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For 3DS games I use NDSTokyoTrim to remove useless data from the game files to make them smaller.
DreamCast, PS1 & PS2 games get compressed to chd with chdman.
GameCube and Wii are compressed to rvz with Dolphin.
PS3 I remove the PS3_UPDATE folder, 256MiB for each game adds up. I also use Gnarly Repacks for PS3 games since they have better compression than anything I’ve tried so far.
Switch games, I use nsz.
Then I use tar with zst on all of them, Nsz and rvz already use zst so theres no change but I just like to keep everything the same accross all of my roms and pc games.
Everything else, GB, NDS, SNES etc all get archived and compressed with tar and zst. For these I’ll also use the --ultra -22 option since they’re small enough files anyway so they don’t take long to compress/decompress. If anyone knows any specific compression/trimming methods that are better than zst, I’d love to hear about them!
Copies of all the tar archives are kept on 2 separate drives and a copy of the games are on my PC in whatever the smallest format is that is compatible with their emulator.
I started The Witcher 3 for the second time. I tried it a year ago and I kept getting absolutely wrecked by the ghost thing in thr very first crypt so I gave up but this time I killed it straight away so who knows what I was doing wrong last time! Also, probably a bit controversial but I refuse to learn how to play Gwent, I don’t have the time or patients to learn a card game inside an already massive game
I also started and finished American Arcadia this weekend and I absolutely loved it. I’m trying to play shorter games that I wouldn’t usually play in between The Witcher 3 since its long. AA is probably one of the best games I’ve played. The story is fantastic and the gameplay is pretty basic, which suits me. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and has some fun twists at the end.
I’ve also been playing Supraland, its a pretty fun, chill game. The areas aren’t very difficult and the upgrade system is fun. I love the funny dialogues from the NPCs and again its a fun game that doesn’t take itself seriously and I find myself smiling while playing it
Over and over and over and over the gaming community has been screwed over by Publishers so I’ll stop grave dancing when Corpos stop being so horrible
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Requiring a third party account to play a game months after it was released and after selling it to customers who can’t legitimately make an account because you don’t feel like their country can make you enough profit. Helldivers 2
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Attempting to take away peoples digital “purchases” of media because you can’t be bothered to pay licencing. Sony
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Changing the definition of “purchase” an established word in English and not defining your new definition until page 22 of a EULA that you know nobody is going to read. Sony, and everyone else
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Shutting down a server and rendering a game with a whole single player aspect completely useless and not telling consumers this at the time of purchase. The Crew (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)
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Selling a terribly incomplete game filled with glitches for the price of a full game. Cyberpunk 2077 and so many others.
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Selling Pre-Purchases to let people play the game early but really its just another way to get people to pay to be Guinea pigs in your buggy game. That new Star Wars game and so many others.
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Adding so many stupid “micro transactions” to games to milk players as much as possible for useless skins and camos etc. Diablo 4 and so many more.
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Adding a “Season Pass”??? I don’t even understand what this is??? Buy a full priced game and then buy a subscription to that game??? But still not have access to all of the content and then be shown a magic glove that costs €500, why is this not part of the subscription or is it??? I hope it is. New COD and probably others
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“Making” a game and selling it to people but really its just a scam where they got “volunteers” to work on the game for free. Then shutting the game down instantly. That zombie game with Will Smith.
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Something, something Overwatch 2 is a totally brand new game.
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Shutting down third party mods for an unsupported and dangerous game just after the sale for that game is over. Fine, they didn’t own all of the assets used but they did fix the issue where people could infect your system with malware. COD
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Increasing the prices of all of your subscriptions and making those subscriptions worse by offering less while your parent company is posting ~$20 Billion profits in the most recent quarter, yes quarter, thats like 3 months…
Btw all of these examples have happened within the last 4 years. Its pretty sad that I can list these off the top of my head. I only play single player games and I only got back into gaming a couple of years ago after ~10 years of not really playing anything
Even if your coutry reaches 100% and you haven’t signed, please still do incase some signatures are invalid
TIP – It is better to collect more signatures than required. Sometimes the national authorities might not be able to validate all the statements of support you provide.
Pretty sure its because of the piracy shield thingy. Secure Core might be an option as long as no Italian servers are used and you’re using the VPNs DNS
“[A]ll parties in any capacity involved in the accessibility of illegally disseminated content – and therefore also, by way of example and not limitation – VPN and open DNS service providers, will have to execute the blocks requested by the Authority [AGCOM],” the notice read.
I’m the type of player that needs the bright yellow markings, that people seem to hate, to be able to get around! So I constantly have to read the signs in Control and even then I still second guess myself.
