Moving to Linux soon, and wondering how pirated games work with it. I know about proton with steam and lutris for most bought games, but how would I run pirated windows games over there?
I use Lutris for this. It makes configuration simpler. The problem is that your crack or patch might not work because it’s shit or because wine/proton doesn’t like it, and it’s not easy to figure out why.
Jc141 on 1337x and LinuxRulez on torrminatorr have repacks specifically meant to work on linux. You just have to run their bash scripts and it auto decompresses the files and sets everything up for you. Make sure to follow jc141 setup guide on github to make sure you have all the dependencies installed. https://github.com/jc141x/jc141-bash/blob/master/setup/readme.md
For Fitgirl and Dodi repacks, Lutris is probably the easiest. I usually setup my folders similar to jc141. GameName with 2 subfolders called game and prefix. The game folder is my working directory and my prefix folder is my prefix directory. This allows me to have different wine prefixes for each game in case some games have extra dependencies that mess with other games. I point Lutris to the installer exe and run the install then afterwards I switch it to the game exe. I usually use WineGE instead of the default Lutris option for the prefixes.
For KaOsKrew, I use a windows VM with QEMU to unpack and use sftp to transfer the files because I haven't had any luck with getting their installer to work. I do the same with Fitgirl and Dodi repacks that have unarc errors during decompression. Then its just setting up with Lutris as normal.
You can also add non Steam games to Steam and make them use proton, I've only had to do this once with RE0, I couldn't get it to run any other way.
r/linuxcracksupport might be helpful and I think they have a matrix chat too.
I've recently been convinced to try Linux again because it's so easy etc but I didn't about repacks and fuck, why does it seem so complicated? Windows, 2 clicks of a button and it's done…
Here's your why: https://lemmy.world/comment/4119679
This is kind of another problem, why can't we have self-contained one click things anymore. Nowadays its all about dependency hell, cloud based stuff and whatnot. It doesn't matter if you're under Windows or Linux still the same crap, long gone are the days when we could get a game on a CD/DVD and be able to install that offline for ever. There should be laws in place against this, software is becoming very "volatile" mostly unreliable and unusable after months or years.
There is AppImages. There's also tools to package games as AppImages with Wine.
Oh AppImages the thing that takes 20 seconds to launch an Application :) What a great option. Not even Joplin launches as an AppImage in a decent time. For what's worth Flatpak was a godsend. Either solutions still have the issues I described before tho.
AppImage launch times should be not that far off of running it barebone unless you have a MASSIVE appimage, as it uses FUSE, but I get your frustration, especially on slower hardware.
AppImage launch times should be not that far off of running it barebone unless you have a MASSIVE appimage
They are and I guess Joplin isn't that big. Flatpaks are way, way faster and make the same thing… but better in all ways. i7 8th gen with NVME btw.
For jc141 and LinuxRulez it really is just 2 clicks once you have the dependencies installed. Your distro will already have most stuff installed but if you follow along with the jc141 setup they basically cover nearly every option that someone might need to get their repacks to just work.
I just checked and it took 16 clicks within Lutris to install a Fitgirl repack, not counting the Fitgirl install setup part.
I'd personally much prefer to do that than to have to deal with Windows and Microsoft but thats just because I care more about online privacy and can't stand monopolies more than the average person.
To make it even easier, instead of using Lutris you could just install them as non Steam games in Steam, again I probably would just use Steam to install them if I didn't care about privacy and stuff.
I don't see these things as a linux issue but more so as a monopoly issue. Microsoft has gone decades doing everything they can to ensure Windows is what people think of when they think of computers and its worked.
Microsoft has gone decades doing everything they can to ensure Windows is what people think of when they think of computers and its worked.
I agree, I think Google has done an even better job brainwashing people to the point that any search online is considered 'Googling', still makes me cringe to hear ppl unknowingly shill for a corporate monopoly without even consciously knowing they are a walking advert for Alphabet's data harvesting empire.
Oh yeah I get it. And I'm not adverse to learning new things. If anything I'm interested in moving to Linux to learn something new but as I mentioned on another post for me it's about time. Between work and 3 kids, I don't have much of it, not enough to barely do the things I want to do but maybe one day. If I make the switch to Linux, I need everything that I have going on Windows now, to just work.
If you already got steam set up, just add your pirated game as a non-steam game.
If you'd want some more control about the environment a game runs in (e.g tooling like DXVK), I suggest bottles, it's a tool designed to more easily manage Wine installations and dependencies.
They have their own compatibility layer called "Soda" based on the same tech that Proton uses, just with less of a gaming focus out-of-the-box. They recommend installing through Flatpak, a software management tool that's available by default on many Linux distributions, but note that you'd wanna give it access to your games folder (wherever you wanna put that) or your entire home-folder using Flatseal
Wow now thats really cool. Im curious if this would work well with Ilok.
