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Affichage des articles du 2017

CRT Filter in Games — SUSE Hack Week

SUSE Hack Week 0x10 finished on previous Friday, during it I wanted to support hardware rendering in retro-gtk . This project had two sides, the first one was to allow the Libretro cores to draw their video with OpenGL, the second one was to render their video using OpenGL to allow filtering it via shaders. It was unrealistic to do both sides of this project in one week and, being at the time a complete beginner when it comes to OpenGL, I didn't plan to succeed any of these projects but just to learn a lot. The week before the Hack Week, I took some time to study GtkGLArea and to implement a skeleton for the RetroGLDisplay widget, which was similar to RetroCairoDisplay but was drawing nothing. The GTK+ part of the project being ready, I was able to focus on the OpenGL part during the Hack Week. Friday The first day I looked for OpenGL tutorials and I managed to implement an "Hello, triangle" tutorial . I played a bit more with it and got the triangle blinking

retro-gtk: The Future, Marty!

Let's come back to retro-gtk. In the previous articles I explained how bad retro-gtk was, what I did to start improving it and more importantly what I did to prepare the terrain for further development. This article will detail the aforementioned planed improvements! Unless stated otherwise, I don't plan these changes to be part of retro-gtk 0.14 and I have no idea when they will be implemented. If I say anything you know to be wrong or if you know something which could help the library's development, please share it in the comments! Stabilization of the API As stated in the previous article, I want retro-gtk's API to stop breaking as much as it did in the past. Starting with 0.14, we will avoid API and ABI breaks as much as possible, and if we do any we will document them properly. The API should be stable but given that some big changes are coming I don't feel comfortable promising proper stability just yet. Gitlab I requested to move retro-gtk to GNOM

retro-gtk: Renaissance

This is the second article in a small series about retro-gtk, I recommend you to read the first one, retro-gtk: Postmortem , before this one. In the previous article I listed some problems I encountered while developing and using retro-gtk; in this one I will present some solutions I implemented to fix them! ☺ All that is presented in this article is part of the newly-released retro-gtk 0.13.1, which is the first version of the 0.14 development cycle. Changing the Scope The Libretro API is tricky: lots of little details need to be handled properly and it isn't always very clear how to do so. By mimicking this API, retro-gtk inherited its complexity, making it way more complex than it should be as there aren't many different ways for a Libretro frontend to handle the cores correctly. retro-gtk was forwarding the complexity of the Libretro API to its users rather than abstracting it. About a year ago I decided to slowly change the scope of the library. In the previous art

retro-gtk: Postmortem

This article is the first of a small series about retro-gtk, a library I develop in tandem with Games and which allows it to use Libretro cores. This first article focuses on the initial goals of the library, its design and the problems that arose during its development, while the next ones will focus on what I am working on to fix these problems. Libretro? retro-gtk? Are These Edible? The Libretro project defines an API to be implemented by so-called Libretro cores — typically video game console emulators — to expose them as shared libraries with a common ABI. These cores can then be used by so-called Libretro frontends via this API. Here is the main C header if you want to know what it actually looks like. You can see Libretro as a videogame console emulator plugin definition without a plugin system to make it usable. Initially, retro-gtk was designed and implemented as a library easing the use of Libretro cores from higher level languages like Vala. It allowed to dynamic

Have You Played Atari Today? 🎵

This is a guest article by Laurent « Hell Pé » Pointecouteau, the Alfred Pennyworth of GNOME Games who relentlessly works in the shadows to help make Games what it is, when he’s not busy writing in French about video games or slacking on Twitter. I used to be really excited at New Stable Release Blog Posts™ like this one, back in the day when you had to wait six months for getting new GNOME stable releases (and matching Ubuntu PPAs) in order to discover what was new in your favourite apps. But nowadays, these blog posts, while still a delight to read, are just a little less surprising than before, and we’ve got Flatpak to thank for that! So, here’s a quick reminder: Games can be obtained by two ways. The old-school way, with the version provided by your distro; and soon, hopefully, your distro will upgrade to the brand-new 3.26 stable version that we’ve just released. And the Flatpak way, the one we actually recommend if your system is ready for it: it’ll give you the choice betwe

GNOME 3.26 Release Party in Nuremberg

The last Friday GNOME 3.26 was celebrated in the SUSE headquarters in Nuremberg with pizzas and a cake. Thanks to GNOME and openSUSE for sponsoring the event! 😃 Richard, Ayoub and Howard chatting and having pizza! A cake with no footprint on it, hence way less cool than the one from São Paulo . There were KDE users too! Though Ana Maria came mostly for the free cake. 😏 Oliver explaining how GNOME is tested for openSUSE with openQA.

The Path to GNOME Games 3.26

Games received a non-negligible amount of changes that you will find in 3.26. These changes can be big as much small, and more are to come! Building the Games Collection Games presents your games collection and if everything goes as expected, it does so without the need of any input from you. From an implementation point of view it sounds simple to do, just ask Tracker “Hey, gimme all the games” and it’s done. If only it was that simple! 😃 The system has no idea which files represent games and which doesn’t, but it can associate a MIME type to each file thanks to shared-mime-info . shared-mime-info already had a few video game related MIME types and we added a lot more such as application/x-genesis-rom . That done, we can query Tracker for files having specific MIME types that we know to often represent video game files. Unfortunately, each of these files doesn’t necessarily represent a game and a game isn’t necessarily represented by a single file: some files may be invalid and

Neo-Geo games on sale for GNOME Games

If you want to get some Neo-Geo games for Games , GOG.com has some on sales here . You can run them in Games by simply unzipping the installer and retrieving the two .zip files corresponding to the game and the Neo-Geo firmware. Keep in mind you'll need a MAME Libretro core to run them.

GNOME at the openSUSE Conference 2017

The openSUSE Conference was held during May 26–28, 2017 in Nuremberg, Germany. The event was really interesting and the location — Z-Bau — was perfect for this event. GNOME had a booth there, were you could have tried “the GNOME gaming handheld”: a GPD Win running Games on GNOME / openSUSE Tumbleweed ! This handheld definitely caught some attention. 😃 On a more personnal note I have been pleased to meet several persons I am looking forward to work with. 😃 See in Prague for the openSUSE Conference 2018!

GNOME Games 3.24

GNOME 3.24 will be out in a few weeks and with it will come Games 3.24. This new version will offer a few new features and many refinements, some of which have been implemented by new contributors theawless and Radhika Dua , kudos to them! Find how to get the latest nightly and (soon) stable Flatpak versions of Games on its web page . A Libretro Core Descriptor Specification In its version 3.22, Games stopped using a hardcoded list of well known Libretro cores and instead looked for the right one to run a game by parsing files describing their corresponding Libretro core's capabilities. These files came from the libretro-super repository and were slightly modified to better suit Games' needs. The concept was great but the format of these files proved to be not very well suited for the job: many information were not useful to Games, some information it needed were lacking, the syntax wasn't specified, complex cases like firmwares were implemented in a messy way,

GNOME Gaming Handheld

Recently I got myself a GPD Win , to make it simple it's a PC in a Nintendo 3DS XL form factor, with a keyboard and a game controller. It comes with Windows 10 and many not too demanding games work perfectly on it: it's perfect to run indie games from Steam and for retro consoles emulation. But who simply want to play video games, let's make it fun , let's put a penguin in it! On this GNOME wiki page I'll report all my findings on Linux support on this machine, focusing mainly on OpenSUSE for the moment. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a fully working and easily installable GNOME desktop running Games and Steam on this machine? 😃