You can sign up to get a daily email of our articles, see the Mailing List page.
Latest Comments by kaiman
Return to Monkey Island gets a first gameplay trailer
28 June 2022 at 4:35 pm UTC Likes: 2

I think that looks fantastic.

However ... somehow I get a feeling that this comes a bit too close to the original in terms of characters and locations. Kinda like certain Hollywood sequels that try a bit too much to emulate the original, in a futile attempt to recapture that spirit, but inevitably fall flat.

But hey, Ron Gilbert must know what he's doing ... could also turn out great!

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is out now
21 April 2022 at 5:08 pm UTC

Pretty conservative Kernel choice, there. I had hoped they'd at least ship with 5.16. OTOH, it will be summer before the .1 release is out and I'll upgrade, and then it's not too long for the first HWE update to materialize. But still ...

Wine 7.6 out now with more PE conversion work, Mono updated
9 April 2022 at 9:51 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: PenglingTell me about it! That's exactly why I haven't bought The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles yet.
The cutscenes in TGAAC can be made to work with some native DLLs, as per these instructions. Using that workaround, I played start to finish with no issues.

Also, from following the Proton bug filed for the issue, it looks like the videos have been re-encoded and now work, save for the bonus content. Though I've not personally verified that.

Sorry Arch (EndeavourOS), it's not working out any more and hello Fedora
8 April 2022 at 4:03 pm UTC

Quoting: DenysMbIt kinda make me sad that everyone forget about openSUSE and it is such a great and solid distribution. 😢
Just the last two days I've been booting an openSUSE VM at work to do some database testing. So it's not forgotten! And I guess if I'm ever fed up with Ubuntu at home, it's either going to be Debian or openSUSE. Though without the original yast it's just not the same any more :-(.

GOG update their stance on DRM-free, Galaxy as 'optional' for single-player
18 March 2022 at 5:25 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: pbThat was not what their customers were expecting
One customer begs to differ.

I basically bought all the "good" old games when they were brand new, and the only reason to perhaps buy them a second time on GOG would be to avoid the hassle of having to dig out the disks, CDs, DVDs, manuals, code wheels and what not. But why bother if there are still good new games coming out every now and then!?

So yeah, GOG as they once were would have been next to useless to me. If they don't turn a profit by selling new stuff that's really a shame, because I'd rather continue buying from them.

Google talk about their 'Windows emulator' for Stadia and they use DXVK already
15 March 2022 at 7:40 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: RichardYaoRead the mythical man month. Having more engineers does not always make development faster. Sometimes, communication between larger teams just slows them down to the point where fewer engineers are more effective than more engineers.
Yeah, I'm often surprised to hear how many "developers" are supposedly working on this or that trivial seeming application. Having worked mostly in small teams (1 to 5 people) so far, it's amazing what kind of projects you can do in reasonable time when equipped with the proper tools for the job.

Judging by the talk, they came up with quite clever and efficient ways to go about whatever they did. Hard to imagine how more people could have helped significantly here. Of course, had they simply chosen to re-implement the complete Win32 API from A to Z instead, that could have been a different story.

Steam Deck Verified has issues, Grand Theft Auto V edition
13 March 2022 at 9:31 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Philadelphusbut it's a problem baked in to how Valve collapsed the infinite spectrum of "how games run" into just four categories
Yeah, if only we had a way of expressing a more nuanced description of the issues a game in the playable category has, to provide a bit of context to the glyph. But alas, unless clever scholars come up with a way of transcribing the hurdles Valves testers faced, so they can be related to folks that don't share the same camp fire, I fear we're out of luck.

PipeWire is the future for Linux audio and I am sold on it
1 March 2022 at 6:11 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, so in my time with Linux we've had many audio bits.
1) OSS
2) ALSA
3) Pulse
4) Pipewire.
Yeah, I was going to write something similar. Long gone are the days when I had to compile my own kernels just to get OSS working with my Soundblaster clone. ALSA made that possible (and for all I know, isn't that still what drives audio in kernel space today?).

Anyway, the major gripe I have with Pulse Audio is how esoteric or badly documented some of its features are. Hooking up my Yamaha A-U670 as an external sound card via USB required some fairly involved tweaking with little advice to go by. Even now that it works, I needed to get a Gnome plugin to easily switch between PC speakers and the external DAC, because unlike plugging in headphones it never does it automatically.

Not quite sure if the task will be less daunting with Pipewire, but I'm looking forward to trying it out when it becomes the new default on Ubuntu.

The Steam Deck has released, here's my initial review
25 February 2022 at 7:15 pm UTC Likes: 1

Looks certainly promising. I'd be fine with a device that gives 30 FPS on medium settings. Though there's the question how new releases 2 or 3 years from now will play. Battery life isn't that great, but for me the use case would be sitting on the couch instead of at the desk, so it could stay plugged in while playing.

Will be interesting to see how the experience will be with non-Steam games. Like how you'd go about installing and launching them. Or whether any Deck optimizations (such as the correct controller glyphs, default settings and whatnot) will be present (up to the game devs, I guess). So hopefully some future article will shed some light on those aspects as well.

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit gets a new story trailer
22 February 2022 at 5:42 pm UTC Likes: 1

Kinda reminds me of the Jack Keane games, but perhaps it's because of the 3D character models. Like the painted backgrounds, though. I guess I'll have to wishlist ...