Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: elmapulthings will never end at this rate, its a "cat-and-mouse game"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_and_mouse [External Link]
just like wine will never be perfect for the same reason.

Welll . . . Wine will never be perfect for current Windows. But over time the proportion of software that was written for Windows-before-the-present gradually increases, and current Windows seems to be getting worse at backwards compatibility, probably deliberately for certain tactical reasons which I think may be mistaken.
So in theory Wine could become approximately perfect for pre-current Windows, and that becomes a more and more important role.

windows indeed cut the support for old softwares/games (that takes time because microsoft understand that killing the backward compatibility may harm then)
you cant play old dos games on windows anymore, indeed.
except that you can!

dosbox has an version for windows, gog even uses it to sell old games on windows.
so even if windows lose backward compatibility, gamers will be able to play their games anyway, some one will port something like wine to windows, or companies will port their old games and the worse part is, even games distributed with dosbox emulation may not officialy support linux (even if the game is still playable, people considering use it will stay away thinking that the game cant run, or new users will have trouble making it run)

Yeah, Dosbox is great for Dos games. My perfect example of Windows not working with Windows is Interstate '76. It's been a while since I tried it, but even on Windows 7 the colors were all sorts of jacked up, no matter what I did. It works perfectly in Wine though.

IIRC (it has been a while as well), my solution to this kind of problem was to kill explorer before launching the offending program... Something wrong about the color palette. I don't recall if disabling Aero was necessary as well ("net stop themes"), but it might be.
I created a .bat file with "taskkill explorer.exe; my_program; explorer.exe" or so... Still, annoying as hell, and works better under Wine.

I guess they will slowly break Win32 compatibility to push people towards UWP apps. This might have the side effect of pushing them towards Linux/Wine (see, competition is good after all :D ), like it did for Valve (though not exactly trough the same means). Any guesses regarding UWP support in Wine, by the way?

(Sorry, this post was completely off-topic)

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Quoting: rkfgI only have one question: did the SC contain an inactive Bluetooth module all this time or did they manage to implement the protocol using their generic radio transmitter (i.e. not a standart BT/Wi-Fi module)? I suppose the frequencies and everything else are different so if they did that it's quite an achievement.

IIRC, it was known for a long time that it was BLE-capable. So it's likely the former. I guess that their own protocol is BLE slightly tuned for better latency, not sure if they had to pass a FCC certification for this (I guess they did).

Edit:

Otherwise we suggesting sticking with the original protocol. It provides the fastest connection, with low-latency support for up to four controllers per receiver, and works across all major operating systems. The BLE connection is excellent, but the native wireless protocol was designed from the ground up to provide the best experience for a Steam Controller.

Wasn't this up to 16 controllers previously?

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Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: tonRYes PXE, most of big cyber cafe (50++ PCs) use this system. Easy to maintain. But, if BSOD..... :'( Good luck to employees. :D

FYI: Some of my friends worked/working in cyber cafe. That's why I know some 'stories'.

Can you boot into a full desktop environment with that? I thought PXE boot did just enough to get a barebones boot image from a TFTP server, only to start an install on the local system. Just to try it out, I once installed Fedora on my laptop with a setup like that (PXE boot into tiny installer over TFTP, download everything else over http from a Fedora mirror), and I thought it was neat -- but booting into a complete system, and *using it* like that would be considerably neat-er!

I'm curious because I eventually want to set up a couple of thin clients around the house, connected to my main desktop, once my other ancient computers kick the bucket entirely. So far I've tried multiseat (which is pretty trivial to set up thanks to systemd), though that's limited to the number of graphics outputs one has; VNC works ok with a bit of pulseaudio twiddling to get accompanying audio, but it's really slow.

...a quick google search suggests that even Raspberry Pi 3s are capable of this. hmmm...

Sorry about the wildly off-topic post, though. Slightly more on topic: 'cyber cafe's were huge in Turkey in the early 00s; I had Starcraft-addicted cousins who practically lived in those places. They're all but extinct nowadays though.

I' ve done such setups in the past, it works quite well: PXE serves the kernel (&initramfs) trough tftp, the root filesystem is mounted trough NFS.

You just have to mount a couple directories on a local disk or a tmpfs (usually things like /var or /var/run, /tmp, etc; I don't recall exactly).

Though most likely those cyber-cafés load a grub-like imager trough PXE, I've seen some of these in the wild. They can check the hard disk, install a new system image, etc. Pair it with wake on LAN and multicast to quickly upgrade your whole infrastructure.

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Quoting: RTherenWhat is Skyrimg? A typo I presume

A backend for graphicsmagick (just kidding, there is a special field to report typos under the article -- which I did on your behalf ;) ).

