Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

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...

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.

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 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, ...

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? 😃

This November from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 was held in Berlin the GNOME Core Apps Hackfest . My focus during this hackfest was to start implementing a widget for the series view of the Videos application , following a mockup by Allan Day. To make this more interesting, I implemented this view using Emeus , Emmanuele Bassi's new in-development constraints based layout system for GTK+. You can find the (clearly unfinished) result here: https://github.com/Kekun/totem-series . I will keep working on it with Victor Toso who did some initial prototype last year . Working at the hackfest was a great experience, interaction with the other contributors was face to face which helps a lot strengthening GNOME as a community. 😃 Thank a lot to Kinvolk and Collabora for helping to make this hackfest a great event!

I didn't blog about Games since quite some time and the app changed a lot since 3.18. 3.20 was quite a small update featurewise: it added support for MAME and Neo Geo Pocket games, added the About dialog, allowed l10n of the application, added a Preferences window listing the available plugins and fixed other small bugs, but this release mainly saw refactoring work with the introduction of the plugins system where plugins allow to list games: the Steam plugin lists Steam games and the SNES plugin lists SNES games. So with 3.20, Games was ready to be improved upon and improvement there was! 3.22 is the first properly usable version of Games The biggest change this cycle is the number of contributors to Games' codebase, first of all with two GSoC interns working on it: Megh Parikh and Ricard Gascons did a great job as I will detail it later. But Games didn't gain contributors only via GSoC: Bastien Nocera has been helping on the project since a year or so and got eve...