2/minix/sysvfs actually operate
  synchronously on directories when using
  the sync mount option                         (Andrew Morton)
- AFFS update                                   (Roman Zippel)
- Fix 3dfx fb crash with high pixelclock        (Jurriaan on Alpha)
- PATH_MAX POSIX compliance                     (Rusty Russell)
- Really apply AMD Elan patch                   (me)
- Don't drop IP packets with less than 8 bytes 
  of payload                                    (David S. Miller)
- Netfilter update                              (Netfilter team)
- Backport 2.5 sb_bread() changes               (Alexander Viro)
- Fix AF_UNIX fd leak                           (David S. Miller)
- Add Audigy Gameport PCI ID                    (Daniel Bertrand)
- Sync with ia64 arch independant parts         (Keith Owens)
- APM fixes                                     (Stephen Rothwell)
- fs/super.c cleanups                           (Alexander Viro)

Lanie Silerio writes: “In response to the growing demand for Internet Exchange Messaging Server (IEMS) products from customers across Europe, IMA opened its sales office in Cambridge, UK to service the sales and support requirements of this important market.
IMA is regarded as one of the major players in the burgeoning corporate messaging market. After the success of its “killer application” the Internet Exchange Gateway for Lotus Notes and Cc:Mail for a decade, IMA is positioning its Internet Exchange Messaging Server as a fully-featured messaging solution interoperable in both Windows and Linux environments. The Internet Exchange Messaging Server 6, which includes Calendaring / Scheduling functions and migration tools from Windows-based MS Exchange, is due for release early February with much anticipation from the European market.
Paul Kaufman, 45, has been appointed to head up the new operation and has had many years experience in the messaging and communications field, working with such companies as 3COM and LANSource Technologies as well as a sales and marketing background in channel distribution. He is tasked with building the local supply chain through resellers and distribution and to set up full local support and product marketing activities.
Tim Kehres, IMA president said “We have seen a rising demand for our products throughout the European region and intend to consolidate our position by taking this important step. With Paul’s in-depth knowledge and background of this valuable market, we believe he is ideally placed to successfully build our European presence”
-END-
Sales and Marketing Contacts:
Paul Kaufman (paul@ima.com
UK Tel: 44 (0)1223 234414
US Toll Free No.: +1 (800) 549-2762
Fax: +1 (888) 562-3561Website: http://www.ima.com“