Chromecast

I don't usually get the latest TV/hi-fi tech. On a whim I bought the Jaffa-cake sized Chromecast dongle, stuck it into the ~2008 Philips TV set HDMI port and had a look. After running the Google Home app on my phone I could teach it the home network and then start "casting".

Even now I was mostly interested in seeing if this could cast the Linux desktop, and if it wouldn't, then I'd still have my Android phone for casting videos. Then it became the current TV watching solution.

Desktop 

But about that desktop casting. On Linux Mint 19.3, with Chromium browser I found no problem. I could also mirror the desktop or the browser window. This is very laggy (at least half a second) so it could work for showing slides or photos.

So I quickly learned the casting is really only supposed to be done with the "cast" icon and the desktop/browser casting is just a tiny added extra. Youtube obviously works. Yle Areena, the national streaming service, could cast a film and it looked rather fine. I didn't see any problem arising from the Linux environment here.

Outside the browser, VLC does cast too, but there's a problem with the subtitles and there are apparently no really good solutions to it. The only 100% working approach is "burn the titles prior to watching".

TV streaming

Ever since the TV transmissions turned digital (analog ended in 2007) I've been somewhat disappointed with upgrades and hopping between services, not that I bothered to do that really. The crappy bundle tied with the ISP had kept me somewhat happy, thinking this was the only way to meaningfully watch something on that old TV set.

But now the old me finally saw that channels such as Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Ruutu, Yle Areena etc. are also apps in the appstore, tied to a monthly subscription. Probably something like Apple TV+ isn't on a Google service, but otherwise the coverage on the Samsung phone looked quite good.

So I could subscribe to one and pick another when something interesting pops up. But it might also be I'm too lazy to unsubscribe the channels (which is what the companies hope for I guess).

Watching shows is easier than having to fiddle with the digi-receiver which even tended to crash-mid show if it hadn't been rebooted lately. And although I still need the TV remote control, the phone now becomes the remote, too.

It can be slightly annoying that different services use slightly different conventions.

Netflix appears to work flawlessly, and casting just the interface itself provides some useful information besides just the logo. Ok, so it might just be an ad for another show, but anyway. HBO Max exactly only shows the service logo on TV screen. With HBO Max I had to find where to adjust the subtitles, and when I got them to work the 'titles were of the somewhat ugly white-on-black box variety.

With HBO Max there might have been a tiny hiccup in the streaming too, something I never saw with the Netflix app. Could be the Max has more bits in the stream by default than the lowly Netflix subscription, however I turned off the phone energy saving and never saw the hiccup again. Occasionally, after viewing a show, the HBO app says it is "offline". Fortunately this did not affect watching the stream in any way.

Black Mesa

After I finished the basic original Quake levels on normal difficulty, I was still eager for some more primitive fps action. Without wanting to plunge into the next Quake chapters I turned my eye towards Half-Life 1 from 1998.

But then I remembered Half Life 1 had also been subjected to a sort of "remaster", the Black Mesa effort from Crowbar Collective, which had been made available as practically complete in early 2020.

The remastered Quake set some expectations to how an earlier game ought to be revisited. As a re-imagining of Half-Life 1, Black Mesa wavers between a remaster and a remake.

Is there a point in making a 1998 game look like it was 2006-ish game? This is at least partly due to the long, long development time. Years have passed and so-called AAA titles look even more gorgeous now, and in comparison this upheaval cannot really make Half Life look like a 2020s high-budget game in every aspect.

Still, in parts the game excels and surprises, like in the later Xen section, which has been boldly and lovingly remade into a gorgeous other-wordly environment, slightly reminiscent of Cameron's Avatar. Also, Half LIfe 2 has clearly been the visual guideline for the environments, and the look of that game has not aged badly at all.

It was only when I looked at a Half-Life 1 playthrough video I was reminded of how sparse and almost cartoon-like the original game looked.

I could not bring myself to buy the original HL1, so I can't comment much on the subtler gameplay differences between this game and something I last played more than a decade ago.

Suffice to say Black Mesa plays more like Half Life 2, and my first impressions were that this is HL2 but with more primitive levels, something I was not initially too comfortable with. I mean there's a lot more emphasis on Quake-style three-dimensional jumping and mazes, and a thematic repetition of "solve 3 sub-sections to unlock 1" style structuring. Making the environments and spaces larger sometimes adds to the time spent on finding your way around.

And the spaces are larger. Everything that was small is now grandiose, large and more naturalistic and filled with detail. This is very evident in some of the outdoor battles, and the rocket launch silo and control rooms now have the space they really deserve. 

You'd be forgiven for thinking the devs had reused the sound and speech materials of the original, but no, the music, sounds and dialogues are new and at places there is more dialogue. AI is different, and the weapon set, weapon behavior and availability of ammunition and such has also been changed.

Those eager to nostalgically revisit Half-Life 1 The Game, this might not quite be it. It might be something better, depending on how you feel.

It's obvious to me the game has grown in length, especially at the end. I put nearly 22 hours of gameplay into this according to Steam, more than I expected and perhaps wanted. I didn't stop for smelling roses and searching for secrets either.

