Quoting: henriquecariocaguys, test Stadia too, it runs linux on servers
This does not oblige developers to have the game on Steam for Linux but it certainly helps the Steam Deck to have native games going forward.
Microsoft still wants to keep developers locked into their platforms
And one of the FUD attacks that Stadia suffers is using Linux as a pretext and the lower quality of games that Stadia has for using Linux.

Stadia looked like a giant promise when Google first launched it, but in the end it turned out that publishers saw it as a separate thing so they never did a Linux port of their games, they did a Stadia port of their games. So when/if they ever think of releasing a native version for the Deck they will most likely not even reuse the Stadia port but start all over from scratch (at least that is the impression that I've got from how game studios work).

And with their recent "this is how you build a windows emulator" announcement, it all but look like they won't even pursue native games on Stadia any more.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI have a theory; Xbox as a hardware platform is going to be dead.

There is no need for it, really. It's already basically a stripped down Windows, from my understanding.

I believe Xbox Game Pass first came to be available on Linux via the Atari VCS. If MS is branching out and allowing that to be a thing... But it isn't like you can easily find a new Xbox (or PS5 for that matter) these days. They took away the dev mode from the Xbox users, so you can't use them as retro boxes anymore, which is a shame.

But why not ditch the hardware altogether next time a refresh is needed, when they can just sell games through Windows Store / Xbox Game Pass / Edge Browser, etc.

Streaming games isn't going to be anything I'll sign up for anytime soon. As it is, even using some games (especially mostly or all Online games) on Steam is bad enough. Too many constant updates that are huge. If my ISP decides to take a vacation, like it randomly does, that means I can't play anything. Not to mention the 'oh, I'll just play this for 30 minutes while I'm waiting for something...' is no longer available, as I'll boot up the computer, start Steam, and there is an update that takes 20min...

Ha, sorry, turned into a rant about modern gaming... I should just play on my MiSTer more...

Because you can buy a Xbox X for a lot less that you have to pay for a gaming PC, so you buy a relative cheap console for your kids and you keep a non-game compatible PC as your home Internet-browser / work-from-home computer. Have zero figures to draw from here but I wouldn't be surprised if the average Xbox owner is not like the people who roam around this site with a powerful gaming capable pc.

Yes with the Xbox Cloud you no longer need a powerful pc to play those games so you have a point there, but then you have to give up your pc for the kids AND pay for decent Internet that also competes on bandwidth for your Netflix and YouTube viewing. Not to mention how much easier it is to just throw a console at the kids and not have to worry about viruses, kids viewing whatever on the net and so on.

Not saying that the above is you or me but there are a lot of normies out there. But I do think that you are correct in that MS is going to try to move in that direction, I just don't think that they will do that until they are sure that Sony and Nintendo won't take over the market once they have left it.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.UltraWith Clean Room one usually means the process where one team does look inside, docuements that they see and then you have another team reading that documentating and doing the actual implementation. This is how Phoenix Technologies claimed that they cloned the IBM BIOS, but it's not how Wine is implemented.

Clean room simply means having no access to the original source code therefore avoiding issues with copyright. Documentation or lack of it is irrelevant to this.

Quoting: Guest"Clean room reverse engineering" =/= "reverse engineering".

And it totally is reverse engineering. What's with all this pointless mental gymnastics and arguing semantics for nothing?

Because we grumpy old timers do not agree with this new floating definition of reverse engineering.

To quote Wikipedia:

Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little (if any) insight into exactly how it does so.

None of this matches reading documentation and public include files, unless people now want to claim that every time I type say "man nanosleep" to remind myself of which arguments it uses is reverse engineering and not plain development.

Wikipedia again:

There is a case-law mechanism called "clean room design" that is employed to avoid copyright infringement when reverse engineering a proprietary driver.

It involves two separate engineering groups separated by a Chinese wall. One group works with the hardware to reverse engineer what must be the original algorithms and only documents their findings. The other group writes the code, based only on that documentation. Once the new code begins to function with tests on the hardware, it is able to be refined and developed over time.

