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There are a lot of Linux and (specifically Ubuntu) questions mostly asked about games that were never meant to be supported on Linux. Most of these are done using Wine. Naturally a lot of issues arise when someone attempts to play games using that setup. Are these questions worth keeping since they're rarely game related (i.e. a badly configured xconf messing up resolution) and a lot of them are very specific (too localized?).

Also, the accept answer rate of those questions seems to be lower than for other questions.

And just to be clear, I have no issues at all for supporting games that have an official linux release. Just an issue with people having problems running Windows games on an unsupported system using Wine (example).

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I think this should be fine. There are plenty of games that are out of their prime, and are being played on unsupported OSes. For instance, many games were designed with DOS, Win9x, or some archaic console platform in mind. People ask "how can I run this game under Windows 7?" and I'd argue that these questions are in the same category.

We've advised on the use of emulators, compatibility settings, DOSBox configs, patches, etc, that allow games to be played on systems other than what they were designed for, so why not this?

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  • I would argue that "how can I run this game under whatever OS" etc is fine as the answer would be (dos box, wine, etc.) Its when they invariably run into issues like, why is my graphics glitchy, etc, where it becomes more inane as those games weren't designed for it in the first place.
    – l I
    Commented May 5, 2012 at 18:06
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    @yx. sometimes we can assist (ie, suggest a different config or version of whatever program that doesn't have the same issues) and sometimes there's going to be no solution. That sometimes we can't help, or that sometimes the answer is "this is a known issue" doesn't mean we should close questions, though.
    – agent86 Mod
    Commented May 5, 2012 at 18:18
  • Agreed, this isn't something we can decide categorically; if a particular question is unanswerable or otherwise too localized then we can close it as such. I think sometimes you'd be surprised though @yx., there are plenty of us who have solved these sorts of weird compatibility issues for ourselves and can help others do the same.
    – Matthew Read
    Commented May 6, 2012 at 1:09

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