Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton

Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by ansible on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @10:21AM (#18968833)

That's great news and all. And I salute all the people who have put tremendous time and effort into getting Windows games to run on Linux.

Sadly, I gave up, and installed Windows on my PC, entirely replacing Linux.

I think I gave Linux gaming a good try. Some of the titles in my catalog had native ports, which generally worked well.

Some Windows titles ran under Proton (or Wine) and worked well. (Dear Ester, Valve titles obviously)

Other Windows titles had issues, ranging from the minor (glitches: The Witcher 1, GTA IV) to significant (no controller support: BioShock 1).

In some cases, as with Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, the original release runs under Proton (no controller support though), but the Special Edition currently has game-breaking issues. And installing mods for Skyrim was going to be even more of a challenge than usual.

I was spending more time trying to get things running than actually playing games, so I gave up and switched.

Sorry...

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by dleslie on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @11:03AM (#18969214)

Ironically, I find that the older a game gets the more likely it is that I'll get it working on Linux with greater ease than it would be to run it on Windows 10.

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by kirion25 on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @11:29AM (#18969443)

This has been my experience as well. Quite a few old games have become buggy or simply unplayable under recent Windows versions, but play fine under Wine. The most common symptom is the game becoming extremely slow on more modern DirectX iterations, which can ironically often be solved by using Wine DLLs.

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by int_19h on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:58PM (#18973512)

There was one very ironic case with an old (1999) game that has been having issues on Win10. A long time ago, I used to run this game on Linux with Wine, and ran into a very similar issue back then, so I made a patch for the game. So I figured I'd try the same patch on Win10, and what do you know - it works.

The amusing part is that I don't remember what the patch actually does. I mean, it replaces a bunch of opcodes with NOP, but I have no idea what. I vaguely recall spending a day in IDA Pro to find those bytes, but nothing about the details.

The really amusing part is that game developers haven't figured out what the problem is, either, and so my who-knows-what-it-does patch is a semi-officially blessed solution for now:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/61500/discussions/0/215439774...

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by dleslie on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @11:54AM (#18979940)

Such a good series. I didn't really _feel_ it with the third, though.

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by innocenat on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:36PM (#18970242)

Funnily, when I was trying to get a 16-bit game to run, my final (and easiest) solution was to SSH to a linux machine, run it under wine, and do X tunneling back to my Windows system.

Works like charm.

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:43PM (#18970315)

DOSBox with Win 3.11 usually works well for these cases.

From what I understand, Microsoft could have totally kept 16bit application compatibility in 64bit Windows, but didn't for some reason. Apparently someone out there even compiled a version of NTVDM that works on Win 10 64-bit using leaked code or something.

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by metalliqaz on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @10:25AM (#18968881)

For my entire life, I have used Windows on my PC, and accessed Unix and Linux machines via PuTTY. My games and web browsers always just work, as do my programming tasks on the servers. I've never understood why this isn't recommended more. Windows and SSH, it's great!

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by lloeki on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @10:45AM (#18969065)

PuTTY is not a good terminal emulator by any stretch of the imagination. I have only tolerated that setup because of emergency situations.

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by metalliqaz on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:25PM (#18970105)

Fine, use your own. But PuTTY is free and easy to install, and it is enough to open the SSH connection that can then be used to launch any terminal emulator you want.

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by stuxnet79 on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @11:53AM (#18969680)

With the new Windows Subsystem for Linux you don't even have to use PuTTY anymore. The new improvements from Microsoft have come close to convincing me to switch back to Microsoft as my daily driver.

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Re:Valve Breaks the Shackles of Proton by erikdared on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:06PM (#18970565)

You can actually install OpenSSH natively now: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...

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