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Latest Comments by slaapliedje
You can now pre-order the Linux-powered Atari VCS games console, a lot more details revealed
31 May 2018 at 1:26 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: slaapliedjeI think this was the downfall of the Steam Machine.
Steam Machines weren't ready. Far from it. I'd say to have a decent console, three things should come together. Vulkan, Wayland and OpenXR. Once that works in combined stack, there can be successful high end Linux consoles.
I agree, but the console needs to be standardized in it's hardware. Otherwise it's just a bunch of parts in a box. Developers like a target for performance, etc.

Can you imagine all the console users being pissed if there were a PS4 Pro+1? I know I'm already annoyed that a lot of games I have that I can't see in their full potential because I don't have an HDR TV or a Pro.

You can now pre-order the Linux-powered Atari VCS games console, a lot more details revealed
30 May 2018 at 7:36 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: ShmerlWhy not Ryzen + Vega?
Because of the cost, obviously.
Not sure if it makes it worth the lower power though. I get the tradeoff, but then they should consider different tiers with more powerful components.
I think this was the downfall of the Steam Machine.

SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics now officially supports Linux with a big update & price drop
30 May 2018 at 4:57 pm UTC

Quoting: [email protected]
Quoting: ryad
Quoting: [email protected]
Quoting: ageres
Quoting: [email protected]Can't use the Xbox 360 controller. It's detected. Listed under input options..

But you can't use it inside any of the games you have in the collection.
It works fine on my computer.
It's wireless. You're not using it wirelessly right?
I use the Xbox 360 wirelessly with steamos-xpad-dkms (Steam OS xpad implementation for Xbox 360). Not working for me.
I have tried the Steam client beta update and it works immediately.

So it's broken in this version of Linux Steam client probably due to this...

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/the-latest-steam-client-update-is-out-breaks-gamepads-in-big-picture-mode-on-linux-steamos.11797

However, i've got another issue that's broken in both this and the new version is that when i start big picture mode, it starts in this small truncated window.
I was having that same issue, with big picture mode being non-big picture :P Though I have a 2560x1440 monitor, seems it's trying to fit in a 1920x1080 screen?

POSTAL Redux, the revamp of the classic brutal shooter adds Linux support
30 May 2018 at 4:55 pm UTC

RWS are awesome. I had ordered the Fudge Pack long before they had their games on Steam, and the newer versions came with Steam Keys. I just emailed them and they were more than happy to give me keys, and while at it accidentally gave me a key for a game I already owned. So free game too. But yeah, really great group of developers.

Invite people into your home and eat them in MachiaVillain, now out with Linux support
30 May 2018 at 4:35 am UTC

Quoting: Kallestofeles
Quoting: slaapliedjeWow, the performance is absolutely terrible. I play Rise of the Tomb Raider with no issues at 2560x1440, but this game just chokes at that resolution, even as far as the menus are slow to react when you mouse over the items.
Wut? There's pretty much definitely something wrong with your OS. Looking at your rig, it should be an absolute breeze to run as it runs perfectly fine on both my desktop and laptop.
desktop: i7-4790k + gtx1070
laptop: i5-8350U + integrated intel UHD620
If there aren't any logs to go by, maybe open a ticket in steam forums regarding the performance? The devs might be able to track it down.

... btw, are you using proprietary nvidia drivers? My testing was ran on 396.24 prop drivers where it performed excellent.
Interesting. I'm running the 390.59 nvidia drivers from Debian Sid. I am having the same issue with the Sega Genesis Classics collection as well.

Edit: Yup, definitely something funky (Funke, sorry, was just watching the new season of Arrested Development) about my install. I'm betting something wrong with the nVidia drivers and Unity3d. Arch Linux on the same system isn't having the problem, granted it's running 396.24

SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics now officially supports Linux with a big update & price drop
30 May 2018 at 4:32 am UTC

Anyone else have horrible performance during the menu area? It goes crazy slow, even though the benchmark in Rise of the Tomb Raider ran at 99 fps.

