What Linux version are you using?

[Bikerdude]

I have never liked controllers period, not because they are uncomfortable but because the movement is so clunky compared to a mouse.

[datiswous]

I found recently that I couldn't play a platform game (Steam Dig 2) properly with a Steam controler, but with keyboard it works fine. At start the game tells you to play it with controler. I wonder if it's just the Steam controler and not controlers in general. I'm talking about the old Steam controler.

[revelator]

probably excerbated by me having had some years working as a smelter. having to rinse the metal slags of with heavy air drills seems to have busted my hands.

also got my first discus prolaps doing that so i started taking lessons in electronics afterwards as a career change.

the really annoying disabilities only show up later in life but most can be tracked back to what you have been working with earlier in your history. 

so i warn youngsters about not taking the first job if it A involves heavy lifting B involve working with heavy machinery with lots of vibrations and C avoid workplaces that dont offer the right tools to help them out doing the work.

[revelator]

i would say it depends on the game. racing games usually go better with the right controller (had one with a steering wheel and gas pedal) and it made it quite a lot easier to drive because the force feedback made it actually feel like driving a real car.

but for something like an rpg it find it kinda sucks because you need pinpoint control and it just feels really akward with a ps controller. for a shooter its even worse 

[datiswous]

I used to have a little joystick that you put over the keyboard arrow keys. the joystick pressing the keys.

Edit:

http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_joystick.html

Edited April 21 by datiswous

[revelator]

14 hours ago, datiswous said:

I used to have a little joystick that you put over the keyboard arrow keys. the joystick pressing the keys

i think i saw one of those many years back  kinda a funny idea but probably not working to well.

probably a lot of funny gadgets made through the years for gaming. i still have the ps controller with the built in keyboard (which suuuuucked!!!!!) . it was imho not a good controller...

the buttons are so small you need the pointy end of a dart to hit them and it was located between the paddles. only place you could actually use it was in the chat channels on playstation it did not work in game.

some ideas should just newer had made it to the consumer side.

same with the magic remote samsung offered with some of they're tv's aw man!... it frustrated me so much i rolled it over with my friends car. for those who dont know it was a remote where instead of using buttons you used it as a lightpen to control settings / change channels by waving it around in the tv's menu untill you hit the gui button you needed to press.

it sucked mundo a... in the time it took you to hit the shit in the tv's menu i could have programmed all channels using a standard remote.

[JackFarmer]

Today I finally managed to get the Thief Dark Project version running on my Mint install.

@datiswous: Once again, no luck with Lutris,and the wine/lutris method you taught me for Thief 2 did not work either (or I already forgot certain things I learned from you). Anyways, somehow I managed to create a Win98 prefix through wine and was able to install both the game/patch through that. After that, copied the video files to the computer and removed the same file as was necessary for working videos on Windows back in the day. Now I've got Thief, Thief Gold & Thief 2 working on my notebook.

@revelatorTried to install ST Voyager EF through Lutris, but it did not work, then I did a pure install through wine (without a specific runner)...and you know what? This one works out of the box without problems - even the videos work!  I don`t get it, I cannot find "the approach" to install the old games on my computer, and if it were not for datiswous, I still would not be able to play Thief 2 on Linux.

Another finding is, that GOG Windows games tend to be functional through Lutris, Steam games work (when fitting for my hardware) flawless. However, I do not have many, just a few indie games/adventures...."Arx Fatalis" among them being the most demanding (compared to the others).

[datiswous]

Well there are a lot of settings.. It might for example use the wrong wine version.

Apparently there are other launchers nowadays that are easier to use. I just got used to this. Recently got the Blizzard launcher working through Lutris so I can play all those games.

[revelator]

Atm. Fixing up textures as i fucked up a bit. Irfans batch converter uses some pretty heavy compression on png images. Im saving the png versions as uncompressed then ill feed them through upscayler and convert them to dds. They look stunningly good now .

[datiswous]

I try to see any difference in-game using your textures, but it seems something is going wrong, because I see no difference, although there is a performance degration while playing.

Btw. I used the tool Upscalyl:

https://upscayl.org/download

When you point it to a folder (using Batch Upscalyl) it can actually read from bmp files (although it says it can't), doesn't work with seperate files. Then webp without compression. Then you can use another tool to convert it to dds. But I didn't get that far.

I think the Ai model Ultramix is generally pretty good for this. Don't use "High Fidelity" and "Digital Art".
Anything higher than 4x doesn't increase detail, just resizes the image.

Edited April 22 by datiswous

[datiswous]

Ok, let's move here:

 

[JackFarmer]

@revelator

Computers have been getting better and better for decades. Why isn’t it possible to simply create a universal emulator that would let you, for example, play Windows games from 1998 without any problems on any new operating system (Linux, Windows 11, etc.)?

[jaxa]

30 minutes ago, JackFarmer said:

@revelator

Computers have been getting better and better for decades. Why isn’t it possible to simply create a universal emulator that would let you, for example, play Windows games from 1998 without any problems on any new operating system (Linux, Windows 11, etc.)?

It's possible that Linux/Proton is already better at handling old games than modern Windows.

But I'll point out that even back in the day when the hardware and the games were contemporary with each other, it could take hours to get a game working because of some weird issue that wasn't easy to understand or research (early Internet). Some things are just hard.

[revelator]

true many older games need odd settings due to an assortments of things like early drivers lying about cababilities (geforce 3 for one), or using ass old compilers who dont fully support newer OS features.

and current generations who newer lived through the infancy of home computing. sure most of them could beat us old farts to a pulp in using the newer features but most stall when it comes to fixing cranky software because they have no deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the os.