To me (and others apparently) this have always been the definition of clean-room reverse engineering since the days of Phoenix Technologies.

Last Wikipedia quote I promise:

Black-box testing is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures or workings. This method of test can be applied virtually to every level of software testing: unit, integration, system and acceptance. It is sometimes referred to as specification-based testing.

Besides being old and grumpy, it could also be the fact that I have worked as a reverse engineer some 10+ years ago and among my colleges (and competitors, and attorneys) at the time these terms where defined very hard so I find it kinda strange that it has become so loose over the years.

In any case, I will not pursue this any more since arguing terms and semantics that also happens to be somewhat off topic can only lead to unnecessary misery. So I'll drop this topic completely now and will put my blinders on.

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Quoting: tohur

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: tohur

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: GuestThey are not reverse engineering Windows. They are implementing specific interfaces - probably all of which are well documented (Microsoft documentation is generally pretty good as it turns out).

Well Microsoft really don't have any alternative, if they don't document it then application and games developers cannot write software for Windows :)

In any case, yes neither Wine nor this new attempt (I highly assume) is done via reverse engineering. Even the slightest wink in that direction would kill Wine legally, that Microsoft haven't gone after Wine in all of these years speaks volumes about how legally sound Wine is developed.

WINE is windows reversed engineered. It is called "clean room" reverse engineering thus they reimplement the windows api without ever decompiling nor seeing windows source code but regardless its reverse engineering if it wasn't it wouldn't be the windows api and windows apps wouldn't even be able to run

No Wine is not reverse engineered. One of the reasons behind the Wine Is Not an Emulator is that they don't emulate Windows behaviour, what they have done is to write their own versions of "all" the public WIN32 functions and DLL:s and since those are public there are no need for any reverse engineering.

All you have to do is e.g to look here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-readfile [External Link] and there you can see what ReadFile expects as arguments and what the replies will be.

The Wine devs then did this for each and every public function that exists. Their early work was the windows loader which they didn't have to reverse engineer either since the .exe format for Windows is also public information.

Now there are some quirks and bugs in the WIN32 API that they have to replicate but that is also not done by reverse engineering, instead its simply done by calling the same function on a real Windows install and see what the function returns, and of course based on bug reports from end users.

And what you just said is a long winded paragraph describing "clean room" reverse engineering... the very meaning of it. all emulators that are legal do it.. they write their own code to do the same things as what they are trying to emulate. I know WINE is not an Emulator but the acronym isn't telling you its not an emulator cause they write their own code but the fact its a translation layer

With Clean Room one usually means the process where one team does look inside, docuements that they see and then you have another team reading that documentating and doing the actual implementation. This is how Phoenix Technologies claimed that they cloned the IBM BIOS, but it's not how Wine is implemented.

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Quoting: tohur

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: GuestThey are not reverse engineering Windows. They are implementing specific interfaces - probably all of which are well documented (Microsoft documentation is generally pretty good as it turns out).

Well Microsoft really don't have any alternative, if they don't document it then application and games developers cannot write software for Windows :)

In any case, yes neither Wine nor this new attempt (I highly assume) is done via reverse engineering. Even the slightest wink in that direction would kill Wine legally, that Microsoft haven't gone after Wine in all of these years speaks volumes about how legally sound Wine is developed.

WINE is windows reversed engineered. It is called "clean room" reverse engineering thus they reimplement the windows api without ever decompiling nor seeing windows source code but regardless its reverse engineering if it wasn't it wouldn't be the windows api and windows apps wouldn't even be able to run

No Wine is not reverse engineered. One of the reasons behind the Wine Is Not an Emulator is that they don't emulate Windows behaviour, what they have done is to write their own versions of "all" the public WIN32 functions and DLL:s and since those are public there are no need for any reverse engineering.

All you have to do is e.g to look here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-readfile [External Link] and there you can see what ReadFile expects as arguments and what the replies will be.

The Wine devs then did this for each and every public function that exists. Their early work was the windows loader which they didn't have to reverse engineer either since the .exe format for Windows is also public information.