Admittedly there were a couple of sections where I was enormously stuck for a better part of an hour just because I couldn't spot a ladder on the wall and the game seemed to lead me elsewhere (Office Complex anyone?). And this could be a minor downside of the added detail, it's not always obvious what is the main thing to look at. This problem is greatly alleviated by having the routes signposted in more or less subtle ways.

Some sections felt they had been shortened, such as the underground train ride. The playthrough video proved my memory correct, the section was longer and had more interactive elements. I'm really happy with this decision as that part of the original could be really annoying.

A minor gripe might be that I kept using the flashlight in many places as the environments were now so dark, and this doesn't always look too pretty.

The Xen levels felt initially impressive and motivated me to go on, although I felt some of the later sections were again exaggerated and overtly long. If only I'd checked the clock at that point, it might be interesting to know the percentage of game left upon entering Xen. Based on feeling it's like I've spent 1/3 or more of the game time in post-Xen environments.

Some of the areas like the trash compactor environments with conveyor belts and the Xen counterpart, just seem to go on and on and involves a lot of jumping and timing, as if the game was hard trying to be Manic Miner in 3D. This is another aspect that has been more softly handled in more recent games, even including Half-Life 2. Again, judging on the Half Life 1 playthrough videos, Black Mesa is more lenient about certain kinds of puzzles, and there may be less critically time-based jumping and swimming puzzles.

As I can play this natively on Linux, I was also interested about the performance. The game worked nicely on the 1060 with 1920x1020 resolution, with nearly highest settings on in every category. I did end up removing FXAA anti-aliasing and motion blur, the latter didn't seem to do much really.

The game crashed really early on, not a good sign, but this did not happen more than 2-3 times overall during the 22 hour game time. Some other glitches occurred. First time I exited the giant giant elevator to the sky to meet the Nihilanth, Gordon got stuck minding the step after the loading pause, and I could only look around. Luckily I had a suitable save.

On a couple of visually intense situations the framerate dropped atrociously, and this kept going on for a while even if the visual clutter was no longer on the screen. The game might then recover or not.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/

Quake and proton

Quake it is, smoothed out and aspect-ratio-ed

With the recent announcement of "remastered" features to Quake, I became inspired and bought Quake off Steam.

There are various conversions and re-creations of the engine on various platforms, but this I felt was an official and definite version so I took the plunge.

As it's Windows-only game in Steam, it again needs Proton to function on Linux.

Apparently it's not 100% out-of-the-box experience for everyone. Looking at some of the tips at the protondb, I got it to work on my Mint 19.1.

The version of proton might need adjusting. Some have had success changing the proton version at steam game-specific properties/compatibility to 6.3-6. At least this was necessary to me.

One tip also offers the removal of all video files from the folder

steamlibrary/steamapps/common/quake/rerelease/movies/

...in the case the video playing is suspect.

I've understood getting multiplayer to work can require the use of protontricks. I chose not to try this at the moment.

The new stuff packed with the remaster

As for the game, although it is a milestone in the history of fps I don't remember being particularly impressed with it in the 1990s. 

Amusingly, Quake also became a symbol of gaming for the already gaming-negative Finnish demoscene, as "kids" playing Quake LANs had begun to take over the Assembly demoscene event. "F*ck off with your Guakes"(I'm paraphrasing) became the enduring demoscene motto and catchphrase for all demo-related events, and can be heard semi-seriously to this day.

Those floating, armless and footless monsters are silly, though.

But anyways. Quake felt somewhat strained in its dark-brown, pared-down world. Compared to Doom, Quake relied more on teleports and surprise traps, mechanisms and such. It was ambitious, and perhaps didn't always succeed in what it tried to do.

Now that I have a good mouse and a smooth framerate, it's easier to appreciate the speed and precision of movement and playability. Yes much of the single-player game is the trial-and-error save/reload fare typical for the era, but it is enjoyable.

GeForce NOW

I tried this tip to run GeForce NOW on my Linux and run streamed games through the browser. To be honest I'm not sure if this is needed anymore, but I followed the instructions to the letter and now have the service.

The nice thing is that I can "buy" a game in Epic or Steam but don't have to download them.

I was motivated to get games like Fortnite and Apex Legends running, so I could have some first-hand experience about these games. Also, I could try less interesting free-to-play games like War Thunder without having to waste hard drive space.

But as I could also "sync" my existing Steam library, it might be revealing to check games I already know well.

What I noticed is apparently no Steam savegames are translated to the service, so I had to begin the games from the beginning. The other immediate thing is that the streaming computer has a different keymap, affecting some games in (very minor) ways. E.g. Fortnite has auto-run key on = but it's not at shift+0. The key is not really needed, though.

The stream picture quality with 1920x1200 is high. On occasions I tried a lower display resolution to see if it would affect the evenness of the stream, but to be honest it might not have done much.

My observations are not serious comparisons, just how I felt about it.

