Quoting: KithopYeah, just an FYI - if you're on a Debian-derivative (e.g. Ubuntu) and want proper ffmpeg packages?

I second this if the alternative is installing to /usr, although I usually build with pbuilder instead so I'm always building in a somewhat isolated clean environment. For personal use debuild should be fine.

My recording tool of choice is vokoscreen (which is also just a frontend for ffmpeg) and I make any final edits in OpenShot. I've never had the desire to live stream.

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Nice article Liam. I especially like it when I already own all the games. :) Haven't played SOMA and Among the Sleep yet, but I have seen a play-through of the later.

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Quoting: GuestAMD is also locked in its own way AFAIK

It uses proprietary microcode, but is only there for DRM features used exclusively by Windows. The components that are locked should never be used anyway. In other words, it's not locked at all.

If AMD released a free software microcode option, that would be perfect since we could plainly see it's not trying to do anything evil. eg. it would prevent AMD coming out with a microcode you could buy to get an increase in Mhz as Intel have done in the past with their CPUs. As it stands today, the proprietary microcode is the reason a lot of distributions don't support modern GPUs. eg. Trisquel, GuixSD, etc. But it's a very minor problem (for AMD cards) all things considered. You could make the same claim about Intel graphics as well.

Closed hardware is fine as long as the specifications regarding how to use it are available.

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Quoting: GuestSo the code is there to display things correctly, but the card GPU speed can't be turned up due to "clocking support" being encrypted/closed somehow in order to fully utilize NVIDIA cards so we could actually use the open source driver for gaming?

Correct. Nvidia locked all the power management stuff down (at least) in firmware, which requires a lot of the functionality to be signed by Nvidia to work. That's why I would strongly suggest anyone who believes in free software and wants to support it to avoid modern Nvidia graphics cards.

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I purchased Mad Max for the PS4 ages ago - one of the few console games I own, although did not get around to completing it. I'll almost certainly pick this port up as well, but I'll be wait for reviews, confirmed Mesa compatibility with AMD cards, and probably a sale.

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Grim Dawn (Wine + Nine) currently. I think I'm getting towards the end.

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Croteam is amazing!

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Quoting: liamdaweYes, but those game were officially released for free. It's still legal content.

Legal to own (if that's the way EA provided it). Almost certainly not free to redistribute.

Further, I am 99.9% certain Dune 2000 was never released by EA (or Westwood Studios) as freeware.

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Quoting: emphyAs far as I am aware, interpreters like openRA, Scummvm, gemrb are always fully legal, independent of where individual users may have gotten the game content.

ScummVM demands you provide the game yourself (from GOG.com, CDs, etc.), but openRA downloads a mirrored copy of the games it supports directly from within the program.

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I was a massive fan of C&C back in the day, and have used OpenRA a number of times (although it's been a couple of years since I last ran it). We even had an after work LAN at the office with OpenRA at one point, which was a lot of fun.

One thing has always bugged me though. I know C&C and RA were made available as freeware for a time, back around the time C&C: The First Decade was released. Then for a couple of years after that, the ISO images could still be found on http://ftp.ea.com/pub/ [External Link] (which no longer seems to be around).

However, I very much doubt that the license permitted redistribution rights as part of the download. Hence, mirroring that content which is no longer available is likely in breach of the license.

The bigger problem I have is that I never got to play Dune 2000. I was a massive fan of Dune 2 back when it was released, but I was flat out with high school, assignments and part time work when 2000 came out, so I missed it. I've been keeping an eye out for it ever since, on Steam, GOG, Origin... I've never seen Dune 2000 made available for download, either for free or at cost. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that the OpenRA download is a case of copyright infringement too (and it's missing the soundtrack and other important game assets). EA doesn't seem to care (and some would call it abandonware), but it's still in breach of license AFAICT.

Nowadays, EA has their FTP content served from http://largedownloads.ea.com/pub/ [External Link] but that doesn't have any ISO images that I can see. I might have to try to get Dune 2000 from Ebay.

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