Now there are some quirks and bugs in the WIN32 API that they have to replicate but that is also not done by reverse engineering, instead its simply done by calling the same function on a real Windows install and see what the function returns, and of course based on bug reports from end users.

Sometimes this approach is called black-box reverse engineering but that is kind of a misnomer since it's too easy to conflate with actual reverse-engineering where you do peek inside. Far better term is black-box testing since that is what is actually done.

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Looks interesting. Like that the menu music continued over to the loading screen, not many devs that make it so slick.

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Quoting: GuestThey are not reverse engineering Windows. They are implementing specific interfaces - probably all of which are well documented (Microsoft documentation is generally pretty good as it turns out).

Well Microsoft really don't have any alternative, if they don't document it then application and games developers cannot write software for Windows :)

In any case, yes neither Wine nor this new attempt (I highly assume) is done via reverse engineering. Even the slightest wink in that direction would kill Wine legally, that Microsoft haven't gone after Wine in all of these years speaks volumes about how legally sound Wine is developed.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: elmapulanother thing to consider is, unlike wine and most open source projects that are made mostly by volunteers after work in their spare time, this one is made by full time employees.

Far as I can tell, Wine is majority made by Codeweavers and has been for years and years, and I'm pretty sure they have more than three full time coders.

i was thinking about the first few years of wine development

Well truth be told they tried to implement the Windows 3.11 API (16-bit as well) at the time and then just two years later Windows 95 came and they had to start all over by implementing WIN32. Google also have the benefit of coming to this 29 years later when lots of "this works but this doesn't" have already been settled.

On the other hand Google could very well be at the "how hard can it be" stage only to figure out soon that the answer is "very".

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Quoting: Anza

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: soulsourceI still haven't finished the first one... Might be fun on the Deck though.

The last level on the first game is a real pain, many rage quits on that one.

I didn't even get that far. Before that there's tower you have to climb. I kept falling again and again and haven't resumed the game since.

Before that there are several memorable levels, so not all bad.

The tower is nothing compared with the damn circus tent later. That one is pixel accuracy from hell. It's a great and fun game, just that I wish that they had toned down the pixel jumping in such a clunky 3d game.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIt's not just distribution that is protected under copyright, though I'm unsure if you're making this distinction. Unauthorized transcription, translation, performance, and of course, making an unauthorized copy of copyrighted content is copyright infringement. Though transcription sometimes falls under fair use. What do you do when you're downloading something? You're making a copy.

No this is IMHO a misunderstanding of copyright. You can do all the transcription, translation and performance all day long without infringing copyright. It's when you distribute any of that to some one else that you violate the copyright, aka you can re-enact Harry Potter in your living room without an audience and not be infringing, but put it in front of an audience in any way and you are potentially in trouble (I say potentially since most courts would not see you performing this for your family or close friends as being infringing).

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualPutting aside whether seeding qualifies as distribution, there are plenty of instances of people being sued just for downloading content. [External Link] Whether they would actually win that lawsuit, I don't know, but most defendants choose to settle before it reaches the court.

Please note that this article is a bit misleading, first they mention that RIAA have won in "in some cases" without further clarifying which or how many and later on they describe that they found the "pirates" by looking at BitTorrent data, so I would still say that the ones that they got damages from in court where the ones using BitTorrent since they could prove that they where distributing and not just downloading.

Also please note that many decided to settle out of court does not prove anything, it just shows that the defendants either used BitTorrent or that they didn't fully understood the law and was afraid (and didn't have access to legal counsel due to the costs involved in the US and Canada).

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualHere's the RIAA, a frequent customer of the court, on what they think: [External Link]

Quoting: RIAAA long series of court rulings has made it very clear that uploading and downloading copyrighted music without permission on P2P networks constitutes infringement and could be a crime.

And the RIAA are known for lying to their teeth in order to scare people into settle the cases. It's a known scare tactic from their part.

What people should think about is why the RIAA invented the term "piracy" if there had been an actual crime for the activity of just downloading, the way BitTorrent works gave them a massive foothold into suing people but they coined the term long before that.

Disclaimer, I have been active at the Swedish Pirate Party since inception.

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