I did the part where you have to answer the phone at the end of the hallway thingy. The amount of times I just walked off the edge because I didn’t understand I had to pull the chord is embarrassing. And then trying to get back from the motel thing I genuinely thought my game was bugged, I was so comfused lol
Ah damn, I know how you feel! Alan Wake remaster kept going black screen every few seconds for me and the only way to fix it was to pause it for a few seconds every time so I had to give up.
Maybe updated drivers or something could have fixed the bugs since then, I definitely recommend checking it out again for a fun linear single player game that doesn’t take weeks to finish
Yes! I feel like there really aren’t enough games like it! Just a fun little linear shooter with some cool time travel/ superpower elements.
I heard there were references to each other, that’s why I wanted to start with Alan Wake before playing Quantum Break but tbh I’m so bad with names and stuff I probably wouldn’t even notice them anyway lol
I didn’t know Remedy didn’t own the rights to it, that’s unfortunate because its such a good concept but at least we got Control after it, hopefully they continue with more games like them
Tl;dr Step by step how I setup lutris to run pirated games
I use Lutris, its pretty easy to setup and is pretty much the same setup for most games.
Install lutris wine and winetricks with your package manager. Wine is a windows compatibility layer for linux and winetricks is a helper for downloading and dependencies that a game might need and lutris integrates both of these.
In the file manager, I like to create a folder with the name of the game and then inside of that folder I make 2 folders “game” and “prefix” I put all of the game files in the game folder and leave the prefix folder empty for now.
When you open lutris, on the left, hover over wine and click on the little box icon to manage the wine versions. I recommend, wine-ge. Its a custom build/fork of Steams Proton that adds some extra stuff
Once you have installed that, back on the main page at the top left is a + to add a new game. Select the bottom option, “Add locally installed game”. Give the game name and select “wine” as the runner from the dropdown.
Then on the next tab, Game Options, select the games executable location, inside the “game” folder. Set the Working directory as the “game” folder. You can just copy the path that you put in the executable section and backspace until the folder called “game”.
For wine prefix, copy the working directory path and replace “game” with “prefix” this is where all the wine/windows stuff will install.
Set the Prefix architecture to 64-bit
On the next tab, Runner Options, you can select the wine version you want to use. It should default to the wine-ge version you installed. At the top right press save and your game should be good to go. There are a whole bunch of other options you can play around with but for pretty much every game I’ve played I just leave them as default.
This should be fine for most games but sometimes wine updates can break older games and so you may have to try older versions of wine-ge or different versions of wine like lutris-fshack or wine-staging. Or the game may need a special dependency that you need to install. This is why I set a separate prefix directory for each game.
You can look at the logs for a game by selecting it and pressing the arrow beside the play button, this may or may not be helpful for trouble shooting.
If you do need to install an additional dependency, select the game and press the arrow at the bottom right and select winetricks. “Select the default prefix” should be selected by default, press ok and at the top of the next screen you should see the path to the games prefix, then select the “Install a Windows DLL or component” Then you should have a list of packages you can install.
If you’re using a repack that needs to be extracted, put the path to setup.exe as the executable on the Game Options tab and run through the installer, selecting the “game” folder that you created as the install location, it is probably under the Z drive. Then when you’re done installing, right click the game in lutris and press configure and then back to game options and replace the setup.exe path with the path to the games exe and save.
There’s a whole bunch of other ways to do this, like bottles or just using system wine or adding the game as a non-steam game to Steam, I have a separate throwaway Steam account for this.
I like the way lutris is laid out and I like having separate prefixes for each game because I archive the games I like and its nice to have a known working prefix in that archive for games I had issues running.
I finished Quantum Break, I loved it! I’ve never really played a game with superpowers, especially like these. I also love games that give unlimited ammo in the starting pistol since I have the worst aim ever, I constantly find myself having no choice but to melee enemies in other games. And the slow motion after doing the dash was so nice!
The final fight was so bad, I could not understand why I was dying even when I was doing exactly what someone on YouTube was doing but other than that it was so fun! And I actually liked the story, usually I’m not a big story person, I just like running around causing chaos, it also probably helped that I finished the game in 3 days, so I didn’t forget what was happening.