 

[Fiver]

On 4/30/2026 at 10:20 PM, JackFarmer said:

Why isn’t it possible to simply create a universal emulator that would let you, for example, play Windows games from 1998 without any problems on any new operating system

If you have a copy of Windows XP that the game works on, then you can try install XP on a virtual machine (using VM Ware or VirtualBox or some other hypervisor) running on some Linux distro. But perhaps turn off network on the VM for security reasons. Windows 7 should work too.

Later versions of Windows may be trickier because of licencing/activation issues after Microsoft implemented tighter DRM measures for later versions. But perhaps not impossible.

But yes, I agree with you. A working emulator would be nice. WINE works well for some programs. ReactOS did not work for my use case the last times I tried, but could be worth a try. At least in a VM.

[revelator]

There are actually numerous emulators allready but they come with a downside as well.

an example dosbox while capable uses a lot of cpu cycles so some games actually run worse than on dos.

windows own vdm also had numerous shortcommings in that regard like not being able to out of the box emulate soundcards from that era. vdmsound took care of most of that but there where other problems as well like not being able to play in fullscreen mode.

so in most cases it is better to just run the OS things were built for in a virtual machine as that way you dont have to jump through hoops to get your games running. downside is you need a harddrive large enough to hold all the images of those operating systems.

linux has multiple emulators but many are not just plug and go and require a pretty deep understanding of how things work, but in that case it can pretty much run anything out there.

[Fiver]

9 hours ago, revelator said:

downside is you need a harddrive large enough to hold all the images of those operating systems.

As long as one can install more than one game on the same VM, I don't see the number of images being all too many. Maybe I'm missing something here...

[revelator]

depends. im one of the older users and was around when the spectrum zx80 was old stuff  yeah i had one it was literally my first gamer.

i  have 1000's of games spanning from so long back that i cannot even remember all of them anymore so from time to time i dust them off and start playing them again.

even with the sizes these oldies had its about 8 tb worth of gaming and some of these oldies dont play well with xp at all and require win9x or older.

some need emulators because they are not msdos or windows games at all (ton of old games from my commodore and amiga some atari as well).

i did get a good deal of the oldies to work on modern windows via wrappers and patch hooks but its cumbersome.

[stgatilov]

To be honest, I am considering hopping away from Bazzite to something not immutable.
And the reason for this is: as a developer I really want to install some low-level stuff, which is usually not doable with flatpak/VM/containers (at least not with my Linux skills).

For instance, right now I have the following packages layered:

1. opensnitch (custom RPM) to have global control over networking
2. coolercontrol to tie chassis fans to GPU + CPU instead of just CPU
3. qemu / libvirt to run proprietary VPN inside Debian to RDP-connect to my work machine (Bazzite stripped it out recently)

I also had hard time to make far2l work properly... it still has its quirks, perhaps because it is inside Distrobox.
Most of the programming stuff is running fine inside Distrobox, which is OK to me.

Now I decided that I should probably install VTune.
Will I be able to find RPM package and layer it? Or maybe it has some messy custom installer which I can't run?
I just feel it is not sustainable in the long run.

However, even if I hop away, I'll still follow the immutable philosophy as much as I can. Appimage > Flatpak > Distrobox, native packages for the rarest cases of system software I absolutely need.

P.S. And I occasionally face some bugs in Bazzite.
First I had an issue where I could not type exclamation mark in email body in GMail (in browser). The next image fixed that, but network adapter stopped working inside VM. Currently I'm on "testing" image where both issues are fixed 

[revelator]

aye flatpak is great for getting otherwise grungy software running but it can be hell to setup properly.

you need to set permissions and it actually has a gui tool for that but not everything is permitted to pass through low lvl stuff especially.

one of the older distros would maybe be a good start if you want to tinker with the mechanics. like opensuse or plain fedora. solus is also ok for stuff like that even though it does support flatpak it is not forced.

[revelator]

some help for flatpak https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html

and yeah it is very restrictive. but so are most sandboxes .

for some stuff native is the only way if you need access to lower lvl functions.

flatpak has on the other hand made linux a whole lot more accessible to users by allowing otherwise incompatible software to run by providing a full copy of the needed runtimes without poisoning the system.

[revelator]

looks like the scaling issue with high resolutions on bazzite have been fixed in the nightlies (atleast on the KDE version).

so im going to try with bazzite again, hopefully without letterboxing my games in 4k this time .

solus still has some bugs with nvidia cards they need to sort out. happens every kernel update due to package system not properly clearing old kernel modules.

updating usually ends in a black screen with no way to even access the TTY so thats a bummer . i hope they get it sorted as solus is my favorite nix OS.

[datiswous]

57 minutes ago, revelator said:

i hope they get it sorted as solus is my favorite nix OS

How is it better? Or is this a too long topic? Also maybe you already told this and I simply forgot.

I switched from Manjaro to Linux Mint and the experience is a little different in some area's, but not much.

Edited August 21 by datiswous

[revelator]

hmm several things like its amazingly stable when you look away from the current problem with kernel updates breaking nvidia gfx (hope it gets sorted soon). i also like the interface on the KDE variant of solus. and so far i had no problems getting any game to run on it. it does use flatpak but it is not forced unless the app in question has no port to they're current kernel or runtimes. so far the onlly user app i have that uses flatpak is kodi and it works just fine so no complaints in that regard. 

i had it on all but one of my pc's but untill the nvidia situation is resolved im going to try out the nightlies of bazzite with the fix for scaling. the only pc i currently run windows on is my main gaming machine and it is mostly due to it having so many titles that it would take me months to setup on nix . at some point im going to do it though but currently been busy with the house building a new terasse and fixing the walls on my garage which were rotten (previous owner had not reapplied wood protection in decades).

[taffernicus]

Interesting old workstation over here,  and with mklinux obviously 

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2026/08/mklinux-and-pimped-out-apple-workgroup.html?m=1

excellent restoration