Rise of the Tomb Raider cutscene

Above: Streaming from Geforce NOW

Below: Running on my Linux and GTX 1060 3GB with my preferred settings.

Rise of the Tomb Raider cutscene

In this scene there is a minor difference in how the pendant casts a shadow, more hair detail, and the leather jacket is rendered perhaps slightly differently. There may be different reasons for this than just the game settings, though, e.g. driver versions and such. Oh and the local screen might be scaled up from a 1440x900 or something,  and this might already explain the difference in materials.

The basic gameplay of Rise of the Tomb Raider is so loaded with "inertia" so a slight lag didn't matter. I felt more doubtful about the quicktime events, though.

Just Cause 3 is a game which I played with some intensity last year. Arguably it has more crisp controls than Tomb Raider, but still I didn't notice any great disadvantage here. The game itself eventually crashed, I think, which is what happened few times when running on my Linux too.

Just Cause 3

I didn't do a comparison of graphic settings, but it may be that using best quality shadows helps give the above effect. I don't know, but blurred and less definite shadows may actually look better in games.

I went through a few battles in Everspace. This was quite playable through the stream. Granted, here the cursor might not exactly follow the mouse, but the ship control itself is sufficiently sluggish so it translates well to the streaming environment. 

The loading hiccups I've sometimes experienced when playing this on my computer, were completely absent on the streamed version. Full graphic detail is active with no slowdown.

Everspace

Elite: Dangerous is a good match for the service, as the game has a slower pace to begin with, and my experiences with Steam/Proton had been a mixed bag. Yes, I initially got it working via Proton, but after later updates I had difficulties in getting the game to run and have no incentive to troubleshoot it. 

After various arrangements and recovering lost passwords and verifying the account, and waiting for shaders to load and planets to generate, I got to my Elite: Dangerous via GeForce NOW. The nice thing here is that the game account is at Frontier, so I guess I am continuing my saved game. 

Oh, and the Geforce NOW tends to have DLC and additional content of the games pre-loaded so the Horizons addition was already plugged in. This is interesting, as I don't really own the Horizons content at Steam. (Horizons is what makes it possible to visit the surfaces of the planets.)

Elite: Dangerous

But so, Fortnite. Twice I tried the free variant of the Geforce service and had 200+ players in line before I could have a go. This meant about an hour of waiting. Then I paid the 6 month fee to get rid of the queue and the one-hour playing limit. The stream itself doesn't seem better, but I guess they wouldn't want to demonstrate a crappy stream in the free service.

I have now played a few hours of Fortnite. One time, the game got stuck in mid-stream, and I used the terminal to shut the browser window.

There was some choppiness as the session starts which I believe is due to the MMO logistics and not the stream really.

Apex Legends was offline and in "maintenance" which I'll have to see as a minus as it shows the service content might change on a whim.

Fortnite

This kind of streamed gaming requires some tolerance towards minor screen effects, as I wouldn't say the stream is perfectly smooth. But it's not always clear what is caused by the stream and what comes from the game itself, or even my setup.

Generally I don't see much point in running a game like Tomb Raider over the stream, if I already have it downloaded on Linux. If the streamed games are from a high-end "rig", then compared to that the 1060 already renders games rather well.

Using full graphics settings is fun to try but reveals that the additions are mostly in details I wouldn't care so much about. Granted, these are already slightly old games.

All in all there's a strange feeling this is not quite "real", but at least for trying out new games and especially games otherwise unavailable for Linux, it is a nice addition. The selection of games is not super-huge, especially at the indie end. But it's just a fact now that many major games are exclusive to different platforms and services.

It's a Moose, Moose, Moose Life with proton/linux

Jeff Minter's Moose Life has arrived. I passed Polybius because it seemed so decidedly 'VR', this felt something like I could play.

It's a Windows game, but as Proton works so well, I thought I'd buy this game from Steam even if there were no positive (or negative) reports at that moment in the proton database.

Happy to say it works on my Linux Mint/Steam.

Trying to 'configure keyboard' did throw me out, though. Also, if I launched it in a windowed mode it would not sync to the vertical refresh and was over-fast. (Ticking vsync on in Nvidia settings did not help.)

I'm also doubtful if the VR/3DTV options can be made to work in Linux.

But apart from these choices, there was no tweaking.

Off we go!

You control this voxellated moose that can move left, right, forward and backward in a flat 3D plane.  And shoot everything.

In addition you can jump back and forth between the upside down plane at the top of the screen. In the beginning this has no immediate value, but later you'll find uses for it and eventually it becomes a necessity.

Instead of mining Tempest or Robotron for inspiration, the game somewhat brings into mind a less known Eugene Jarvis game Blaster from 1983. But it's far from a remake of that game.

Although some ideas from all the above games might be found here, it's more clearly a Llamasoft creation.

At least in this Linux workaround setup, some of the game keys (control, alt) pressed together will tend to loose the window focus. Possibly I could just change my system settings, if I can't get to the keyboard configuration. Fortunately this does not result in a crash, in fact the game gets paused and can be continued.

Apparently you can't play the non-arcade mode without a gamepad. Didn't have one at hand just now.

