Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 51: It’s Not Easy Being Green
Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 51: It’s Not Easy Being Green
Publish Date: 2026-03-03 04:58:00
Source Domain: www.gamingonlinux.com
Return to Part 1: Dumpster Diving
Continued from Part 50: Dawn of Civilization
When I first started using Linux full time in 2007, I was still not well versed on how video cards worked. Growing up my brothers and I could not figure out why Quake III Arena would never launch on our Fujitsu LifeBook E362 laptop for instance, unaware of the need to have a compliant 3D accelerator. My initial switch to Linux was cushioned by the fact that we had older ATI cards such as the Radeon 9200, the last generation to have DRI support under Mesa for several years.
This meant that 3D support just worked out of the box for me under Fedora Core, but my white whale would be Doom 3, which refused to run under Mesa at the time. This forced me to actually learn about graphics drivers, and discover that the proprietary ATI fglrx driver needed to run the game had dropped support for my R200 card back in 2006; ATI would go ahead and burn me yet again in 2012 by dropping support for the Radeon HD R600 cards I had upgraded to after that.
What kept me loyal to the brand was the pivot by AMD after they acquired ATI to once again support the development of the free graphics stack, something which proved to be a painful and slow transition at times, but nevertheless paved the way for the now favoured status that Radeon cards enjoy under Linux today. When I first started out though, the received wisdom was that if you were serious about gaming on Linux, you needed to get yourself a Nvidia card and use their proprietary drivers.
I never did, and I still opted against it when building Dianoga, being more curious instead to see the early days of Mesa. Hiding in my father’s old home office though was a stack of AGP graphics cards, among them a RIVA TNT2 M64 and a GeForce2 MX 400. It is fair to say I had pushed my ATI Rage 128 Pro about as far as it could go by the time they were found, and the fact that the GeForce 2 MX 400 is comparable in performance to the original GeForce 256 from 1999…