I had to give up on Alan Wake Remaster, the visual bugs were just too much so I moved onto Control. I was expecting a more linear style, similar to Quantum Break so I ended up running around in circles being so confused, especially the elevator at the start, I spent way too long looking for that lol but having the force like a Jedi is super fun
I also started GoW Chains of Olympus and I kinda regret playing the series in chronological order instead of release order because going from Ascension to this is not so great, since it was Originally designed for the PSP but hopefully the original series will look better when I get there
Quantum Break got me to put down BG3 for now since I’m looking for shorter games that I don’t accidentally spend 10 hours on a Saturday playing
Its also convinced me to get back into RE4 remaster. I started it in November and got to the part where I’m in the little boat on the lake but I got a bit bored of it. I think my expectations were too high, I loved 0,1,2 and 3 especially 2 and 3. And since everyone always says 4 is the best, I just expected more. I still want to finish it and continue the series because they are fun games tbf
My dads friend used to burn random movies to DVD and give them to us. Eventually, he showed my dad where to get them and my dad showed me. I think it was the uploader axxo on isohunt that my dad would always download from. I nearly completely forgot about that, thanks for making me think about it! We really had no idea what we were doing, we used to use utorrent and everything. That family computer was riddled with viruses. It took us about an hour to remove some random extensions that changed our default search engine one time
I caved into my urges and started playing Baldurs Gate 3 again, this time as a dark urge
I finished it for the first time a few weeks ago and have wanted to do nothing but play it again but I never replay games like ever. I held out for as long as I could but no other game was calling to me like BG3
I never understood how people could keep replaying games, I always thought the new game+ concept was pointless but now I get it, now I understand why people have put thousands of hours into Skyrim
I nearly never even bothered to try BG3 because I’ve never played anything with turn based mechanics and I know nothing about D&D but now its all I want to play, I’m worried I’ll never want to play anything else again lol
The size of the file and speed shouldn’t be an issue, unless its crazy high speeds, I’m seeding a bunch of 80+ GB files, I think for me it was the number of connections being made that was causing the disconnects for me.
I assume its not something basic like the ProtonVPN subscription lapsed or one of the issues mentioned in the link in the logs https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/faq/healthcheck.md
I’d try a few different countries and see if its that specific one, I like to have 3 different countries listed in my compose files so if there are issues with one countries servers it just connects to the next country instead
You could also try switching between wireguard and openvpn configs to see if that helps https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/providers/custom.md#wireguard
Are you seeding a lot of torrents?
Something similar kept happening to me last year, constantly disconnecting no matter what I tried. I thought it was a gluetun issue so I stopped using docker and tried the official ProtonVPN app, openvpn, wireguard and community version of protonvpn, I tried switching from arch to ubuntu on my NAS and the same thing kept happening.
I was convinced it was a hardware issue so I tried different hardware, same issues.
The only thing that fixed it was reducing the number of torrents I had seeding. At the time I had ~500 and once I lowered it, I stopped disconnecting.
Now I run 3 gluetun containers with 1 qbittorrent container connected to each and they each have ~400 torrents seeding and I haven’t had any issues since.
I started Alan Wake Remaster but it has really bad visual bugs, my screen keeps going black every minute or 2 and I have to pause the game for a few seconds to fix it so I don’t know if I’ll keep it going lol
I started it because Control and Quantum Break look so fun so I might just skip to them instead. Happy to see another positive opinion of Control, I’m super excited to try it!
I’ve just started God of War Ascension today, I’ve never played any of the series so I decided to play them in chronological order, well at least the ones I can play since the mobile one doesn’t seem to be available and I don’t have FB to play that one.
Its super fun, I love that they put the button prompts on the side of the screen that the button is on since I’m using an Xbox controller. But I’m not a big fan of how often they zoom out while I’m in the middle of fighting monsters. I just kept spamming quick attack on the back of the snakes because I couldn’t tell which character I was lol
Fennec is a Firefox fork on F-droid, use this as your browser and install ublock origin as your adblocker. Top right menu in fennc then press add-ons and find ublock origin and install it. Customise by pressing the top right menu of fennec -> add-ons -> ublock origin -> settings
Then just use the direct download sites in the megathread to download your files from. You can follow something like this video to harden ublock and make sure you block the ads that pretend to be download links.
OR
If you want to seed (upload the files you download from the torrent) back to other people like you, then use fennec, the same as above, but use the torrent sites linked in the mega thread instead of direct download sites and use a torrent client like libretorent on the F-droid repo to add the magnet links or torrent files you get from these sites. It will start downloading the files and also uploading the parts you have downloaded to other people that want them.
I always recommend a VPN and on android you can turn on always on VPN and and block connections without VPN in android settings but that’s up to you and what your country is like when it comes to piracy
OR
Others might be able to suggest a streaming setup? But I don’t stream anything so can’t help you there
I have my qbittorrent containters capped to seed about 20 - 30 GiB per day, 300KiB/s on each container. I’m seeding about 1400 torrents but since we have “unlimited” data allowances that aren’t actually unlimited I have to cap it. It sucks seeing some torrents seeding at 20KiB/s but at least they’ll eventually get it fully downloaded I suppose.
I also set anything over a 5 ratio to superseed mode so more popular torrents don’t hog too much bandwidth
The valid CRF value range is 0-63, with the default being 30. Lower values correspond to higher quality and greater file size.
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1
I compared a bunch of crf values, taking video quality, encode time and file size into account on a few episodes from some of my favorite shows and ended up settling on this.
