There are a lot of good reasons for secure boot both in game and in general. If your distro does not support it then that should be a complaint directed towards the maintainers. And… getting that through Proton is a different mess.
But EA have been spending the past year or so actively updating older Battlefields (I want to say all the way back to 3?) to actively block linux/proton. For whatever reason, they actively want to block anything but Windows for their games.
Secure boot can be used as part of a chain that eventually ends with unlocking your cryptographic keys only if the software stack has not been modified.
Sure, for most people that’ll make little difference, but it is an actual benefit.
First, Yo. Doesn’t even need to be a good password.
Second, what you are describing is something very different. Outside of very rare situations (most of which theoretical or specifically targeting a specific system by a state level actor), to be able to “boot the bios and disable it” would generally mean the machine is already VERY compromised or the bad actor has physical access to the machine.
A good way of thinking of it is that secure boot isn’t the lock on the door. It is the peephole that you look through to make sure that the person with your pizzas is from Georgio’s AND you actually ordered pizza. Rather than just opening the door because “Yo, free food”.
On its own? It doesn’t do much. But it goes a LONG way towards improving security when combined with other tools/practices.
Works for something like PSN. I see cards for sale in local shops. They can presumably be used to claim some funny money in the service that you can pay with.
Steam could probably do the same, but would suck for a smaller operation.
There used to be some cash to BTC machines that would work with any service.
A gift card isn't cash, legally or literally. Gift cards also require processors. So this could happen again with gift cards, just with a different set of processing companies.
So what's your answer? Cheques, money orders, cash in the mail? Or maybe MasterCard, Visa, and their ilk shouldn't legally be allowed to limit legal purchases that haven't been flagged as fraud.
Any gift card still needs to be processed by a processor, who could get all up in arms just like MasterCard and Visa.
I mentioned digital transactions because that's what has been restricted in essentially all cases. They don't seem to care if you buy porn in person, they just don't want you buying porn online.
FINAL FANTASY TACTICS - The Ivalice Chronicles launches Tuesday, September 30th, 2025 for Nintendo Switch™ 2, Nintendo Switch™, PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam®, and is available for pre-order now
You’re in luck, Square Enix is finally giving up that exclusivity
Even the one I enjoyed the least (mgs iv) still had several fantastic moments and would still gladly pay for full price for. I will gladly pre-order things from a fair number of devs personally
Can’t watch now so not sure what’s in the video, but Lands of Lore 2 was quite fancy.
Had a parchment scroll-like UI with animated burning transitions, did creepy chants at you to test stereo sound.
Funny thing, it tested your CD-ROM drive speed too (it used to matter). Of course on a modern PC, you’d have the whole game on your (much faster) hard drive and simulate an optical drive with DOSBox or something. The installer runs its test and literally says : “Wow, your drive is fast!”
That’s neat, quite different from old installers not recognizing newer hardware properly (who can blame the devs after several decades?) and instead stating that the game would not work. There was a German gaming magazine (Computer Bild Spiele) that always put a system check in front of game installers (even software installers) on their discs that would compare your system to the title’s minimum specs, using a simple stoplight (green=far exceeds requirements, yellow=just meets them, red=below minimum specs). It’s kind of similar to modern online services like “Can You Run It”.
I tried to install a very old game from one of these discs recently and it didn’t quite know what to make of the hardware. IIRC, my 32 GB of RAM was more than the developers of this check anticipated and it reported that I didn’t have enough RAM (the game needed 32 MB).
A 32 but integer can store a number up to four billion. If measuring RAM size in integer bytes, 32GB would be 0 bytes, because that integer would wrap around four times.
Assuming windows, if you right click on the executable, you may be able to choose to run it in a compatibility mode of some sort (like XP mode or something) in which case it should report smaller memory to the game, probably.
Good analysis, but I checked again and must have either misremembered or different versions of the same test were different in this regard: Upon running one of these again (this one is from 2002), it reported 32 GB of RAM as 2 GB of RAM and gave the system the green light. Notice how it also reported a fabulously high speed for the (virtual) CD-ROM drive:
I never thought that this compatibility mode would limit the amount of memory that is available to an application. In fact, this is the case with all other working compatibility modes as well (Vista, 7, 8 - 95 and 98/ME don’t work with this application).
Now I’m curious what your criteria are. Do none of the shaders shown in the video appeal to you? To me at least, they look remarkably close to several types of old CRT TVs that I remember.
I only know of filters in emulators I’ve used for nes, super nes, Genesis, gb advance, dolphan, duckstation, and whatever other emulators over the years.
I’m currently toying around with ares (the only fully cycle-accurate SNES emulator) and it has a lovely selection of CRT shaders (that are also available for other emulators). Try out crt-maximus-royale (or the half-res-mode variant). At least to me, the latter looks perfect, with just the right amount of blur, distortion, bloom and scanlines - and it comes with lovely details, like the bezel reflecting the image in real time and speaker grills filling the rest of the screen.
Someone uploaded a gallery with various games to reddit that shows just how versatile this shader is:
His videos used to be pretty good, but his RE4 "comparison" one was pretty much 40 minutes of strawman arguments from someone that hates change. I'm not hopeful at all for this video here considering DRDR turned out really good as well.
The innovation vs stagnation debate has been had across all sectors, but it’s imo also an effect of cost-cutting and risk-minimization. Every time something new fails, you lose money, which means you have to cut more somewhere else if you want to keep your profit margin the same. So instead, you don’t try new things, you fire your creatives, you make every product more safe and bland.
Of course that’s a bad plan, but that’s where being drawn to reuse and reboots and endless sequels comes from.
We can’t fix stagnation until we fix mindless profit-seeking to appease mindless demands for infinite stock price growth.
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