Greetings to all

Daerandin

Daerandin

Well-Known Member
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 and thanks for joining!
Yes, its more relaxed and less formal here because we are much smaller than POL forum.
We hope to grow in time and provide as much help as we can. I still consider myself fairly new to Linux since I've been using it (on a daily basis) for about a year. Been using Windows for 10 years.
I've learned a lot from trial-n-error and the POL forums.
My goal is to help new Linux gamers to run their old & new Windows games in Linux. That seems to be the biggest wall to overcome with Windows gamers.
Feel free to post and start conversations.
If you feel led to create a guide, let me know if you have any questions.
I normally follow a structure that you already see in my guides.
Something like this:
  1. Introduction
  2. Screenshot
  3. Specs
  4. Wine version
  5. PlayOnLinux setup
  6. Wine configuration
  7. Install game
  8. PlayOnLinux shortcut
  9. PlayOnLinux Configure
  10. Initial Launch
  11. Options, Optimization
  12. Conclusion
  13. Screenshots
 
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.
 
Pretty cool, You are more daring that I am. I read about Arch and thought "that would be nice to install only the processes I need for gaming" but then realized how much work it is.
On top of that, I wouldn't expect new Linux Gamers to use Arch, so I finally decided on Mint.

That would be awesome to have some more DosBox guides. My DosBox guide was pretty general and should work for most games. But I'm not surprised to hear some DOS games are tedious to get them running well.

The more Guides and featured games we have the more traffic we'll get. At least I hope.
 
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.
 
Very nice! We need you!
Your 200+ games and my 150+ games would mean hundreds of Guides.
Not that I would expect you to do that many of course.
Whatever you can do in your spare time is good with us.

I would love to see your list of games.
Did you see my Dawn of War: Dark Crusade guide?

I've heard of Spellforce, I'll have to look it up again.
 
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.
 
Awe man! I really need your help:D
As you can see I don't own a whole lot of strategy games. We only have one guide for Dawn of War and thats all.
I would love to see more Guides on strategy games... that would be awesome!
Specially the classics like Starcraft, Warcraft II, etc.
New ones too, of course
If you are willing to do some guides, let me know if there is anything I can do to make it easier for you.
I have a few templates I use. specially with Steam install. Steam always installs the same way so i just copy paste the text and rename screenshots.

All the other guides I actually take screenshots of every step, crop them with Gimp 2.8 and then rename.

I plan on doing some video guides in the future too. Right now its more about quantity. The more Guides we have the more attention we will get. So I'm just focused on being consistant.

One thing I'm curious about is DOS games from GOG. I'm sure you have noticed that they are bundled with DosBox and it automatically runs.
So which is better? Running the game with Linux DosBox or using PlayOnLinux to run the Windows DosBox?

Don't worry about the list, its your call. I'm sure you have seen mine in my signature
 
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.
 
I just install the game with the GOG installer then copy/paste the folder into my DosBox games folder.
Then use Linux DosBox to launch the game.

Dude, some guides on your Starcraft 1 & 2 would Rock! But no hurry.
I'm trying to do a guide every week if possible. If you post a guide, that would give me the week off.

I'm fine with a Guide that shows gamers how to use PlayOnLinux scripts. As long as the script still works of course.

Let me know if you want me to proof the guide. I can make it invisible in the forum. Then we can publish it later.
 
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.
 
We'll have to do a test because I don't know if you will have access to the post after I make it invisible.
PM me ahead of time so I know when you will post it, then I'll wait until you are done, then I can hide it.
Unfortunately we don't have a way to save a draft yet.
 
You know what, just post it in the PlayOnLinux forum or even the random nonsense forum, then I can move it to the Guides forum when you are done.
 
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