The main reason im not switching atm is because i make music and unfortunately some of the plugins i use require Ilok. Regardless if it does, def interesting! Thanks for sharing.
what is Ilok?
If it happens to be FL Studio-related, then I am pleased to inform that FL Studio is reported to run pretty well and can be automatically installed with Bottles (https://usebottles.com/app/#flstudio)
if ya need help setting it up, just ask here or find me somewhere else
Ilok is a license manager used by some vst or plugins to pervent piracy. It sucks. Its not based on any DAW or anything like that.
Ive been doing research on whether it can be run using things like wine but it seems to break pretty easily if wine updates.
I recommend using this amazing ressource: https://github.com/jc141x/portal for games already repacked for linux and ready to run with a simple bash script.
Why do jc141 releases use DwarFS, instead of more typical compression formats like tarballs?
From their Github: Q: Why use the dwarfs format? It makes it less convenient for users. A: Our purpose is to serve a community which is involved enough to be able to follow a short setup page. It enables us to provide users with new technological features that we find useful.
Thank you, and sorry - I made sure to read the FAQ, but I couldn't find the answer for this specific question.
No worries, I actually did not find it either even tho I had read it before. Seems that they removed it from the FAQ but it is still in the search results.
So why aren't they packing the games as flatpaks with their dependencies all baked in?
You can ask them on their Matrix Support Group
I think I remember one of them saying its because some games can be decompressed "on the fly" with DwarFS. So their mindset is the user doesn't have 2 copies of the game, compressed and decompressed, which saves space but also increases the chance that the user will continue to seed the files. Instead of someone downloading the archive, decompressing it and deleting the archive and just keeping the game files which can't be seeded.
You can just add games to your steam library and run it like any other steam game
On steam deck I just install them with Steam forcing it to run in proton. Works great
Use bottles for Linux , its just a great experience using that software I am already playing Far Cry Primal and Battlefield 1
Thread hijack:
Has anyone found a Tony Hawk PS1+2 file? Not about to pay $40 for some online-only BS.
vimm.net has it, the megathread has a lot of good resources
Which megathread?
it's on the sidebar, but here's a direct link to it: https://rentry.co/megathread
I'm so very confused.
Vimm.net seems to be entirely comprised of emulators.
I found it on c/crackwatch. It links to this predb site which prompts you to download a text file that has the same instructions in it as the website. The first instruction says "extract". Extract what? It also says I have to change firewall settings so the game can't connect to the internet and I've no idea how to do that.
I don't see Tony Hawk or any other games on that megathread site.
All these torrent sites just seem to link back and forth to each other.
Search results for a good place to find Torrents turn up nothing but VPN ads.
vimm.net has emulators, but they also have Playstation 1 - 3 games under the Vault section.
I was looking for the new Steam game…
man I thought you meant the tony hawk games for the playstation 1 and 2
vimm is for old console/handheld games. on the megathread link go to the games section, go to ones of the torrent sites in general purpose and look up tony hawk
ones of the torrent sites
Great, thanks…
If you can't click 3-5 links within the megathread rentry link and search for one the game you want on lets say 1337, then maybe paying is more your speed
Not sure if you are allowed to post direct links here but when I want pirated steam games I always go to https://cs.rin.ru/forum
Search for the game, click on its thread and browse the pages until you find a good crack or repack (fitgirl, dodi and others posts their repacks on that site) or sometimes you will have to download the clean non cracked files on there and patch it yourself. Fortunately that's quite easy.
Here is a link to PS1+2: https://cs.rin.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=105415&hilit=Tony+hawk&start=150
The post by "Masquerade" looks promising.
PSA you need to make an account before links will show, and if the download is encrypted/locked, the password is always "cs.rin.ru" unless something else is specified.
NB: I obviously can't guarantee that the download is safe, but I would trust it. You could also check the other pages if someone you trust (like fitgirl) posted something
In most cases, the windows version will work with Lutris.
I remember I pirated God Of War and Days Gone and they worked fine.
You need to run the setup installation, and then select the game launcher (.exe) as executable.
As other have pointed out a majority of the time games are setup with Lutris. Essentially you create a new game, set a wine prefix so you have a Windows-like directory, then you select the installer as the executable before switching to the games executable. Sometimes you may need to limit the RAM usage of installers or check ProtonDB/PCGamingWiki.
These steps are the same steps you would use for CD games that don't have a (working) installer script or indie titles from places like itch.io.
