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Latest Comments by adamhm
Here's another way to look at the Linux market share on Steam
3 December 2017 at 2:06 am UTC Likes: 15

Quoting: neowiz73plus China has been so ingrained to use windows that pirated copies of windows 7 runs rampant from what I've read in the past. I honestly don't know how much of that has been true. but considering that many don't have windows 10 yet, since it is a free upgrade, then they most likely don't have the MS genuine approval for the free upgrade.

There's a quote from Bill Gates himself about that:

QuoteAbout 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998)

also

Quote"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not." -Bill Gates, Fortune Magazine, July 17 2007

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

GOG now have Epic Pinball and the platformer Jazz Jackrabbit with Linux support
2 December 2017 at 12:45 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlThough I agree with adamhm above as well, that when some game requires a lot of effort to run in Wine (too many tweaks), easy wrapper can be really welcome, especially by Linux newcomers.

Plus it would add to the number of games with official Linux support and in turn help grow the platform in general.

Quoting: ShmerlThe upside can be convenience, but downside of Wine wrappers is that it would take you effort to keep Wine updated in it, since otherwise it will be fixed to certain version which you picked to wrap with. The benefit of decoupling Wine from the game are improvements in the Wine itself which will appear over time. Of course regressions can appear too, so it's a trade-off.

On the other hand having wrappers use whatever version is installed on the user's system would be a nightmare to support, and a terrible thing from a user experience perspective. It wouldn't be a good experience to have games fail to run properly/at all right from the start due to having an older version of Wine or newer version with regressions, or to have games suddenly stop working due to a Wine update introducing regressions.

Using an older Wine version isn't that critical of an issue IMO as long as the game itself runs fine with it. Updating the Wine version periodically for any performance improvements they bring (and compatibility improvements for people wanting to use third party tools, mods, etc.) should be done but it doesn't need to be a frequent thing; perhaps just once a year or so to keep up with stable releases - that's what I'm planning to do with my wrappers.

GOG now have Epic Pinball and the platformer Jazz Jackrabbit with Linux support
1 December 2017 at 12:02 am UTC

Quoting: Guestother issue with some old gog or wine games : they temporarilt switch the screen resolution and mess up my desktop

DOSBox can be configured so that it does not do this. IIRC you need to open the dosbox .conf file for the game, find where it reads [sdl], then under there find and set the following two settings as so:

fullresolution=desktop
output=overlay

In Wine you can use a virtual desktop to prevent it from changing the system's desktop resolution - if the game sets a resolution lower than your system's desktop resolution then the virtual desktop will resize & it'll effectively run in a window instead. This can be annoying when games run at fixed resolutions or have a limited selection of display resolutions though; it would be really useful if Wine had an option to scale full-screen output to fit your desktop/virtual desktop resolution.

Depending on the game there may also be other options available to prevent unwanted display resolution changes (e.g. widescreen fixes).

GOG now have Epic Pinball and the platformer Jazz Jackrabbit with Linux support
30 November 2017 at 7:42 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: linuxvangogthey offer a less-than-perfect user experience, since user needs to install loads of 32 bit dependencies and there's no going around that

I just tell people to install their system's Wine package & let the package manager take care of the rest.

Quoting: linuxvangogthey meet, sadly, with poor reception, aka "meh, I could easily just run it with Wine myself"

It's a very similar situation to DOSBox really. More experienced users can just set up Wine themselves but that's not an option for newer & less advanced users, for whom Wine can be very daunting & a major hassle to use. Even for more experienced users, some games can still be a huge pain to get running in Wine when you don't know exactly what's needed to get them working.

Plus wrappers can offer more than simply getting the games running; things like save handling, performing some initial display setup etc. to try to make the experience more like playing native games, as I try to do with my wrappers.

On that note, you're welcome to use any of my wrappers to do official releases if you want :) Although some of them may not be possible due to requiring certain native components where licensing may be a blocker (especially where such components are made by Microsoft).

There's masses of good Linux games on sale right now
21 November 2017 at 7:24 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: wojtek88You made me wonna play Hitman games :D.
Let me ask you few questions. Do you have:
- This project source stored anywhere (github / bitbucket / gitlab)?

Not currently, but they're mostly just Bash scripts. For any other stuff I create for them I do include the source though.

Quoting: wojtek88- Project page (somewhere outside gog forum so people won't be forced to go through whole discussion to read important information),
- Video of recorded gameplay of games that use your script,

Right now the main news/faq/discussion thread & release threads are all there is for them.

Quoting: wojtek88- Plans to support other titles?

Of course :)

Wine 2.20 released with more Direct3D work and more fixes
6 November 2017 at 12:50 am UTC

Quoting: mrdeathjrIn good news game works but saves dont work correctly :(

It works fine here, although I've tested with 2.0-staging/2.10-staging... might be a regression (or perhaps there's just something the game doesn't like about your system)? I made a wrapper for it