Like with many Jeff Minter games, it's a bit tricky to make a screenshot that would somehow do justice to the moving graphics. No doubt it looks really fascinating in VR.

The wide variety of power-ups brings about hilarious effects, such as creating a vertical mirror double of your moose. Various beasts appear, rotate and whirl around in different formations. Pixels, voxels and particles form clusters of explosions.

Even if the cumulative amount of effects can get very high, they are never too 'violent', which I guess is a result of considering the VR environment. In any case it gives a particular tone to these effects - there might be a second or two where you can even appreciate the expanding particle clouds.

A very nice game altogether. I'm somewhat afraid to get too deeply into it, as I might get addicted. Soo... a thumbs up I guess!

Some more Linux/Proton games

About a year ago, I had a look at Proton on Steam for running Windows games on Linux.

Here's a small bunch of games I have since then played on Linux using the Proton/wine setup in Steam.

The results show not everything is totally perfect, it seems the larger the game the larger potential there is for some glitchiness.

Mind you some games could be improved by adjusting settings, these are more like out-of-the-box experiences.

A larger problem for the Linux player these days is the increasing amount of different game stores and solutions for running these games. Not everything is available on Steam. For instance, to play Firewatch I had to use Lutris, so I'm not discussing it here.


(I have reduced the screenshot sizes for this blog)


Inside

For some reason I avoided this for a long time. The game's a real little treat, comparable to Limbo (if not better in some ways) and works quite perfectly.

Ok this is exactly the kind of screenshot that helped me avoid the game. It's much more interesting than this.

Arma 3

There's apparently some limitations to on-line features, but I could play the solo missions.

If I recall correctly it did work rather well.

Every vehicle is quite meticulously modelled from outside and inside.

Although I had some positive memories from Arma 2 back in Windows Vista days, I just couldn't really now become enthused about this somewhat militaristic and involved playfield.

There is interesting stuff like drone reconnaissance, but the missions are of the "perform exactly correctly, or fail" variety, rather than a dynamic simulation, which is not that satisfying.

Some of the cutscenes are almost hilarious in their military matter-of-factness

Dirt Rally

I'm not too enthusiastic about car games but rally games have tended to be more bearable.

Dirt Rally works well, the loading times were surprisingly long but this likely has nothing to do with Proton.

The famous Paskuri.

It's about playable with a keyboard but this kind of game might really need a controller.

It does look quite authentic.

Virginia

This is a heavily Twin Peaks-inspired story game. It's bit like the aforementioned Firewatch but with even less to do for the player. Just click on things and walk the character to correct position to find the things to click.

The beginning is promising but then it starts to get wearisome, as the gameplay never really expands. Then it just ends.

The unhappy family.

Almnost needless to say, the technically quite simple game works perfectly in Proton.

Where's the coffee?

NieR: Automata

Not as huge as a Final Fantasy game, but it's still quite intense. Although at heart an RPG, the game fuses elements from shootemups, platform games, brawlers, often shifting the genre multiple times a minute when going gets hectic.

The technical strain is not massive, but the visuals are well thought out

I encountered spurious crashes at first, but apparently these were a result of undervolting I had done earlier to my computer. After removing undervolting it became one of the stablest games.

You can attach different chips for different features, bit like magic accessories in an RPG. What makes it different is that even the basic game functions, such as hp counters, map, damage counters are "chips" and could theoretically be removed in order to make space for something else.

You are wearing the masks wrong

Mirror's Edge

A rather influential game, as most later third person action games (Tomb Raider) employ similar movement logic as this parkour-fest. Played this only a little but it seemed to work ok.

I needed to change the in-game resolution settings as it did not correctly guess the screen resolution.

Here I had not yet changed the resolution...

Just Cause 3

I believe this was something that until recently would not have worked because of Digital Rights Management issues. (Funnily enough the antagonists in the game are called DRM for Di Ravello Militia)

The High Ground makes it all easier

A rather nice open world game in the GTA mould, but with more emphasis on super-heroics and destruction. Maybe a touch of Midwinter here, although without the strategy/recruit elements.

After launching, the window minimizes itself, after which I had to bring it into view again. Using shift+tab I brought the focus to Steam, after which the keyboard becomes responsive.

The rebels favor strangely uniform visuals for styling their cars

During game, there's also a danger of pressing a key combination that minimizes the window again, or brings something else to focus. After this happens the keys rarely work 100% again and I had to relaunch the game.

I encountered some graphic glitches, which might or might not be result of Proton, but nothing that would distract my gameplay.

It also did crash very occasionally, perhaps 2-3 times in 20 hours (edit:30 hours) of playtime.

recordmydesktop script

I've used recordmydesktop for grabbing the few desktop videos I need.

It's useful to record a specific window. This requires knowing the window ID beforehand, acquired by using xwininfo.

Remembering and executing this phase is sometimes a bit annoying, so I tried to shorten the process a bit by using the following script. I guess a front-end exists somewhere, though.

