On Nov 13, 2025, at 10:32 AM, Geoff Shang <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, 11 Nov 2025, K0LNY ?? wrote:
> I was thinking of trying wine in my shiny new Debian Trixie, so I might
> discover if some Windows games for the Blind will work.
I've not used the GUI much in Debian, but I did once get Top Speed 3 and Super
Egg Hunt working well enough to be playable (this was over 10 years ago now).
Self-voicing games are going to be simpler. I understand it's possible to
install SAPI5 support and a SAPI5 TTS (like Espeak), but I've not actually
tried it.
I'd like to see if I can get Crazy Party working under Wine. This will
definitely require a TTS. I do have the Crazy Party server running on a Linux
VM under Wine, that was relatively simple to get going. Let me know if there's
anyone interested in how I did it.
> I thought that before I went through the trouble of possibly finding out that
> they don't work, I'd ask here to see if there some Blind friendly games for
> Debian?
For audiogames specifically, you may well be able to play some natively but I
don't expect to see any in the main Debian repo.
Doing a search on audiogames.net turned up 15 results for Linux. The only one
I recognised was the Linux RSGames client, which I remember playing with once
but not sure if I ever got it to work. Still, it might be a good place to
start.
I've played Quentin C's Playroom on a number of platforms that are not Windows
via their web interface. It's been a few years now but I remembered it being
pretty good and feeling pretty responsive. I successfully played itin Firefox,
even on Windows, so I would expect it to work in a GUI browser on Linux without
much trouble, though as I say it's been a few years since I used it.
If you're more into text, then there are some options that are in Debian and
more you can get elsewhere.
If you like interactive fiction (think the old Infocom games from the 80s),
Debian has several z-code interpreters, both for the console and for the GUI
(personally I've used frotz and jzip). If you have any of the Infocom games,
these will run fine under these. There used to be several z-code games in
Debian, such as Jigsaw which I never got around to finishing, but they don't
appear to be in the Debian repo anymore.
Debian also ships Inform, which is a language compiler which allows you to
create your own z-code games. Debian only ships Inform 6 which is more of a
programming language, Inform 7 is more like written English but it's not in the
Debian repos.
There are other interactive fiction formats, such as glulxe and tads. I've not
looked at these but they seem just as valid as z-code (glulxe seems to be a
successor to z-machine). However, there only seems to be a single interpreter
for each in the Debian repos, with the tads one (gargoyle-free) being an
x-based app whereas glulxe runs in the console.
Gargoyle seems to run a whole lot of exotic interactive fiction game formats,
so if it's usable, it may be worth looking at as it will allow you to play a
wider variety of games.
There are lots of interactive fiction titles of varying quality available for
free. Good places to look are ifdb.org and ifarchive.org.
There are at least three implementations of the classic Colossal Caves
(adventure) game from the 1970s in Debian. There is a version in the bsdgames
package, there is a c-based implementation from 1995 in the open-adventure
package, and there is a Python clone of the original Colossal Caves in the
colossal-cave-adventure package.
In addition to adventure, the bsdgames package also contains a bunch of mostly
text-based games which have literally been around for decades, including
monopoly and trek.
There are many other games in Debian, there is a whole section of the Debian
package repository dedicated to them. I've not checked out most of them and
I've no idea how acccessible any of them are. But therer's a lot to look at if
you're interested, and it will cost you nothing but time and energy to check
them out.
Let us know if you find anything good.
Cheers,
Geoff.
