I tried to get some JumpStart games to run with DOSBOX a few years ago on Windows 7. Iirc I managed to install but not run the game.

I recently tried a bit to try and get another 16bit game run on Arch Linux with WINE in win98 or 95 mode but that still didn’t pan out.

Honestly it’s probably doable in some way without one but next time I try I’ll probably use a VM (Virtual Machine).

Secondly, the purchase UI seems to have been designed to ensure that a new player can never understand it. I’m sure like all things it becomes clear over time but jeez, did a professional team really work on that thing?

Yes it’s professionally designed, like all microtransaction games the shop is the most important feature and they’re always designed to be confusing by forcing the user to jump through hoops and use multiple currencies to make it less obvious how much money you end up spending on the game if you’re a “whale”.

They don’t want you to be able to have a direct association between how much money or time anything costs, that’s why these games are so predatory and you should not be playing them, regardless of what you think of the actual game itself.

Well, I will say, for a “free” to play game League isn’t that bad (especially not when compared to mobile games), or at least not last I played (3~4 years ago) but they still use the same methods.

Also as others have mentioned, the game’s reputation in terms of it’s community isn’t exactly stellar. Being very “toxic”.

But what I think is even worse than the language, which you at least can mute, is that the most popular streamer for the game “Tyler1” constantly rages, shouts, screams, destroys equipment and punches furniture etc.

Let’s just say if your son starts doing those kinds of things then it’s not (only) because they’re going through a teenage phase it’s probably also because of bad influences from the game and its community.

I thought about upgrading to AE a few times since it seems to have pretty much everything or at least replacements for everything now, but I guess I’ll never upgrade from 1.57.97 at this rate

same reason why people buy games even though they can pirate them to get them for free

I got through another few missions of Wargroove 2. It continues to be a worthy successor to Wargroove.

I didn’t have high hopes for WG2 at first but I saw they made some really good improvements with the map editor.

I’m still on the fence about buying it though, I heard it doesn’t have ranked match making so if I get it it would only be for the single player. Might get it if it goes on steam sale

yes

Advance Wars By Web

Well, not sure if it counts, since it’s an online pvp fansite based on Advance Wars 1~2 and Dual Strike, but I’ve been playing it at least a few times every week for a while now.

Maybe you should check some lets plays instead of watching tutorials. Just an episode or two to get an idea of what the game is and whether it seems to be up your alley or not.

The lets player will probably explain some mechanics as they come up while they’re playing (at least in the beginning to help new viewers unfamiliar with the game) and that should be a lot easier to digest than someone purely explaining a bunch of game mechanics in one go.

I felt an urge to play Skyrim again, had a lot of fun for a day or two, but eventually after I added some more mods I started getting frequent CTDs and have been trying to figure out what the problem is (and how to fix it) through the crash logs.

I might just have to remove Immersive Citizens from the load order but I really don’t want to because it really makes the NPCs feel so much more “alive”.

So one thing I’ve started getting worried about is whether youtube/google will eventually block/delete youtube/google accounts who use adblockers.

I don’t really care about my youtube account but I have several gmail accounts and losing those would be awful.

I assume they won’t ever go that far, but just the possibility is scary.

So is there an easy way to migrate all your stuff to some other email service and what are some good ones?

same

Mass Effect Legendary Edition (ME1), just got Liara & did the DLC mission as well as a bit of uncharted worlds & rogue VI on Earth’s moon.

The game looks a lot better and most controls are nicer. Although somehow the Mako is even worse to control in LE than the original ME and I get some stutter/loading while running around in presidium.

Being able to skip while in the elevator is nice, but I would’ve liked to see the option to be moved directly into normandy added to the rapid transits like in ME2 & ME3. Having to go to C-Sec, take the elevator, and wait for the decontamination process every time is really tedious, and it’s why I rarely visited the Citadel in the original ME1 as well.

Honestly ME1 LE is looking pretty nice and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it yet, but it was always the story that was the highlight of ME1, the gameplay isn’t actually that great and I’ve already replayed the original several times so I think I’m just going to go ahead and play ME2.

