Quoting: Guest

Quoting: slaapliedjeI hadn't heard of play.it though.

That’s expected, as ./play.it is newer and we have not enough time to spend communicating around it :wink: If you already used game-data-packager, our tool is similar in its very focused objective: building packages, nothing else. The main differences are in our support for multiple package formats and non-free game engines, as well as our refusal to support any DRM scheme (so no Steam game at all is allowed in our collection).

Until very recently, it had almost no community activity outside of a mostly French-speaking IRC channel and a couple French-speaking forums… But the software itself has been under active development for several years already, and has support for several hundreds of games.

We are slowly trying to share news in English too, mostly on Reddit [External Link] and a couple forums including of course GamingOnLinux. But this is time that is taken away from the development itself.

Something needs to be done to set up all the ultimas with enhancements so I can finally sit down and play them all with MIDI music!

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: whizse

Quoting: aluminumgriffinNice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).

(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).

You want unstable, possibly with Mesa packages from experimental if you're interested in in rc-releases.

Backporting Mesa to stable would be difficult. You would need backports for drm, llvm, and the kernel too.

They've done it for Stretch. I'm betting it's just going to take time. They have support backports of software a lot more than they used to, it does keep Debian much fresher than it used to be.

Still, I recently was bored when I found an old hardrive that had Debian 5 installed on it. Tested the theory that it'd still upgrade to 10 without issue.

Left it on overnight as it was going at it, and then the motherboard died... I swapped motherboards and then it finished. Only thing I changed was instead of using Gnome 2.x, I changed to using lxde, as the original motherboard I was using was only a P3@466mhz. The motherboard swapped in was an Athlon 64 @.. 3.5 I think?

Try doing that with any version of Windows... or most other Linux distributions! I bet even Ubuntu would puke along the way.

its possible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP7AkJo3OE [External Link]

from windows 1.0 to windows 8.
i'm not sure if you can update from this 8 to an 10, but you're being spoiled too much at that point ;)

He skipped 2000! That is my favirite version still.
Also, it is one thing to iterate throught them like that when nothing is installed. I can't even get my desktop to update to build 2004 of Win10 because the installation crashes. Nit sure why, but I suspect it is something random I have installed.

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Quoting: GuestThis is good news to me. I recently switched to a Debian derivative, after Canonical made their announcement to drop 32-bit computer support. Whatever their current road map entails, it made me realize that, for gaming, I should look elsewhere than Ubuntu and its derivatives. I was previously using Linux Mint.

I realize that it is an adaptation of Debian, but I have been using MX Linux now for several months as a gaming platform with equal success in all ranges of new and old games to my previous Linux Mint installation. I was attracted to it because of the stability of the distribution base. It is still an adaptation, like Linux Mint, but at least I feel more confident that Debian won't up-end its current support based on market research or other transient metric to capture an audience.

I hope that the talks are productive for gaming and development.

I have used many many many Debian based distributions over the years (anyone remember when Corel had their own Linux? Or Storm Linux?) But always ended up going back to normal Debian. The ones that are derivitaves tend to make some odd decisions that break compatibility with normal Debian, and just saturates the market with incompatible .deb packages. It is annoying and causes a lot of the 'which distro do we support?' Questions that developers have.

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Quoting: GuestRemember that Debian is not only about libre games, and actually provides tools dedicated to the integration of non-free games: game-data-packager and ./play.it [External Link]

(there is some self-advertising here, as I am ./play.it main developer)

Game-data-packager is awesome, I hadn't heard of play.it though. Nice!

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Quoting: Avehicle7887

Quoting: aluminumgriffinNice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).

(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).

A bleeding edge Mesa would be appreciated in the Stable release, it's one the key areas which needs improving, Fortunately with a little tinkering it's possible to use latest Mesa on Stable without turning it into a frankendebian. Below is my Debian 9 system from 2017 running Mesa 20.1.9. Many of the required updated packages have been compiled from source.

My system has a lot of customization under the hood so an OS upgrade was not possible, had to find a way to upgrade Mesa without breaking everything else. Just a few months more until Debian 11 and I'll start clean again.

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If you are customizing it so much you break upgrades, you might be better off with something like Arch? I have a triple boot system with Arch, Debian Sid and Win10, as sometimes it is just easier to get something running right in Arch. Good example of this is hxcfloppy emulator software. Though I do have it working well enough in Debian, Arch has a PKGBUILD if I recall right.
Pretty much everything out there has one for Arch.
The ability to easily upgrade from one release to the next is where Debian is king. Redhat barely started doing that with 6 to 7... and even then Cent didn't get that feature. With the exception of re-installing because I went from 32bit to 64bit, I have been running the same Debian install on my server for more than a decade.

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Quoting: UnixOutlawI recently bought Blade Runner from Gog, thinking it was something "recent" (it wasn't 'recent'), anyway I downloaded the Linux version anyway, and it wouldn't run - then I figured out - "it's just a ScummvM game", so I can probably figure how to run it in ScummVM, but haven't gotten around to that yet...

Played Monkey Island 1 via ScummVM on my NTC PocketChip (single core ARM 512 RAM) a couple years back and that ran perfectly...