Invite people into your home and eat them in MachiaVillain, now out with Linux support
28 May 2018 at 8:15 pm UTC

Wow, the performance is absolutely terrible. I play Rise of the Tomb Raider with no issues at 2560x1440, but this game just chokes at that resolution, even as far as the menus are slow to react when you mouse over the items.

A new Steam Client Beta adds Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) support to the Steam Controller
28 May 2018 at 7:54 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Ardje
Quoting: slaapliedjeThis was/is a hardware issue, and didn't have much in the way of how root accesses things or not. I have literally had the Windows drive do this to me many times. I'd be playing a game and it'd just hard lock, I'd reboot and the BIOS wouldn't even see the drive. I would have to do a full power off (even sometimes as far as flipping the hard switch on the PSU) before it'll be detected again. This was just the first time it's done it to me on Linux.
Is it a Vortex?
I've thrown out all my vortex SSD's as no matter what system, they will crap themselves and then get disconnected from the bus.
I've had this issue with high end servers, and with my desktop ARM several times.
The only really reliable SSD's are from intel and samsung.
There are stats about that (an nntp server farm using SSD's), and the Samsung Pro seems to be the most reliable.
Taking a step back (half the price), the EVO's are rock solid too.

The only upside of the Vortex is that the firmware upgrade can be done from linux, and their SSD rescue CD was just a linux distro.
These are Mushkin brand. I recall their memory was one everyone said was great. Not sure what happened, but it was the first dead memory stick I'd ever gotten was a Mushkin, and I only got these SSDs 'cause they were going for a good price. I've heard that though, that you go Intel or Samsung for SSDs.

Gyre: Nova State is a steampunk-inspired open world RPG promising Linux support on Kickstarter
26 May 2018 at 5:40 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: BeamboomHmmm... The fighting looks very static, almost mmorpg-like. And the dialogues too remind me of a rather generic mmo, as do the city...

Don't get me wrong, I love, LOVE the concept/setting, I salute them for not going the fantasy route, and agree that we sorely miss a open world RPG. Plus I totally dig steampunk aestetics. But is this the one we wait for? I'm not sure...
There's a discussion I ended up in about RPGs and railroad vs sandbox. This was about pen and paper RPGs, but pretty much applies to video games too.

Some didn't like the term 'railroad'. I usually hear it as 'on rails' when applied to video games, because some of them literally were on a train and you couldn't move anywhere, just shoot at things. But I think there are at least four levels here. I think there is

1) Railroad: really no control over what your character does, everything is force fed you and you can't wander off the beaten path much if at all. These are basically like the shooting games in the Arcade; Terminator 2, Hogan's Alley, etc.

2) Linear: story moves along, but there are some side quests here and there, but you can't just go wandering all over the map. Locks you in with either creatures you couldn't possibly overpower, or terrain you can't cross. Some of the Final Fantasy games, Doom and most FPS.

3) Open World: This is where you have some adventures around, can go pretty much anywhere, and just do your thing. Side quests, main quests, and just random things. But here there is still a beginning and an end. If you want there to be. This fits the Ultimas and Elder scrolls games.

4) Sandbox: You're plopped in there with no direction, very little story/plot, and you can just interact with things. Minecraft (before story mode? I haven't played that), Ark, etc.

I prefer games that are somewhere between Linear and Open World. Mainly because when they're too open, they end up becoming not complete and are more of a sandbox.

A new Steam Client Beta adds Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) support to the Steam Controller
24 May 2018 at 8:16 am UTC

Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: F.UltraStill sad that still in 2018 things get's completely wiped on firmware updates. Wouldn't it be nice if vendors of controllers, BIOS/UEFI, Smart TVs and so on would put the configuration on a separate memory location that didn't get wiped.
Speaking of wiping things...

