If he means “4th gen and GBA”, that’d work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_generation_of_video_game_consoles
That has it as Genesis and SNES era.
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They didn’t track before the introduction of cable boxes with phone-home capabilities, at any rate.
182·6 days agoI’m not entirely enthusiastic about the fact that the maintaining GitHub account is using an avatar that appears to be a flaming Pepe.
2·6 days agoresembling ancient Greek/Roman painting
The style I suspect that you’re thinking of, if you’re talking about the stuff on pottery, is one of:
21·8 days agoso the screen saver comes on in 20 minutes or my machine goes to sleep after an hour while I play. I haven’t figured out how to stop it yet.
The way I have my system set up is to not power-off the monitor unless the screensaver is up, but if it is, to flip the power off in pretty short order. I manually trigger the screensaver. So I don’t know what people who do auto-locking and all do today.
kagis
https://github.com/foresto/joystickwake
This appears to do this on Xorg and Wayland for various screensavers and environments. I have not used it myself. I don’t know if it’s been packaged by anyone in Mint, though – I don’t see a package in Debian trixie, and if this site is the package repo for Mint – I know that there are variations of Mint – then I don’t see it there. You can build, install, and set it up to run manually, I suppose.
I do see a reference to an Ubuntu package in a PPA at the bottom of their main page. One variant of Mint is based on Ubuntu; I don’t know whether that means that one can get away with using Ubuntu packages or not.
All of these are complaints specific to wireless controllers (auto-shutoff to conserve battery, battery life, some sort or Bluetooth connectivity issue). Have you considered getting a wired, USB controller? Or using your existing one in USB mode, which most wireless controllers support?
Hmm.
For the early titles listed, when the games came out, Linux was pretty irrelevant from a gaming standpoint.
Later, many games that had cross-platform releases used engines that provided cross-platform compatibility. Those games would have been written to the platform, so I’m sure that ports weren’t as easy.
Now, the games are very elderly. The original team will be long gone. I don’t know if there’s anyone working on those at all – unless a game represents some kind of continued revenue stream, there isn’t a lot of reason to keep engineers on a game.
WINE runs them fine, so there’s a limited return for Blizzard to do a native port. In fact, as I recall, Starcraft was one of the first notable games that WINE ran…I remember Starcraft support being a big deal around 2001, IIRC. The original Warcraft was for DOS, so you can run that in a DOS emulator.
I doubt that the investment in a Linux-native port in 2025 is going to get much of a return relative to what other things one could do with the same resources.
I guess maybe I could see an argument for World of Warcraft, as a very successful, long-running MMORPG that still has players and still represents revenue. But I think that I’d be surprised to see native ports of most of their earlier library.
I mean, he’s using Linux, so it’d run on Proton. I’m pretty sure that it just fires right up. I don’t think that I did anything special myself.
Getting Mod Organizer 2 set up to mod it or something like that might be more-obnoxious on Linux, but honestly, I’d say that Linux plus Proton might compare favorably against current Windows when it comes to backwards compatibility on older games. I’ve read a bunch of Steam descriptions where there are a bunch of upset reviews from people saying that they can’t get a game working on current Windows, and it just runs on Proton without problems or configuration for me.
Fallout: New Vegas lists an ATI X1300XT as the minimum and 2GB of RAM. That card has a Passmark score of 69. I’d guess that he’d probably be more than fine.
IIRC, New Vegas was really CPU-constrained, too, not GPU-constrained, and the systems he’s using are probably pretty comparable to any other system from the time CPU-wise – it’s just that they don’t have discrete 3D hardware.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/17410/Mirrors_Edge/
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or better
1GB RAM or more
The GeForce 6800 has a Passmark score of 113 and he’s fine on memory, so, yeah, I’d give decent odds that it’d probably run well on his system.
Well, it depends. I mean, I play rather newer games that I suspect either can handle fine, but they’re light on 3D rendering.
Nova Drift is one favorite.
That exited Early Access this year. I play it regularly. But…it just uses 3D hardware for some lightweight effects.
goes to see what minimum system requirements are
Yeah, that actually lists your older Intel integrated GPU, the one on the MacBook, as being the minimum requirement.
CPUs haven’t advanced all that rapidly for quite some years, so games that are CPU-bound are also less of an issue than those GPU-bound.
EDIT: And some games won’t use 3D hardware at all. I also regularly play Rule the Waves 3, which is a 2023 naval warfare military simulator that doesn’t use 3D hardware at all.
EDIT2: I’ve also played Balatro recently, and that just uses the barest of 3D hardware to do stuff like stick rotated sprites on the screen. They just say “integrated graphics” on their system requirements. That’s a 2024 release.
I’ve run it without issues, on a much newer system.
I don’t know why it wouldn’t run at all, but as you point out, you’re running it on a pair of pretty low-end systems. One is from six years prior to the game’s release without discrete video, and the other came out in the same year, but is a very low-end system with no discrete video card; those things aren’t really aimed at playing 3d games. I don’t think that you’d likely be happy with performance even if it ran.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/
Windows:
Minimum:
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 660, Radeon R7 370 or equivalent with 2 GB of video RAMRecommended:
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce 970, Radeon RX 580 or equivalent with 4GB of video RAMMac:
Minimum:
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: 4GB AMD Radeon Pro 5300M, Radeon Pro 560X or betterMy experience is that minimum requirements tend to be kind of optimistic.
The minimum system requirements specify a discrete video card.