After running it, xwininfo is indeed launched but the info is directed through grep to a temporary file. I click on the window I want to record, the output is parsed so that the window ID is passed onto recordmydesktop.

It could be bit more elegant but what do I care.


#!/bin/bash
echo Click on Window
echo WILL RECORD INSTANTLY
echo using fps 30
xwininfo -display :0 | grep "id:" > temp.txt
more temp.txt | grep -Eo '0x[0-9]+' > temp2.txt
fname=$(<temp2.txt)
echo $fname
rm temp.txt
rm temp2.txt
recordmydesktop --windowid=$fname --fps 30

I noted that on occasions at least Chromium browser window refuses to work (unrelated to script I think). Recordmydesktop had trouble with the acquired window ID. First I thought it might have to do with detached tabs, but not really. Sooo... maybe just run another instance of it and try again or something.

Horizontal and vertical dual setup on Linux Mint

I have never really been a two-screens guy, unless you count the inevitable retro computer monitor next to the modern PC.

Partly because there's never ever enough desk space to do that, partly because I've felt that having my eyes wander between two wide screens is too un-ergonomic, and so on and on.

On a whim I noted I could at least save some desk space by having the other screen as vertical. This would also reduce the horizontal eye and head movement.

Reading news sites or Facebook it might be a better layout, as many websites are now designed with a vertical screen in mind.

But it's still more of an excuse to get the second monitor fit.

To me it makes sense to have a vnc window to another computer on this second monitor. No, really, although it does sound a bit silly.

I've occasionally tried running two computers on two monitor side by side, and found that to be more confusing than the vnc. I have more than two computers and so the keyboard/mouse sharing options could get complicated. Plus the other computers might not be stacked physically close to the screen.

So, I could get used to this.

Connecting two screens and changing their orientation is not at all difficult in Linux Mint/Mate. Some challenges arise from trying to do specific things.

The primary monitor is connected with DVI, whereas the other is on a Displayport->VGA adapter. (I don't have a displayport-equipped monitor) The primary monitor is 1920 x 1200 and the secondary as 1680 x 1050 (1050 x 1680)

It may not be obvious that by moving the pink and cyan rectangles changes the way the mouse pointer crosses over to the other screen.

I did encounter some hiccups in the way the icons are arranged on the primary screen. When trying to match the screen positions with the physical reality, some icons went over the top of the desktop and would not "arrange" correctly either.



Drawing with a Wacom tablet on screen 2

Using GIMP window in one screen and tools in another, is not something that works well for me. The mouse pointer transitions between monitors are not ideal and shifting my focus is even less so.

But, drawing on a vertical format on a single screen might make sense in Krita or Mypaint.

Generally I've found my cheap-end Wacom tablet to behave well in Linux.

The first instinct of the tablet device is to map the entirety of the display range to the tablet. Just like if you take a screenshot it will mosaic both screens. This makes sense if you thing the tablet as a substitute for a mouse, but it's not good for drawing.

xrandr can tell the names of the screens (or the ports?) such as DVI-D-0 and DP-2 in my case.

xsetwacom --list devices will tell the names of the tablet devices:

Wacom Intuos S 2 Pen stylus      id: 12 type: STYLUS    
Wacom Intuos S 2 Pad pad        id: 13 type: PAD  

But, instead of using the screen names from xrandr, I found that using HEAD-0 and HEAD-1 work instead. (I've understood this is due to Nvidia drivers. Just in case the above works better I've included the info).

xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos S 2 Pen stylus" MapToOutput HEAD-1

What still remains is that the scaling is all wrong because the tablet is horizontal and the screen is vertical!

xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos S 2 Pen stylus" rotate ccw

This rotates the orientation counter-clockwise. "none" and "half" are also possible values. Obviously the physical tablet will have to be rotated too.

After removing the window toolbars it's quite nice to draw on Krita vertically.

After these settings, everything works as I'd expect: the mouse still works across both monitor boundaries, whereas the Wacom tablet is limited to that one screen with Krita.

There is a discrepancy between the color and intensity and gamma of the two monitors, which can be annoying in some situations but I may even need that in some visual tasks, looking at how a graphic might show in different environments.


Launching applications

I recall this has always been a bit off-putting with the Mint Mate dual monitor set up. The thing is, programs don't launch in the correct monitor in a logical way.

Part of the confusion may be that it is all treated as a single display after all.

Some programs, like Krita and GIMP, remember the previous configuration, which is great.

I don't expect to play Steam games etc. in this vertical monitor so that can be forgotten. I already recall this required some fiddling and is partly to blame for my negativism towards two-monitor setups.

Half-Life 2:Lost Coast behaves rather nicely, but the mouse is mapped wrong

But there's really no need to force games, or films, to play on that vertical monitor.

I created a panel to the second monitor with application launchers. This might help with obvious ones such as the terminal window.

Even this information I had to dig up somewhere: The new panel can be only created on a monitor with an existing panel. Drag the new panel to the correct monitor with ALT pressed down.

Using compiz and and changing compizconfig settings does not help, although some of the options sound like they might address this issue.

