Greetings to all

Hello everyone, I found my way here from booman's sig on playonlinux forums. I've had a look around and must admit to liking the more relaxed atmosphere here for simply discussing games, or whatever.

I've been playing games for as long as I can remember. For the most part it is old games for me (I love dosbox), but PlayOnLinux is also awesome as I can so easily manage several wine versions for different games.

I am using Arch Linux, because frankly I love that nothing is configured or set up for me, I do love to tinker with my system and maintain it myself. Only once did I break my system, which forced my to learn some valuable lessons.

I have a blog which I rarely update, mostly I use it to keep my own list of games I manage to get working and how, just in case I should forget at some point.

I hope to be able to both find solutions and help discover solutions to getting games working, and participate in other discussion. Oh and I started learning Python 9 months ago as a hobby and will get started on C as well once I've finished the Python book I currently work through.

I suppose this shall suffice for an initial greeting.

Welcome! New here too, couple of weeks now. I agree with you on the nice atmosphere, it is nice to have pleasant discussions going on and helpful people.

I am also quite new to Linux. It is still less than a year since I decided to permanently ditch windows and only use Linux. Prior to the permanent ditching of windows, I really only dabbled a bit. When I made the permanent move I made sure I managed to get my games working in Ubuntu, both games that use dosbox and playonlinux. After slightly over a week I felt confident enough to dive into Arch, which admittedly overwhelmed me at first. But the Arch wiki is great and I have just spent more time than I dare think about reading all I can there and several other websites too.

Now I've even made a very simple script that allows me to change keyboard backlight on the laptop I'm using (Xfce got not tools to make that automatic) when I press the desired key combination. One year ago I would have been completely lost in attempting to do that.

I will most likely contribute with a guide or two. I will probably get around to making guides for the dosbox games I run, especially concerning those that requires Timidity to get sound working as that is a little extra step. Not that dosbox games really are that difficult to get working, but I've found some configurations that work well. Maybe just a general dosbox guide. I'll give it some thought.

Any games I have working well that you don't have guides for is also something I'll look into.

I do want to point out that I have a lot more games than what I have tried out so far. I own somewhere around 130 games or so on Steam, and a roughly equal amount on GOG. However, thus far I've been mostly focused on getting my big favorites running well and as such have not really tested that many yet. But given time I will probably get around to testing more games.

Sadly, I have a couple of games I really want to get working but with no luck so far. One is the original Dawn of war 2 which use GFWL. Since Retribution work well, the whole problem is likely GFWL. At the moment I just hope that the game will be patched to work without once GFWL shuts down next year.

The other game is Spellforce. It does work, but framerates are poor, and ground textures are truly horrible no matter what graphic settings you use. Winehq got a bug report for that and it looks like they may be on to something as somebody made a patch for wine that made the ground texture appear correct, however the patch is also reported to give horrible framerates to the point that the game is unplayable. At least people are on to something.

I do have all Dawn of War games, that means the original Dawn of War, and all three expansions for it, Winter Assault, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm. I got them all working with the PoL steam install script. All work without any issue when installed from Steam.

Dawn of War 2, and the Chaos Rising expansion require Games for WIndows Live. The second and last expansion for DoW2, Retribution, is stand-alone and does not requires GFWL. That game works without any problem when I simply followed some steps from winehq.

I read the DosBox guide, and it is very good so I don't see any need to expand on that. I'd probably like to do guides on the Might and Magic and Heroes of Might and Magic series. Although I didn't play anything after Ubisoft bought the brand and changed it. I only play gog or steam games, have not touched any of my old physical purchases in a lot of years. That means any guide I write will be for either steam or gog releases.

As for my list of games, you could add me on steam. The gog list is more complicated, I may just have to write it all down as I don't know of any way to let others see it.

I extract the gog installers with Innoextract. This always creates two folders, app and tmp. The tmp is useless, and the I always delete the /app/dosbox folder since I use Linux DosBox. I remember from my brief time with Ubuntu that I had to use a ppa since the version in Ubuntu repos was too old. Since Mint is so alike Ubuntu, I assume a ppa for Ubuntu will work with Mint. From what I understand, most Linux users, especially newcomers, use either Ubuntu or Mint. I would prefer to be able to provide instructions for getting Innoextract in a way that can be used by both.

I prefer to use Linux DosBox since it gives me full control over how I run the game. Also, I have not look into how PlayOnLinux handles DosBox games, so I don't know much about that. What I do is that I just create a custom dosbox config file for each game. I also make custom shortcuts then which launch "dosbox -conf /path/to/custom/configfile.conf"

I do have several strategy games which I play. That reminds me, I do have one physical copy of some games that I still play, because they are not available on gog and I didn't want to purchase them on steam. Stronghold 2 and Stronghold Legends. I have Starcraft 1 and 2 working, although I can't say for the multiplayer as I never tried it. I don't really play much multiplayer, mostly I feel other people get in the way of my gaming experience, haha.

Most games I install with a PlayOnLinux script, if one exists. However, I can simply look at the script to see what is being done and write a guide based on that (after testing that I didn't miss any steps, of course). I will see about getting a guide or two done during the weekend.

Starcraft 1 should not be a problem, and the Starcraft 2 script on PlayOnLinux works without any problems for me with the Heart of the Swarm expansion. If you could make it invisible when I first post it for proofing that would be great. You know what, I'll have a guide ready before sunday.

I will do that.