I went for Authenticity, and was running it last night on my Atari PC4 w/286@12 and 5MB of RAM (I went silly and also threw in my Awe64 which I upgraded to have 24MB of memory.. weird when your sound card has more memory than your system.). This is all hooked up through a Roland MT-32. Sounds amazing (even though I'm currently using the crappy dell speakers that connect to the monitor).

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/311958-atari-pc4-and-isa-cards-conflicts/?do=findComment&comment=4644874 [External Link]

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Quoting: whizse

Quoting: aluminumgriffinNice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).

(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).

You want unstable, possibly with Mesa packages from experimental if you're interested in in rc-releases.

Backporting Mesa to stable would be difficult. You would need backports for drm, llvm, and the kernel too.

They've done it for Stretch. I'm betting it's just going to take time. They have support backports of software a lot more than they used to, it does keep Debian much fresher than it used to be.

Still, I recently was bored when I found an old hardrive that had Debian 5 installed on it. Tested the theory that it'd still upgrade to 10 without issue.

Left it on overnight as it was going at it, and then the motherboard died... I swapped motherboards and then it finished. Only thing I changed was instead of using Gnome 2.x, I changed to using lxde, as the original motherboard I was using was only a P3@466mhz. The motherboard swapped in was an Athlon 64 @.. 3.5 I think?

Try doing that with any version of Windows... or most other Linux distributions! I bet even Ubuntu would puke along the way.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: aluminumgriffinNice, however I really wish they would keep mesa somewhat up to date without forcing one into a FrankenDebian, maybe start with yet another "distro sub-section" (akin to non-free) that is "gaming" with the note that it is a slight sacrifice of stability for the sake of more bleeding edge (would also be a good place to put things like fresh OBS).

(mesa in Debian/Stable is at 18.3.6 , the iris drivers (matters if you uses intel iGPU) became good quite a bit after that (in the 19.x series) - to make it all that much funnier debian stable ships with libdrm 2.4.97 (to build the 19.x mesa and later you need at least libdrm 2.4.100)
In Debian/Testing it is mesa 20.1.8 and libdrm 2.4.102 so it is a night-and-day difference in terms of performance you get in stable and testing)).

IMO Debian Stable is mostly for servers and stuff . . . things that are doing basic workloads and you want them to just keep doing it and never die. If you're going to be playing non-ancient games on a machine, it should probably be using at least Testing and maybe Unstable, which is still about as stable as most up-to-date distros.

That used to be true. With backports you could still have a pretty modern system, even 2 years on. Though I did just check and mesa isn't in backports YET, I think 20.x only hit testing a short time ago, so there is that.

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Quoting: chrisq

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: chrisq

Quoting: Spl-it

Quoting: slaapliedjeThe Amiga inspired Vampire V4SA (ordered today)

How and where ? :shock: not related to the Atari but I'm really curious about this one, I want one :woot:

It's here:
https://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ [External Link]

He's writing about the Vampire v4 standalone:

http://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/doku.php/vampire:vsa-v4:start [External Link]

You beat me to it. It's kind of wonky to order one, you sign up on their page, but you won't get an email from them until they're ready for you to pay for your order. Would be nice if they could get enough stock in ship them out as they're ordered. I think it was 3-4 months for mine? They did say they'll ship it out next week, so I'm guessing I'll have the V4SA before the Atari VCS. I do already have a V2 500 in my 500+ with Checkmate 1500 case. It's a pretty sweet setup, just missing the AGA support!

I've been thinking about this myself, is it worth it to get the non-standalone?

I have a600, a1200, a500, a500+, cd32 and an a4000.

I really wanted them to come out with one for the A4000 (I have two A4ks and an A500+) I bout the A500+ mainly to check out the Vampire, and it's pretty awesome there, and would probably be my goto Amiga, except that it doesn't do AGA yet.

I wanted to replace the A3660 with a Vampire, as that is my Video Toaster version, and the 080 would be sweet there! My other A4000 is my overly expensive one with the PPC in it.

If you don't already have an accelerator / RTG in your A1200, I'd probably get one for that, as it'd be 'more Amiga' to me. But then as you already have all of those, may as well have the 'New Amiga' and get the stand alone :)

I'll let you know how mine is when I get it!

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Quoting: chrisq

Quoting: Spl-it

Quoting: slaapliedjeThe Amiga inspired Vampire V4SA (ordered today)

How and where ? :shock: not related to the Atari but I'm really curious about this one, I want one :woot:

It's here:
https://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ [External Link]

He's writing about the Vampire v4 standalone:

http://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/doku.php/vampire:vsa-v4:start [External Link]

You beat me to it. It's kind of wonky to order one, you sign up on their page, but you won't get an email from them until they're ready for you to pay for your order. Would be nice if they could get enough stock in ship them out as they're ordered. I think it was 3-4 months for mine? They did say they'll ship it out next week, so I'm guessing I'll have the V4SA before the Atari VCS. I do already have a V2 500 in my 500+ with Checkmate 1500 case. It's a pretty sweet setup, just missing the AGA support!

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