Looking around, this launching problem seems like a fairly persistent issue with Mint.

I could make this somewhat kludgy script, make a launcher icon run it and technically have my application run on the other monitor:

#!/bin/bash
x64 &
sleep 2; wmctrl -r "VICE: C64 emulator" -e 0,1920,0,1200,1500

But it's not especially ideal either, here the "sleep" period is used so that wmctrl can catch hold of the window.

Should I want to run Vice full screen then it will again switch to the primary monitor. Ok, if I add the -fullscreen argument to x64, the script will miraculously run it full screen on the other monitor, but the pointer will be confined to that screen. Vice seems to do that in any case, so that's the end of that really.

It does not matter to me if Vice runs full screen on a wrong shaped monitor, I'm simply using this as an example of the kind of problems that may arise from this setup if you insist on getting something to run on the 2nd screen.

Going through a lot of software and finding out they don't behave in the best possible way gives a negative feeling, even if I wouldn't really even use those apps on the second screen.

So, the "wrong" monitor launch is not an enormously big deal, more like an annoyance that comes from testing multiple apps. 

VNC, ssh, remote, Android, n00b

For the most part I've found ssh enough for connecting over home network, for file transfer purposes. But sometimes it's just helpful to share the screen, keyboard and mouse remotely.

Not every resource is on the same computer, and in the case of physical drives it might not even be desirable. I need to use Processing on the Mac, but it does not properly compile applications over the command line in the way I'd want to, and making Handbrake crunch a video from a drive that only exists on that other computer is a bit handier when you can see what's going on.

Of course on occasions I could just switch the display to show the other computer but then I'd still need to switch between two mice and keyboards.

So, VNC (Virtual Network Computing) screen sharing to the rescue. This needs the viewer software to view the other computer screen, and a server on that other computer that 'feeds' the screen to the viewer.

I used RealVNC's viewer to get the easiest results. With the Mini Mac, the VNC server was built-in and could be activated by ticking one box in the settings.

With Linux computers I found some hurdles, which on one hand might seem surprising, but perhaps really not. Whereas VNC viewer from RealVNC can be recommended, I did not go for the server, as it requires a subscription.

Being a newbie in this, I guess some protocols don't quite fit each other so it's not always obvious which server works with which viewer. Messing with TigerVNC did not produce the results I wanted, although it probably should do the work. Some Linux Mint versions have vino, but it is no longer part of the Mint install since 19, and I'm not sure I ever got that working either.

So, x11vnc as the server. Not sure if all the above solutions actually rely on it in the end somehow, but at least by using this simplest advice I could also connect the Linux Mints together. I rebooted the computer to get the server properly working.

It gets meta as I edit the blog post locally and have an eye on Handbrake converting video on the other computer. VNC viewer interface in the middle keeps track of past connections.

After this the computers can co-operate within the home network without additional hassle.

The Mac may whine a bit about a missing keyboard, but as you input something this will go away.

The keyboard mapping is one thing I've not yet figured out well, as even rather simple characters like _ and @ can be difficult to achieve straightaway, at least when using a Linux to get over to the Mac.

Predictably, video over VNC is not such a bright idea but is kind of doable, at least for the purposes of checking the contents. I encountered a hiccup when using VLC video player, trying to bring up the context menu with right mouse button shut down the screen sharing server. Hmm...

Playing 3D games is even less useful, but I just had to have a go at Tomb Raider from 2013. It was obviously very choppy even in a resized window, but what made it finally unplayable was that the relative mouse motion was not correctly interpreted.

For a while the silly me thought I need to use the IP address for the connections, but the computer hostnames do just as well and better, as the address can change.

Out of curiosity I also checked the situation for the Android Galaxy phone, as the VNC viewer is also available there as an app and works ok. Doing this the other way might be interesting but at first glance at least it seems to be a bit trickier to get the server running on the Galaxy. Arguably the VNC viewer over Android could work as an elaborate remote controller for another computer.


Other Android stuff

Speaking of remotes, the Android app remote Unified Remote (and the download for the corresponding server on Linux) DOES act as a remote way for moving the mouse pointer. I paid a little fee to get rid of the ads and it does seem to work as promised. This might reasonably work as a remote control for that laptop sitting next to the TV.

These softwares don't look very appealing, but you're not supposed to look at them, really.

After somewhat clunkily enabling the server as a browser app (!?) the movement on the Android touchscreen are transported to mouse movements on the target computer. There are also other functionalities such as launching software etc, but I'm not going over that stuff now.

As a hilarious experiment I could use the remote to hover the mouse pointer over to the VNC viewer window, to control the computer where the unified remote server is NOT running.

Somewhat against my expectations, the Unified Remote could not work reliably by having the server directly over the computer where the VNC server is also running. The pointer would fidget somewhat but would not move. Oh, well.

When it comes to having ssh over the Android phone, there is apparently a solution for accessing the Android system directly via cable and the developer mode. But for my purposes I have found it enough to be able to access the phone through wifi and ready-made Android helper apps.

Left: SSHelper server running on Android. Right: Termius, using tiv on another machine to display a png over the command line.