I used to use Firefox before Chrome, and it was working great. Then at some point Firefox just started sucking and so I ended up switching to Chrome.

Around the same time I stopped using hotmail in favor of gmail as well

Now, probably almost 20 years later I’m back at Firefox

I haven’t escaped gmail yet though

Yeah. I switched from world to lemm.ee because world just seems to be too willing to use censorship.

From what I can tell lemm.ee is one of the instances that does the least de-federating and censorship so that’s why I switched to there, but I’ve seen talks about it becoming an invite only instance in the future so if someone is not sure then imo you should join now.

Never used or heard of it before but apparently zoxide is only for cd command, do you happen to know if there’s some fuzzy match for in general?

At the moment what I do is history foo | grep -i "bar"

yeah Fish tab completion works, but one thing I’ve noticed though is that tab completion for wrong case only works if there’s no option with the correct case

e.g. if I have Downloads and Downloads2 then d with tab completion will become Downloads, but if I have Downloads and downloads2 it will tab complete to downloads2 and D will complete to Downloads

I’ve been meaning to look through the Fish documentation to see if I can change that and fuzzy search for history but never got around to it

Skyrim but it’s an MMORPG (and I don’t mean some shitty WoW clone with an Elder Scrolls skin draped over it like ESO)

Installing the fake japanese font did the trick 👍

Why a game (unmodded) doesn’t work will usually be pretty obvious just from the errors you get

I might’ve just been lucky, but so far the only time I had to look up a fix was for battle.net launcher, which ever since a while back has to be done after every update.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/yairmz/battlenet_fails_to_start_with_this_application/ituht4u/

The problem is in a hidden flag that’s set on the qwindows.dll file in lastest B.net version which makes it hidden from the app.

The fix is relatively easy, simply run this inside the Program Files (x86)/Battle.net/Battle.net.13801/platforms directory:

setfattr -x user.DOSATTRIB qwindows.dll

After this Battle.net will work again.

But when it comes to mods it can be a lot trickier, and I don’t really have a general purpose solution. Hopefully the game is popular enough that someone else has a guide on what to do.

I’ve never played subnautica so I don’t know, but if the mods have their own modified DLLs then you’re probably supposed to use DLLOVERRIDES, so maybe WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ribbon=n,b" since it’s called ribbon.dll

Some other issues I’ve had with modding is that the mod might expect the game to be in a certain directory or for directories to have certain names or there might be some problem because Windows isn’t case sensitive while Linux is.

Honestly the mods are generally not causing issues from my experience, it’s the mod loaders and what not.

Years ago, Winetricks would write a new verb definition for every new DXVK release. Presumably when it was much less stable. You can see remnants of that with the 100+ verbs for installing particular DXVK versions. Now it just takes the latest stable release. Yay for the maintainers, because that’s a lot less work. As a side effect, Winetricks doesn’t have a way of updating it normally.

Oh does it not add new entries for every new DXVK release anymore? In that case I guess my DXVK version is probably a year old by now even though it says DXVK (Latest) and that it’s from year 2023: https://i.imgur.com/lNaqTPG.png

There is an easy way of updating DXVK anyway. Just run Winetricks with --force:

WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/whatever winetricks --force dxvk

Now, admittedly, I misspoke about Winetricks “not supporting updating DXVK”. I learned this option exists just now. So you can force-update it with --force, which bypasses winetricks_is_installed and installs the latest version of DXVK. Guide has been updated accordingly; thank you for making me look into this again!

Oh I had no idea about this, and I normally just use winetrick’s GUI while using it so I would’ve had to look up how to update dxvk if not for you explaining it.

Although as a side note I’ve got the winetricks-git AUR package, not winetricks so maybe there’s some fix for it somewhere already, I’ll have to look into it. So far I haven’t had an issue with DXVK being too old, but I mostly play older games

When I was writing the Visual Novels on GNU/Linux guide, I did a lot of experimentation with Winetricks.

Unrelated but I’ll check that guide out, I’ve had trouble playing VNs that are in Japanese, as without LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8" wine /path/to/game.exe they won’t even run but even with it the fonts don’t work and are shown as empty boxes.