You’ve got an 8GB RAM Surface Go with a non-discrete GPU and no VRAM, and a 16GB RAM Macbook also with a non-discrete GPU that had been around for six years prior to the game’s release.
I’ve never returned a game, but IIRC Steam does have a refund policy for a short period of time after purchase, so if you buy a game and it doesn’t run, you can refund it.
goes looking
https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn’t meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn’t like it.
It doesn’t matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours.
The Steam refund offer, within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime, applies to games and software applications on the Steam store.
EDIT: Here’s a Passmark comparison of your two Intel integrated video things and the lowest-end video card they list in their system requirements, a Geforce GTX 660. This gives a score to give a rough idea of how they’d compare in relative terms:
GeForce GTX 660: 4013
Intel HD 4000: 348
Intel HD 615: 705I mean, you might get it running, but I’m skeptical that you’d have a good experience with it.
EDIT2:
Their “recommended” card is a GeForce GTX 970. Adding that:
GeForce GTX 970: 9634
EDIT3: Hmm. I’ve never really thought about it, but you’d think that Valve could get minimum requirements plonked into a database, and then have the Steam client, which can see your hardware – assuming that you’re shopping from the Steam client – warn you on the game page if your system doesn’t meet them.
and uses btrfs send/receive to create backups.
I’m not familiar with that, but if it permits for faster identification of modified data since a given time than scanning a filesystem for modified files, which a filesystem could potentially do, that could also be a useful backup enabler, since now your scan-for-changes time doesn’t need to be linear in the number of files in the filesystem. If you don’t do that, your next best bet on Linux – and this way would be filesystem-agnostic – is gonna require something like having a daemon that runs and uses inotify to build some kind of on-disk index of modifications since the last backup, and a backup system that can understand that.
looks at btrfs-send(1) man page
Ah, yeah, it does do that. Well, the man page doesn’t say what time it runs in, but I assume that it’s better than linear in file count on the filesystem.
You’re correct and probably the person you’re responding to is treating one as an alternative as another.
However, theoretically filesystem snapshotting can be used to enable backups, because they permit for an instantaneous, consistent view of a filesystem. I don’t know if there are backup systems that do this with btrfs today, but this would involve taking a snapshot and then having the backup system backing up the snapshot rather than the live view of the filesystem.
Otherwise, stuff like drive images and database files that are being written to while being backed up can just have a corrupted, inconsistent file in the backup.
It doesn’t appear to be set
Ah, okay. Bit of a long shot.
and additionally I don’t appear to have the libgl1-mesa-swx11 package mentioned in that post.
You shouldn’t need it – that’s for software rendering.
You might want libgl1-mesa-glx, but it sounds from that page like that was restructured prior to your distro release.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1517352/issues-installing-libgl1-mesa-glx
ibgl1-mesa-glx has been a transitional package for a while and is now obsolete from Ubuntu 23.10 and onwards.
Installing libgl1 and libglx-mesa0 instead of libgl1-mesa-glx will result in equivalent behaviour and should work on Ubuntu 18.04 and newer.
Both libgl1:amd64 and libglx-mesa-0:amd64 are installed on my system. Are they installed on yours? If not, if they are available in your apt repo, maybe do so and see if your problems disappear?
How do I even know if I’m using plasma?
It’s part of KDE, if you’re using that. The default in Fedora is GNOME, but you may have selected KDE when installing Fedora.
I don’t, myself, use KDE, so I’m afraid that I can’t describe what it looks like.
how do I apply that flag?
It looks like the convention is for the display manager to source /etc/profile and files in /etc/profile.d prior to starting the desktop environment.
So, as root, create a text file called something like /etc/profile.d/plasma-triplebuffer-fix.sh that contains:
export KWIN_DRM_DISABLE_TRIPLE_BUFFERING=1Then log out and log in again. If it’s worked correctly, then that environment variable will set set in all programs after you’ve logged in: if you run, in a shell,
set|grep KWIN_DRMand it should show that value set.If it doesn’t fix the problem, then just go ahead and delete the file.
EDIT: If you are using Plasma, I’d check the version first, because they say that they’re gonna have a workaround in 6.1.3.
Ah, neat, thanks.
However I most often use my laptop plugged into an ultrawide monitor and when I do that with the Nvidia driver active all sorts of strangle artifacts show up on the screen and the edges go black and shudder, this slowly gets worse over the course of about 15 minutes until I cannot use the laptop at all and need to reboot.
Is this in games?
I’m guessing, but that might be your GPU overheating, and the laptop not having sufficient cooling to keep it from doing so and/or the fan settings not being aggressive enough. I assume that the monitor is a higher refresh rate and/or resolution than your laptop’s display, which is why you’re using it.
Does the problem go away if you set the external monitor to a low resolution/refresh rate?
EDIT: If so, while I don’t have experience with the utility myself, it looks like it’s possible to adjust throttling on Nvidia GPUs via the
nvidia-smiutility (nvidia-smi -pl), if you can’t improve the cooling situation.
Those are all mature systems, and I’d say that rankings for games on old systems are reasonably consensus at this point. You can just search for “best system whatever games” and get lists, look for games in genres you like; I’ve had luck doing that in the past, as that avoids a lot of the chaff.
I personally probably have gone back and played Super Metroid the most on the SNES, but depends on what one likes. If you like RPGs from that era, different set of games.
For this ranking of SNES games, as an example:
https://www.ign.com/lists/top-100-snes-games/92
I’d say that probably those games are going to cluster near the top of any list of SNES games.