Termius acts as a simple terminal on the Android so you could access your computer with it (after enabling the ssh server obviously), whereas SSHelper is more comprehensive. I suppose it is a minimal linux-within-linux, as it sets up a small server on the Android, complete with a set of useful command line tools such as busybox.

Both have a kind of 'virtual' mapping of the Android filesystem so you can copy photos etc using scp  from the command line, and I had some success with remotely opening the folders through caja too. Nano on SSHelper together with Apple Bluetooth keyboard might be the closest to having a reasonable text editor on the phone.


Just something more

On another remotely related note, the Terminal Image Viewer tiv (from here) is quite good at displaying bitmaps over the command line terminal itself, using unicode blocks and colours to best effect.

A Big Fat ANSI Deal

Sadly it's not able to accommodate for a terminal wider than 80 characters. That might have helped reproduce 8-bit graphics and PETSCII jpgs rather faithfully... again, it's ok for checking a bitmap over the terminal.

Proton, Steam, Elite: Dangerous on Linux

I've been bit more interested in Steam/Linux gaming recently, but although the number of native Linux steam games has been on the rise, some interesting recent Windows games have been missing.

For some time, there has been an initiative called Proton, derived from wine, and this helps launch Windows-native games on Linux after installing them legitly from Steam. As this project is maturing, even mere mortals like me can get Windows games up and running on Linux.

After enabling Steam Beta, it's even possible to run games that are not even white-listed.

There's a collective effort to list experiences of working games at https://www.protondb.com/ with tips on how to get them running.

Promises of having Linux versions of Witcher 3, GTA V, No Man's Sky etc. made this look credible and I felt need to get on board too despite not wanting to play exactly these games.

Xpand Rally, perhaps a bit lame title, but it's a Steam-purchased Windows title running smoothly on Linux! 

I had a couple of Steam games from my Windows days, and Xpand Rally was one that worked immediately through Proton.

This was an encouraging experience, and although Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light did not work, learning it was a DRM issue was also reassuring.

Titan Quest

Edit: Titan Quest Anniversary Edition worked straight out of the box.

Prey

Edit 2: Prey seems to work too, and quite smoothly at that. That's nice!



Elite: Dangerous

One of the games that got me interested in gaming in the 2010s was Elite: Dangerous, the ambitious, Kickstarter-famous sequel to Elite and Frontier. But I never got around to playing it as I did not have a suitable Windows computer.

But now, with Proton it's possible. Elite is not one of the whitelisted games and judging by the community's efforts, it was not one that would run very easily, despite comments:

https://www.protondb.com/app/359320

But the bottom line here was that Proton itself need no longer be built from scratch for ED and the game itself can be run through Steam.

The game launcher window, prior to launching the actual game client window.

My initial experiences were not too promising. After installing wine and protontricks, although the game launcher, game intro and menus seemingly worked, the game itself started with a screen that quickly faded into black and I could only hear the game audio.

After I updated the nvidia drivers to version 430 (from 3xx), I could get something visible:

No, that's not a sun, just a ringed planet.

The joy was a bit premature, as the graphics were somehow too bright, and not consistently either. The over-bright gfx flickered on and off semi-randomly.

However at this point I was quite certain the game could be made to work. The above screen was a result of having a wrong (sub-4) version of wine installed, and generally not paying too much attention to the tips.


Sidetracked

In the meantime I messed up my Linux Mint 19 installation, wrecking Python 2.7. This I found out when trying to fix something that prevented 'apport' from upgrading in the update manager, losing the Mint main menu in the process.

I doubt it was the result of following the ED install instructions, it's probably I got the bright idea of removing some crucial package at some point.

At the darkest moment I considered reinstalling the whole system, but eventually I was able to remove and re-install enough packages by hand and with synaptic, to get the system on rails again.

What I learned from this that Linux Mint is quite dependent on Python in many places.


Getting it to work

After this, I went back and followed the instructions (https://github.com/redmcg/wine/wiki) more precisely, getting the right versions of stuff.

I installed wine-staging instead of wine, and then winetricks, needed by protontricks. I then ran protontricks 359320 dotnet40 win7 again in the terminal and now I got much better results:

Windowed, lower resolution

After this it was more a matter of adjusting the graphics parameters (there are many).

In its 1920 x 1200 glory, the game appears to work very well and smoothly on the 1050 GPU. Possible exceptions are some of the station/docking scenes where there is more stuff on-screen.

But Elite is by no means a new game anymore, so such good results could be expected. I'll probably talk about Elite: Dangerous more in the future, given that I can now compare it to my experiences with Everspace.

Full screen 1920 x 1200 resolution

So, whereas I would not agree ED "works out of the box" from Steam/Proton, it still can be run via Steam and when it works there have been no hiccups. Only thing is that it tends to refuse to run the intro some times, preventing the game from loading.

It may be helpful to reboot the computer but then again not, sometimes I felt I just needed to kill the process and run it again from the launcher. This is just to say that the "black screen" after the game launcher screen might not be decisive.