Still, it's always sad to see developers ressources being wasted on working around driver-specific issues. Long live open source drivers!

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Still, those graphs in GOL's survey page are quite funny to look at :)

Thanks for reporting!

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Quoting: tonRGood news for portable Linux computing and gaming on-the-go. Bad news for Nintendo as it may be use for "unofficial" purpose. Hopefully that person not getting sued for this exploit like PS3's OtherOS lawsuit last decade ago.

I really wish a truly portable open-source devices/smartphones are exist or at least I can install Linux distros on any Android devices. Closest thing I have right now is Samsung Galaxy Note II running on LineageOS and without Goggle apps.

You might want to have a look at PostmarketOS (it's not ready for a daily driver yet, but it's getting there).

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Quoting: Guestthey really should have release xen and then worried about bug fixing the game

it's not good practice to bug fix games before everything is released for said game since they still have no idea if xen might cause new issues

I would actually argue the opposite. And as they improve their engine for Xen (which should be just a new map drop-in), I get that they might want to release their bugfixes and performance improvements. The good practice would be to have a beta, but that's probably the case already :)

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: mirowell I had zero crashes there when playing the first chapter. since then I've been waiting for the second (Xen). The game is surely worth the money and as far as I understand it, xen will not be 100% the same as it was in half life 1, but even longer and a little different, as the first chapter of the game.

The reason Xen will not be 100% the same as it was in half-life 1 is that the original Xen was horrible, it was the part that made Half-Life not be a perfect game. Suddenly a wonderful FPS-adventure turned into a dull 3D platformer with teleporters. The developers are very well aware of that, and I, for one, would be satisfied even if the new Xen has nothing whatsoever to do with the original, provided it is fun to play. I suspect that it is for the same reason that they are not shipping it yet for bug fixing and balancing - they might be reserving the "right" to make big last-time changes which breaks previous savegames.

I agree, though the Xen environment was quite imaginative and nice to look at. And it seems that The Crowbar Collective is trying to capture that impression of a lush and vivid, organic alien world, all for the better!

I am prepared to wait, a couple more years if I need to. I've been following the project since the very beginning, and it's not like I don't have other games to play (and not enough time) in the meanwhile :D (/r/patientgamers has some pretty good suggestions :P)

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: slaapliedjeIs this DRM though?

According to mobile operators it is. They also used to lock devices that prevented users from switching to competing networks. You can argue it's not DRM, but they actually threatened those who tried to break that with anti-circumvention. That's why DRM has nothing to do with rights. It's quite proper to call it Digital Restrictions Management, it's exactly what it's used for - to restrict the user.

In case of Switch and most incumbent consoles - they have tons of such restrictions.

I just want to point to others that R in DRM technically stands for Rights, but yeah. Wasn't that kind of thing ruled illegal, at least in Europe? Or what is the driving force behind virtually every phone manufacturer providing a way to unlock the bootloader? (which usually deletes the encryption keys used for DRM from the device, couldn't they do something similar with the switch?).

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Well, this is all very nice.

It's not really an exploit, though. The bootloader is "just" accessible, if I get this right (though discovering it was probably quite hard, It might even have been left here on purpose, who knows?)

Fascinating stuff really, as an owner of a Switch it's not exactly something I will be doing (my son would never forgive me), but it's very cool to see nonetheless.

This just allows you to boot from an external media, say an SD card. As long as you don't tamper with the internal storage, everything should be fine.

I would refrain a bit from using it right now, though: you can easily fry stuff if the kernel asks for the wrong voltages, etc... But it shouldn't be too risky, and I would give it a few months before it's 99.995% safe.

Regarding games and stuff you can run: of course, most open source software should run right away (no word on its usability, though). 0AD, SuperTux*, OpenMW and other engine reimplementations, *DOOM, various emulators, sc-controller.

Touching on that last point (sc-controller is python), visual novels on Steam are typically python, IIRC, so these should work without a hitch as well. The same can be said about those languages targeting an architecture-independent virtual machine: Java (minecraft), asm.js/Webasm games (there are some on humble bundle, among which Dustforce, Osmos, FTL...)

Now, on x86{,_64} software, you could always use QEMU, and I would be surprised if some QEMU wrappers for popular games didn't surface sooner than later.

The selling point is probably emulators, though. From NES to DOS and later, everything should run pretty much flawlessly. I hear some Wii U titles run pretty well as well? I am waiting for the day we'll have a switch emulator running on the switch itself, though :P

Many thanks to nVidia for their continued open source support on the Tegra platform!

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I was thinking about this game today... It was really hard to find. How about editing the title so that we can easily find it later? Including ASCII, Retro and Roguelike in the title would make the search function behave better, I think ;)

Or maybe we need a better way to search trough articles?

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