I was all happy, booted into Linux, launched Steam, which I thought pulled in the new version, but it doesn't auto-restart itself, so when I turned on the Steam Controller, nothing. Restarted Steam, it then said there was a firmware. Started the firmware update, but it said I had to plug it in.

Plugged it in and... my hard drive went away. Now I'm creating a LiveCD to fix my Debian install.... looks like grub got completely borked!

Hopefully my drive still has data on it... it literally started popping up a bunch of ext4 errors.. :(
I think this is one of the "don't confuse correlation with causation" situations. Unless it required you to be root I have a hard time seeing Steam being able to overwrite the MBR of your drive. Most likely is that there is some kind of problem with your drive that happened to show itself at that particular moment (perhaps the download of the firmware was the first time there where a write done on this particular partition for some time).
My theory is that it tried to mount the Steam Controller as a drive, and for some weird reason my BIOS decided that drive should be /dev/sdb (my Linux drive) because it acted exactly as if /dev/sdb had been unplugged. I ended up updating my bios there was a fairly recent update) and then doing the update again and it worked fine.

The thing is, clearly Steam doesn't have to be root to write the firmware to Steam Controller, it also doesn't have to be root if you have Linux set up to be able to mount USB devices automatically, which almost all desktop OS's are set up that way.

To be fair, it never actually got to the 'update firmware' stage, it gave an error that I needed to plug it in, I plugged it in, the dialog disappeared as did my system.. .for a time. Besides having to run grub-install /dev/sda and update-grub (after I got back into Debian to add Windows back to the boot loader).
So your hard drive was connected over USB? Well that might explain it then.
No, it is over SATA. I do have to point out that these two SATA drives I have do have a weird issue with randomly disappearing off the bus, causing the OS to crash, but this is the first time it has happened to my Linux drive (the other one has Windows 10 on it and has done it a few times.)

I think it is time for a reinstall of Debian Sid anyhow, something funky is going on, since it won't read Audio CDs, yet my Arch Linux install on another drive woks perfectly fine.
Sounds like the issue is more likely connected to your "randomly disappearing off the bus" then. An application needs to be root in order to write to the block level of any device, that you can upgrade the firmware of the SC without beeing root is due to it performing firmware updates as either normal file transfer or with their own protocol on top of USB/BT.
Except that some auto-mounting stuff happens when you plug in a USB Stick. While yes, ultimately root access is required for all the udev bits and pieces for that to work, that means access is there for when installing a new USB device, because that can load new kernel modules.

It's not entirely a random thing if it happened the exact moment I plugged in the controller. Who knows. Every time something similar has happened to me, it's always been caused by these two Mushkin SSDs. Let's just say next time I get SSDs for my system, I won't be buying them from Mushkin.

Edit: Model number is MKNSSDCR480GB-7 in case anyone else wishes to avoid them.
For mounting the drives yes, but that will still not give you the low-level access that an application needs in order to do block-level writes such as writing to the MBR. All a non root application can do with a mount is to transfer a file using the filesystem, and to be honest I don't believe that Steam have code in it to do low-level sector by sector writes either.
I'm not saying that's what happened. What I think happened is the bus did that weird thing where something was connected to it (that it was a Steam Controller I think was random and not the root cause) and it decided to remove the drive from the SATA bus. Causing Linux to just freak out as if someone had just unplugged the drive while it was running, which most likely corrupted the grub data on the EFI partition. GPT doesn't use MBR by the way.

This was/is a hardware issue, and didn't have much in the way of how root accesses things or not. I have literally had the Windows drive do this to me many times. I'd be playing a game and it'd just hard lock, I'd reboot and the BIOS wouldn't even see the drive. I would have to do a full power off (even sometimes as far as flipping the hard switch on the PSU) before it'll be detected again. This was just the first time it's done it to me on Linux.

I should just order some new SSDs and swap 'em out, they're 480GB ones and I got them for a good deal years ago. Then again, my motherboard now has a slot for an NVMe too... :P