Would be cool to see it support libraries outside the Steam ecosystem and have it as a general Wine platform. Would be nice to use it with some GOG games.
This is huge. I wonder if they saw poor sales for their previous windows devices and were like… well what if we put linux on it? I am tempted to preorder…
Ayaneo (and GPD) have been doing pretty well for the past few years. Well before Valve dipped their toe into the PC handheld market.
It is mostly that Valve have demonstrated the viability of linux for gaming (in large part to preserve their de facto monopoly on PC gaming as MS find ways to convince people to put up with GFWL…). Which means Ayaneo (and GPD) potentially have a way to not have to factor in windows licenses with all of their SKUs.
Games for Windows Live hasn’t been a thing in years. You talking about Xbox Game Pass?
I think of Valve’s Linux efforts as more opening up the PC market than anything else. A ton of their efforts end up being upstreamed, which gives other vendors a chance to develop their own OSes based on Linux and have it actually be viable. More Linux and less Windows is a plus in my book.
Say it with me everyone: Companies aren’t your friends.
I think Valve’s work on proton and the like have gone a long way toward making linux viable for “normal” users. But they are very much doing this because they don’t want to give up their giant slice of the pie to MS.
That’s true. Valve isn’t a “good” companie. But honestly, just because a corporation made it, and open sourced it, it isn’t bad. Also you still have to honor them for doing what they did. It doesn’t matter why they did it, but more what they did.
Yeah they aren’t your friends, but they can be the enemy of your enemy, and that’s exactly what’s happening now. Plus you have to look at the end results of their actions. Yes Valve’s Linux efforts may be self-serving, but it also benefits the community as a whole. You can’t say the same about Microsoft. That’s a big difference IMHO.
Judging from their history of rapid releases, I’d say this is more a matter of just throwing it out there to see if it sticks because “why not?”
Worst case, it fails, they’re out a little bit of capital, but can just as easily swap it over to Windows and keep selling it that way. Best case, they’ve opened the market up that little bit more for themselves.
Actually, I think they are. At least the parent company was always infogrames.
They started as infogrames, then they acquired Atari and started calling themselves that. Then they spun off a new publishing label using the infogrames name again. The problem is keeping track of what infogrames of today, used to be? They’ve acquired so much shit over the years that’s it’s a freaking mess.
awful name, there is some unrelated VNC software thing (which is vaguely similar idea of remote desktop) and the name also just sounds like a Tetris clone (because there is one called Netris)
This has become a bit of a rollercoaster here. Looks like 2048 peaked around 2014, according to Google Trends. Apple Arcade launched 5 years later. So it turns out that it doesn’t line up.
The reason 2048 took over was probably because Threes was only on iOS for a while, and because 2048 was available as a free, ad-supported game while Threes was only available as a paid game.
I got Threes back around Android release, and 2048 was already huge.
Being stuck for a while on iOS was its initial problem.
The Android port took quite a bit of time to happen which means 2048 had time to eclipse it for many people. And when it finally was on Android, It probably struggled more there for being a paid game when 2048 was free with ads what’s wrong with you people, it costs as much as 2 coffees and ads are fucking annoying.
It’s been available on both iOS and Android for years before Arcade was a thing.
I reached the same conclusion. But at the end of the day it’s your system, if losing Gamepass doesn’t bother you go ahead and install SteamOS. I did see a few people say that it is somewhat buggy and that Bazzite is still better for the Ally.
Not really. The Ship of Harkinian ports are based on decompilations, which is where you reverse engineer some equivalent source code using the final binary as a reference point. Then, you can port that source code to anything else you can build for, like a PC, phone, Wii U or Dreamcast.
Recompilation, which is what this project is, is closer to (and some have gone as far as to say that it is) emulation. It's taking the final binary and then, without actually working backward to get source code, translating the raw instructions directly into code that compiles for a different platform.
It's kind of difficult to get across the difference without being familiar with what both are doing behind the scenes, because the result is obviously similar. Both require human intervention, but decompilation is the more labor-intensive approach, while recompilation is somewhat more automated.
The advantage of former is that you end up with a relatively human-readable codebase to work with, while the latter doesn't bring you any closer to understanding how the game works internally. Both ultimately allow for porting the game to new platforms. Decompilation will almost certainly result in a more optimized final game, because it avoids the overhead of "emulating" the original architecture. However, for the same reason, recompilation can be generalized to other games that originally ran on the same hardware.
Thank you for the detailed explanation! I had thought Ship was decompiling and recompiling it into its own package, but what you describe makes more sense.
Ship of Harkinian does indeed get recompiled but the steps before recompilation are more accurately described as decompiling.
The Majoras Mask recomp might be better described as “automated recompilation”, implying there was no/limited human involvement in the _de_compilation step first.
So similar to how WINE works then? This is taking the MM binary and building a wrapper around it that translates it’s system calls into something generic?
That's closer but rather than being a wrapper, it takes the original architecture's instructions (MIPS in the case of N64) and generates a C/C++ function which implements that instruction. Then you call those functions in the same sequence as the original compiled machine code ran instructions.
That's a relatively inefficient way to make a port, because you're basically reimplementing the original CPU in software, hence why some have described it as emulation. At the same time though, most recompiled games are like 15-20 years old, so a bit of overhead on a modern PC isn't going to hurt you too much.
But anyway, unlike WINE, the original binary is not used any more after recompilation. Instead, you have a native binary for the target platform, the translation having occurred at the time of recompilation (when you built the port binary).
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