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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Action-shooter The Ascent is Steam Deck Verified, adds a little tweak for Deck players
15 Mar 2022 at 11:36 pm UTC Likes: 2

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

Google talk about their 'Windows emulator' for Stadia and they use DXVK already
15 Mar 2022 at 11:25 pm UTC Likes: 3

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.

Google talk about their 'Windows emulator' for Stadia and they use DXVK already
15 Mar 2022 at 11:20 pm UTC Likes: 3

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".

Double Fine say Psychonauts 2 for Linux and macOS still coming
15 Mar 2022 at 5:36 pm UTC Likes: 1

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.

Apex Legends now broken on Steam Deck and Linux desktops (update: fixed)
15 Mar 2022 at 3:07 pm UTC Likes: 1

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.

Google plans their own version of Wine to run Windows games on Stadia
15 Mar 2022 at 2:51 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: F.UltraThe CS definition of emulation is "the use of an application program or device to imitate the behaviour of another program or device", Wine does no such imitation. An application running under Wine does not get an imitated Windows environment except for the file-system which is the single thing that Wine emulates, for everything else the Windows application runs in a Linux environment which have it's pros (performance) and cons (compatibility).
This is incorrect, or at best not a strictly defined idea to claim that you can't interpret it differently. Using dictionary definition of emulation, it means imitation. The rest is a stretch that no one can claim is the only way to stretch it.

Wine totally imitates Windows in some ways. Running in the Linux environment doesn't preclude that fact. These ways include providing ABIs that Windows program expects to behave in the same way Windows does.

Meaning, you can even write a test of behavior, and at least in ideal case of Wine reaching its goal for that particular component, it should produce the same result in Windows and in Wine.
Does Musl emulate glibc according to you?

Double Fine say Psychonauts 2 for Linux and macOS still coming
15 Mar 2022 at 2:49 pm UTC Likes: 2

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.

Google plans their own version of Wine to run Windows games on Stadia
15 Mar 2022 at 2:07 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: RichardYao
Quoting: F.UltraAnd no WINE is not a OS emulator, it's a reimplementation of the Windows API. Not really sure how a emulator for a modern OS would look like but perhaps this one from Google is. Perhaps they emulate it down to how e.g the Windows Scheduler works to make games get the 100% Windows experience that WINE can never do.
It is a Windows emulator just like OS/2's DOS program support was a DOS emulator. In computer science, the notion of OS emulation is well established and predates WINE's creation.
OS/2 contained a proper emulator for MS-DOS (just like DOSBox), it did not simply reimplement the MS-DOS API due to how MS-DOS works this couldn't be done so they had to perform a real emulation.

The CS definition of emulation is "the use of an application program or device to imitate the behaviour of another program or device", Wine does no such imitation. An application running under Wine does not get an imitated Windows environment except for the file-system which is the single thing that Wine emulates, for everything else the Windows application runs in a Linux environment which have it's pros (performance) and cons (compatibility).

Had Wine been an emulator then things like EAC would have worked out of the box.

Apex Legends now broken on Steam Deck and Linux desktops (update: fixed)
15 Mar 2022 at 1:58 am UTC

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: RichardYao
Quoting: avivilloz
Quoting: Xpander
Quoting: rustybroomhandle
Quoting: RichardYao
Quoting: quotI wonder if dropping in that missing `easyanticheat_x64.so` file would fix the issue. The removal seems accidental, so I'm assuming the main binary is still compatible. Of course, you're risking a ban if you try that, but I am curious.
It does fix the issue.
How did you get the correct file?
i backed up the file before the game updated :)
could you maybe share this file somehow?
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/te62pa/apex_legends_eac_file/ [External Link]

Keep in mind that this is technically copyright infringement on the part of the person distributing the file. It would avoid copyright infringement if we figured out how to download the old depot version from Valve to get it.
It should also be classified as copyright infringement for the person obtaining/making a copy of the file. Otherwise no one would be successfully prosecuted for downloading copyrighted content from anyone aside from the copyright holder or those they've authorized.

As most sources tend to focus on the legality of sharing the content rather than obtaining it, there's not a wealth of information about it, but here's a wikipedia article. [External Link]

Legality appears to vary depending on the country.

Although, on another note, anyone can be prosecuted for anything regardless of whether they did it or not, so I'm not really making a good argument there. I couldn't find any cases where such a prosecution was successful; mostly cases where the defendant settled.
Those individuals where sued because they used software that uploaded the copyrighted material to other people while they where downloading it themselves. AFAIK no one have been sued for just downloading, it's distribution that is protected under copyright, for usage to be infringing you have to go to patents.

Windows drivers roll out for Steam Deck but Valve won't support it
13 Mar 2022 at 2:14 pm UTC Likes: 6

Quoting: pete910
Quoting: F.UltraAnd LTT is out with a video on exactly how horrible Windows is on the deck right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNt_ReLwk40 [External Link]
Oh how the tables have turned ! :grin:
They have even turned a few more turns than that. Looking at the comments done by people in the various videos it's quite clear that people have zero insight into their own biases.

E.g Linus on the Linux videos made it Linux fault that drivers where bad or missing, but here when Windows is suffering from the very same thing he blames Valve...

And we have Windowsgamers that page up and page down refuses to even try out Linux since that would potentially make them loose 10fps in games and that would be completely unacceptable but now suddenly with the Deck they consider replacing SteamOS with Windows because loosing 10fps in games is nothing :-)