Finding something with symbols will help a lot. Symbols end up getting left in Linux and macOS builds fairly often.
The reverse engineering I've learned has generally been to fix something that has annoyed me - for example I reverse engineered part of RCT3 to fix mouse input with high poll rates and allow for resizable windows [0]. Certainly easier to approach than trying to get into a closed device since you can attach a debugger.
Or further, I don't know about other distros, but Arch doesn't even package vi (in the main repos) - it's a package group (or some implementation I'm not sure off the top of my head) consisting of vim and vi-compat.
I'm struggling to think of the last time I saw a commercial unix -- we still had solaris on some new machines until about 2006 - the last I remember was the x4500 with ZFS.
Our sun sysadmin contractor (whose full time job it was to look after about 10 solaris machines) was a big fan of ksh at the time.
I used a Sun workstation as late as 2008, but by that time it was ancient and kept around only for the expensive engineering software that wouldn’t run anywhere else. Even at the time, using CDE felt like a blast from the past. I didn’t dig too deep because I wasn’t using it for long, but I’m pretty sure the vi was original.
I was honestly embarrassed to admit that I have no idea what I've been using on my Ubuntu server for the last 10 years. The way to find out if I'm using vi or vim is to enter command mode (by pressing “:”) and run “version” I'm using vim ;)
When I fly transatlantic I don't mind paying to get an exit row or bulkhead seat, but even just premium economy is a much more significant increase in cost over economy, at least flying from Canada.
I have a B580 in my desktop. Unfortunately AMD still has broken PCIe level reset and so their GPUs don't work well for assignment to a VM, Intel and Nvidia cards both work fine.
The perf is fine - it was a $350 CAD GPU after all.
I am certainly interested to see where Intel ends up going with their lineup. Having a third player in the GPU space is definitely a good thing.
I have a B580 too. The cool thing about it is architecturally speaking it is basically a mini version of the Ponte Vecchio (PVC) datacenter GPU. You can run most of the datacenter GPU workloads, albeit scaled down to fit the compute/memory constraints of the B580. It's a great vehicle for software development. But you can't buy PVC anymore so it's unclear what you are developing for...
GOG's original and somewhat current line in the sand is "must have an offline-capable installer". For a lot of Good Old Games that is enough to guarantee DRM-free. Unfortunately in the Live Service world it is a concession that allows too many loopholes such as Sony single player games that still need a PlayStation Account and a half-dozen telemetry services active before they get to actual gameplay. Sony, as a particular example worth flogging, also makes use of the loophole that an anti-cheat rootkit can be installed offline, easy.
I think GOG is saying a lot of the right things in terms of Game Preservation being a long term goal for them. I think they are between a rock and a hard place that the store would be a lot less active if they couldn't offer the latest games from companies like Sony, and they want to be on good terms with such companies to get access to their giant back catalogs for Preservation efforts which also presumably includes sales numbers of recent titles for justification.
But yes, I'd also love to see them push back a bit harder on some of these publishers a bit further than "needs an offline-capable installer" and mabye include more steps towards some definition of "should run offline-capable", because yeah things like "Live Services" and account systems and mandatory telemetry systems and rootkit anti-cheat systems are often de facto DRM just wearing another hat of "user convenience" or "achievement tracking" or "game safety" tools. I don't think GOG can make that push alone, though. There are too many industry trends to try to buck to get further in those directions. (Thinking about the recent Anthem shutdown as a recent for instance of a mostly single player game that is entirely unplayable because EA shutdown live services this month.)
There are no games on GOG which require a PlayStation account for their single player gameplay. (AFAIK, but I think I'm pretty tuned in and would know.)
It was an early complaint about Horizon: Zero Dawn, especially but not uniquely, on GOG. Sony did walk that requirement back several months after the complaints started, but it wasn't directly because they thought they violated any of GOG's explicit policies, it seemed more directly due to the user complaints and review bombing on Steam from what I saw.
To be clear: if you buy Disco Elysium on GOG, download the "offline game installer" without using Galaxy, install it, and run the game on a desert island, it will work (the network requests fail open). But if you try to run the game after removing the bundled dylib/DLL, it will not.