I wish I could have included a step-by-step history of all the tiny things that needed to be done to get this up and running, but I just can't remember it all anymore.

The instructions at the wiki seem innocent enough at first, but in order to install something, often a couple of other things needed fixing, installing or re-installing. This would initiate a cascade of activities that all needed to be done before the first step could be completed. But I can't stress enough that the instructions need to be followed quite precisely, or you may end up wasting time on a half-made install.

Linux games test

I noticed there's quite a lot of "big" games available for Linux on Steam. Partly inspired by this, I switched my computer setup to a slightly more able 1050 GPU-based system.

Now I don't have to resort to playing Half-Life 2, Portal or 2D indie games.

Here's a few more 3D-intensive games I've tried, with some completely unscientific notes on how they performed on my 64-bit Linux Mint 19, i5 3.00GHz × 4, 16 GB, 1050 GPU computer.

The native resolution of my display is 1920 x 1200 which is bit too optimistic for recent games.


Tomb Raider (2013)

Already somewhat old game, I could bear to play this through last year on my old setup. This was possible because the play doesn't need to be that smooth.

I recall that I lowered the resolution quite a lot, and turned off the more involved hair simulation(!) that brought the speed down.

At native 1920 x 1200

What was left for me to try how Tomb Raider benefits from the 1050 GPU.

At first I experienced surprising slowdown and tried to remedy the situation by lowering the resolution to 1024 x 768. This resolution can even look a bit crude without the anti-aliasing as the environments are quite detailed at times.

But then I found out that "somehow" it does work quite nicely with 1920 x 1200 by changing various settings, especially when using the FXAA anti-aliasing, which is what you might expect from a 5-year old game. It didn't seem to need the triple-buffering either for syncing.

at 1024 x 768, no AA, scaled to 1920 x 1200

2013's Tomb Raider is a well balanced combination of exploration, climbing and action shooting with some roller coaster type run/jump sequences thrown in.

The puzzle elements are now in optional sub-quest tombs which I felt was a good idea.

Besides the main quest there's bunch of things to do and collect, different weapons and equipment to wield and stats and items to upgrade. Instead of toting the dual-pistols, Lara's main weapon of choice now seems to be the fashionable bow.

1920 x 1200

Everspace (2017)

If there's one game that inspired me to upgrade my computer a bit, it's Everspace, because without 1050-level GPU it just quite didn't work.

Even now I went for 1440 x 900 to make it faster. Strangely I could not get the in-game resolution switcher to work so I pre-set the resolution through desktop.

Gorgeus locations at 1440 x 900

The play requires quite fast frame rate, otherwise maneuvering in the battles becomes too confusing. However, a better resolution would be helpful as you want to sort out details from far off so a balance needs to be struck.

A long time ago, I wanted to play Elite: Dangerous, but as that game is not available for Linux I turned to this as a consolation. In some ways Everspace is really closer to the original Elite, although in many ways it's not. It's been described as a rogue-like in space, which is quite nice description.

The Gunship

The universe is structured as a sequence of bounded small locations, accessed through jump points and jump gates. If you think about it this is not unlike the original Elite, except here the galaxy is not open for free exploration.

The locations are most often filled with detail, multitudes of asteroids and derelict spaceships and other wrecks. Realism and space simulation has been thrown away in favor of condensed situations, again, much like Elite.

Combat can get intensive with drones and auto-turrets blazing.

You'll often encounter hostile ships, either outlaws or the dreaded Okkars, but sometimes you can manipulate different factions to fight each other and only enter the fray at a more opportune moment.

Again, as in most modern games, it's possible to customize and upgrade your ship endlessly, switch weapon systems and acquire special one-off items.


The Long Dark (2014)

Another "oldie", and not too big either, this game would have worked rather nicely on the old setting, as the 3D is not very complex. Now I can play it on 1920 x 1200 resolution with all detail on.

I've not looked at the story mode, as the plain survival mode felt more interesting to me. The game places you somewhere in the wintry northern Canada, and a geomagnetic (read "magical") storm has broken all electrical equipment. You'll simply have to find a ways to stay alive in the harsh environment.

That fog isn't there to clip the view distance... it's there to kill you.

Some of the first moments with the game were quite intense. A lot of effort has been put into producing dynamic weather effects, literally the most atmospheric part of the game.

There's something satisfying in wandering desperately in a snowstorm and then finding refuge in an old cottage in the middle of nowhere. Then you try to get a fire up and running and arrange food and drink before opening the bedroll.

The Maintenance Yard. Those planks will be transformed into firewood.

The illusion begins to break for me as I realized the areas are meticulously designed to have certain amount of exits and inroads to other areas. (Possibly to facilitate the story mode) You really can't get that lost, and the cliffs are really un-climbable, ultimate constraints of the maze.

It turns out that as an abandoned national park, the neighborhood is filled to the brim with equipment, buildings and pathways to follow. A somewhat more generative universe would have been welcome for the survival mode.

Yet again, stuff to be crafted, broken apart to component pieces, repaired and so on and on, but in this game concept this seems more justified.