JohnCena141 is in a few piracy Wiki's here and they focus specifically on native Linux titles. They're exclusively on 1337x as far as I'm aware.
wine i guess but Roblox will not work
It will now. You just have to do some poking. You need vinegar installed (It's on flathub if you're a flatpak user.) Tell wine to use vulkan instead of DXVK (mkdir -p ~/.var/app/io.github.vinegarhq.Vinegar/config/vinegar/ && { echo "[player]"; echo "dxvk = false"; echo "renderer = "Vulkan""; } >> ~/.var/app/io.github.vinegarhq.Vinegar/config/vinegar/config.toml ) for flatpak again. And then boom. roblox running. no issues.
saving this but after the switch Roblox Linux release could be next
Try portproton https://github.com/Castro-Fidel/PortWINE It works without steam
In all my years of pirating on Linux is the first time I've heard of this tool, could you give a brief description of it? Their Github isn't entirely clear and his website is completely in Russian.
It's create own folder with wine prefix.If simply talking when u click on exe file,pop up a new window with asking u which version of installed proton/wine to use and on what to run it vulkan/opengl/gallium-nine .it's automatically download the updates of dxvk and new version of proton-lg and proton-ge.And have very cool feature about adding shortcuts to main menu and ur desktop folder like it would be usual native program.It's also have wide customization about launch options and integrated vkBasalt as example
Sounds pretty interesting, definitely I'm gonna try it up.
I just do right click on the exe file and "open with wine". It works for me
Proton will make almost anything work. There are more than a few different approaches but if you need a gui/simplified all-in-one tool I can't recommend lutris enough.
just mount the .iso (if there is one) and run the installer (e.g. setup.exe) with WINE
Yeah sure and then it fails because some WINE compatibility issue or because you've to manually install half of Windows on Wine manually before being able to install anything useful.
Or you just use something like bottles
Ahahaha. I've tried them all, bare bones wine, bottles even the payed version of crossover and the thing is that they're all a fucking joke. Don't be delusional you know as well as I do those things don't provide a good experience nor a good result.
oh what are you saying? The largely volunteer-developed reimplementation of the entirety of the Windows / WIn32 API is not perfect? If only I had known!!1
Seriously, of course Wine is not perfect, but your dependency issues are largely minimised when using something like Bottles, which manages them for you. And saying that Wine never delivers a result is factually incorrect, even when just looking at compatibility rating for games, not even accounting for other software.
Bottles is not that much better. Crossover (payed) does a much better job but still it's funny to see how ReactOS that is 100% "volunteer-developed and a reimplementation of the entirety of the Windows API" performs much better with older Windows applications. I believe they even share code with Wine.
assuming that you're running WINE through the terminal you'll see if there's any error and usually it's pretty simple to find what you need to make the game run (if it doesn't already)
for starters get all the gst/gstreamer packages including the plugin ones (libav, good/bad/ugly, etc.) and make sure to have both 64 and 32bit versions.
get wine-mono (or directly install .net runtimes in your wineprefix, easily done with winetricks) and wine-gecko.
after that you basically just get whatever .dll or vcrun stuff as needed (following error messages), most easily done through winetricks
I will admit though, while using Linux Mint (instead of Arch Linux which I use on my home PC) at a relative's house I had some trouble at first because a) apt package manager sucks, b) the names of the packages were different, and c) wine-mono and wine-gecko packages didn't exist so I had to follow these instructions https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono & https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko
also just like how protondb is a really good resource to look up how well games will run on steam proton and tips on how to run them, there's https://appdb.winehq.org/
I wasn't saying it can be done, thing is the time and effort to make it work is way too much… and the end result tends to be poor. A Windows license costs close to nothing to most people (comes with computers, can be bought for 10$ in some places, pirated etc) and things work out of the box as expected, better ROI. Even if you've to virtualize and/or dual boot still easier.
I wasn’t saying it can be done, thing is the time and effort to make it work is way too much…
If you think it's too much time and effort for you, that's fair enough.
I obviously don't think it is or I wouldn't do it. Also something to note is it gets easier and faster with time as you have more things already installed and thus more games run out of the box, as well as just having the experience and know-how of what to do.
and the end result tends to be poor.
I'm not having poor end results compared to when I were using Windows, so that's just a you thing.
Only real notable fault for linux gaming is online multiplayer games with anti-cheat, and luckily for me I don't play those anyway.
Well one thing that hasn't been working that comes to mind is Frosty Tool Suite, a mod manager for Frostbite engine games, so I was unable to replay Dragon Age Inquisition with new mods on Linux.
That however isn't a game itself but a 3rd party mod manager, and technically I could get it too work by either using a NTFS formatted hard drive or some other tricks, but it seemed too much of a pain to deal with so I've left that on the back-burner.