Why do Galaxy-free games ship with a mandatory dependency on Galaxy?
> Why do Galaxy-free games ship with a mandatory dependency on Galaxy?
Because the developer linked the dynamic library in at compile time instead of writing additional code to load it at runtime and disabling/enabling features based on its presence.
You can call it budget limitations, incompetence or lack of respect for the customer. Doubt it's intentional DRM though.
Many games with multiplayer features require Galaxy for those multiplayer features. You can consider this DRM-equivalent if you want. However, every singleplayer game on GOG will work without Galaxy installed, and that singleplayer gameplay will be completely DRM-free in every possible way. (That's at least 99.6% of the games on GOG, but eyeballing the 22 games which don't specify that they're singleplayer games, most of them simply have incomplete metadata, so it's really 99.9% of them.)
Off the top of my head Crime Cities on launch forced me to use Galaxy to play it. I vividly remember this because the game also ran like complete crap.
Galaxy can be required for multiplayer aspects in games, but if what you say is true for the singleplayer part of the game, GOG will consider it a bug, and will get it fixed.
There's nothing in the Crime Cities GOG forum about this, nor in the various tracking threads in the main forum, and generally GOG users are extremely sensitive about anything which even reeks of forcing Galaxy, so I'd strongly expect any issue to be known.
I've seen cases where the developer implemented a bad online check, so that if you blocked the program from accessing the internet while the OS reported being online, the game would hang or crash, but being fully offline would work. Could it be that something like that was at play here? Oh, or that you simply picked the wrong installer for the game, and thus ran the Galaxy-installer rather than the offline installer?
I think too it can be misleading since on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE (which works entirely without Galaxy and how I run games).
They do this to push Galaxy for convenience I suppose as most are used to clients that handle updates but it can be confusing if some wonder why for instance their offline installer shortcut opened Galaxy instead.
If the wine experience is anything to go by, if you don't have Galaxy installed at all, the shortcuts will also just point to the .exe - but yeah, I suspect it must be something like this.
> on Windows the default LNK shortcut that is created after the game installation launches Galaxy with arguments instead of being a path to the direct game EXE
I had Crime Cities lying around since it was a freebie on GOG many years ago, so I just went ahead and installed it using vanilla wine. There was absolutely no Galaxy requirement for installing or playing the single player part of the game.
Not quite. You can use Galaxy to download the offline installers (or just do that through the website), but when you install a game through Galaxy, it downloads a special build which it just copies to the right location, without running a separate installer.
The running game can also call out to Galaxy and unlock, or not unlock, ingame content based on what it hears back. It's pretty difficult to imagine a definition of "digital rights management" that doesn't include this.
As far as I remember, the only games which optionally need Galaxy running are those will online multiplayer, and only if you want to play online. This is because the original developers shutdown their own servers for matchmaking or originally used Steam servers for that. GOG servers are only replacing those.
There are also a handful of games which put some additional purely cosmetic content behind an online check. That could be the start of a slippery slope, which people are justly upset about, but they then do an injustice to their cause by generalizing from those cases.
It's not a slippery slope but already full blown DRM plain and simple. Both online functionality limited to GOG-run servers and checks for cosmetic content.
Note that for Gloomhaven, the multiplayer server is one of the players' computers. That player hosts a game and everyone else joins. There are no GOG servers and no company servers.
In version 1.0 of the GOG release, multiplayer is enabled.
In subsequent versions, multiplayer is disabled (in the sense that the button to host or join a game is greyed out) unless the game succeeds at verifying you through Galaxy. (And this is a dynamic status; you can have it enabled, shut off Galaxy, restart the game, and find that it's disabled again.
Which ones? Honest question. I only remember games for which GOG apologizes in their store page for missing cosmetics or extra features because originally tied to online services (e.g. the Mafia or Yakuza games), or ones in which they are unlocked by default for the same reason (e.g. Dragon Age Origins).
The reverse engineering I've learned has generally been to fix something that has annoyed me - for example I reverse engineered part of RCT3 to fix mouse input with high poll rates and allow for resizable windows [0]. Certainly easier to approach than trying to get into a closed device since you can attach a debugger.
[0] - https://mastodon.social/@benpye/109261545643008493
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