Posted September 19, 2017
I just finished changing the way I run wine (yet again), and, while testing, found some games that were different and decided to retest every single GOG game I own (way too many, even though I have no money -- I guess I prefer games over feeding myself). Net result: 6 previously untested games broken, 9 games that used to work don't any more, 3 that were flaky are now at least sort of playable, and 4 games work that used to not work (one of which has taken me so long to fix, that it's no longer even for sale here any more). Also, dosbox, in spite of not changing in years, seems flakier than it used to be, affecting a large number of games. And e-uae is broken/deprecated/unmaintained, so now my Amiga games (and old Amiga desktop) have to run in fs-uae (thankfully, they still work) (yes, GOG doesn't sell any of the games I play as Amiga games, but sometimes the DOS versions are just too painful).
Summary: 18 games don't work in wine, 9 Linux "native" games don't work (5 of which work in wine, so you could call that 4). Of the wine games that work, 20 games won't play videos, 11 games' editors don't work, 3 games have no in-game sound at all, 3 games have no music, and 3 are so brittle they are liable to break if you look at them funny. Actually, strike that, apparently all these games are so brittle they'll break eventually.
To make it all worse, mesa-17.2 is once again broken on my system (or, at least, more obviously broken than 17.1), and I don't have the patience to git-bisect and report it any more. Last time it took 2 releases for anyone to even notice my bug report, anyway, and rather than fix it, they just removed the feature entirely for my chipset. I guess this newly introduced defect doesn't affect anyone but me, given that it was broken throughout the 17.2-rc cycle, and is still broken in 17.2.1.
Net loss, I guess. This took way too long to do. In retrospect, I spend more time trying to make games work than I do actually playing games. Is that because this is really the one true game? I sure spend enough time doing it. I guess I must really love that sort of thing, since I've been playing a similar game with my OS for over 25 years now (Even my current system has packages I've been forced to drop, and still has 7 packages that refuse to build unless I give them love -- like the other 77 packages I currently have to maintain myself).
Thing is, I'm tired of this game. Maybe it's time for me to switch to the one true OS: Windows. At least then all of my games will work, right? Oh, wait, I guess not: 90% of the posts on this site complain about stuff not working on Windows, either. I guess the only real solution is to force software publishers to release their source code when they abandon their software, so people who actually are interested in running it can fix it without having to reverse engineer and/or reimplement from scratch.
Sorry for the rant. I guess I felt the need to vent somewhere. Time to go back to the rock I was hiding under, and maybe play a game (grrr... or not - 3 boss battles in a row, each harder than the last, with no save in between and unskippable cutscenes before and in the middle - bastards).
Summary: 18 games don't work in wine, 9 Linux "native" games don't work (5 of which work in wine, so you could call that 4). Of the wine games that work, 20 games won't play videos, 11 games' editors don't work, 3 games have no in-game sound at all, 3 games have no music, and 3 are so brittle they are liable to break if you look at them funny. Actually, strike that, apparently all these games are so brittle they'll break eventually.
To make it all worse, mesa-17.2 is once again broken on my system (or, at least, more obviously broken than 17.1), and I don't have the patience to git-bisect and report it any more. Last time it took 2 releases for anyone to even notice my bug report, anyway, and rather than fix it, they just removed the feature entirely for my chipset. I guess this newly introduced defect doesn't affect anyone but me, given that it was broken throughout the 17.2-rc cycle, and is still broken in 17.2.1.
Net loss, I guess. This took way too long to do. In retrospect, I spend more time trying to make games work than I do actually playing games. Is that because this is really the one true game? I sure spend enough time doing it. I guess I must really love that sort of thing, since I've been playing a similar game with my OS for over 25 years now (Even my current system has packages I've been forced to drop, and still has 7 packages that refuse to build unless I give them love -- like the other 77 packages I currently have to maintain myself).
Thing is, I'm tired of this game. Maybe it's time for me to switch to the one true OS: Windows. At least then all of my games will work, right? Oh, wait, I guess not: 90% of the posts on this site complain about stuff not working on Windows, either. I guess the only real solution is to force software publishers to release their source code when they abandon their software, so people who actually are interested in running it can fix it without having to reverse engineer and/or reimplement from scratch.
Sorry for the rant. I guess I felt the need to vent somewhere. Time to go back to the rock I was hiding under, and maybe play a game (grrr... or not - 3 boss battles in a row, each harder than the last, with no save in between and unskippable cutscenes before and in the middle - bastards).