For the most part, I don’t notice a quality difference compared to my source, but it might just be because of my bad eyes or my monitor lol. But I did notice quality differences around 35 + so they were out.
At crf 0 I’m encoding a 40 min epsisode in about 5 mins which I’m happy with, I probably could have saved time going for a higher value but most of the time I run the script when I’m sleeping so time wasn’t a big issue as long as it wasn’t taking 20+ mins to encode 1 file
Going for 0 meant I’d have as close to the same quality as my source, using the default preset, and I didn’t notice huge file size differences between 0 and 30.
I’ve encoded pretty much all of my TV shows now and I’ve dropped the size of my TV directory to about 1/4 of the original size so going for a higher crf value didn’t seem worth it to me, if I had noticed that my file size at crf 5 was half what it is at crf 0 then I would probably have went with crf 5
I think its pretty subjective some people are happy with 720p and others won’t settle for less than 4k so I don’t think this would be a great solution for everyone to do but I think people should play around with different parameters to see what works best for them.
I’ve been using a for loop with ffmpeg to convert to AV1
I start in the series root folder and it iterates through each seasons subfolder
for f in ./**/*.mkv; do
ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:v libsvtav1 -crf 0 "{f%.*}.av1.mkv"; done
Since I’m happy with the quality of everything so far, I’ve added this to the start to make it easier to delete the old files
for f in ./**/*.mkv; do
mv "$f" "${f%.*}.xyz.mkv"; done
And at the end I’ve added this to delete the old files
for f in ./**/*.xyz.mkv; do
rm " $f"; done
For sports, the mega thread has some stuff https://rentry.co/megathread-sports
For a good IPTV service you really do need to know someone, I know a guy that has been reselling for over a decade and he’s only had one provider shutdown on him because they only sell to people they trust.
When a provider gets too big that’s when law enforcement step in. Over the last few years there’s been a bunch of raids all over Europe so finding a provider has gotten more difficult and when people have one they don’t want to risk getting them shutdown by telling a stranger on the internet about it
Its pretty weird, being specifically bound to tun0 and still having your IP show after disconnecting, makes it seem like there is something else running tun0 like openVPN or Wireguard without a kill switch enabled and they’re just not connected to a VPN, if you’ve ever used them?
You could probably test this if you exit qbittorrent completely and disconnect from your VPN then open qbittorrent again and connect to another network interface in qbittorrent like wlan0 and save it. Then reopen that setting and see if tun0 is still an option. I don’t think it should show up, if it does something is keeping tun0 active.
Either way, I would suggest uninstalling ProtonVPN v3 and v4 and reinstalling v4, maybe something is getting mixed up with v3 and v4 files?
https://protonvpn.com/support/official-linux-vpn-fedora/
https://protonvpn.com/support/official-ubuntu-vpn-setup/
Under the notes section they specifically show how to uninstall v3 so that might help too.
I’m almost certain when using the official proton VPN app that proton creates a “proton0” network interface, or something similar, instead of using tun0. So you would have to bind to that interface instead of tun0.
I can’t remember for definite, its been so long since I used the official app.
I’m not sure it explains your problem though since you’re bound to tun0 anyway.
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.
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.
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.
https://rentry.co/megathread-emulators-and-roms
Fitgirl also has some repacks of popular ones and I’ve personally had good experiences with stuff from Sineater213
Proton requires an email because they offer a free tier, without some way of regulating users their servers would be overrun with bots and spam…
The difference between what recently happened with Mullvad and what happened in the article you linked about Proton is that with Mullvad they were looking for general user data for VPN usage, not a specific persons email account like with Proton.
If a copyright holder or law enforcement is in a torrent swarm and logs all of the IP addresses of the seeders of Frozen II and then goes looking for the users of those IPs then ProtonVPN and Mullvad VPN would have the same response - No logs, no idea
Sure, not having to register with an email with Mullvad and IVPN is great but they’re not offering port forwarding any more so we recommended ProtonVPN and you said you didn’t trust them because they followed the law, if Mullvad or IVPN offered email services then they would have to do the same thing Proton did.
If you make a ProtonVPN account with the sole purpose of torrenting then all you have to do is not publicise your Proton email along with the fact that you’re torrenting and then nobody can really do anything about that because law enforcement can’t go to Proton like they did with that guy because they don’t know the account linked to you.
I didn’t hear about the onion issues, but again unless Proton was specifically told to log specific users IPs then even if they were redirected, their IPs wouldn’t have been logged in those instances.
Its still user error, he must have publicised his Proton account, law enforcement found out about it and his IP was logged under Swiss law, thats user error. Its crappy that thats law but if you’re going to do things like that then you should know how to protect yourself properly
Proton doesn’t keep logs by default unless legally forced to.
Law enforcement would have to know the email account to make them log it. If they know the email account you’re using with ProtonVPN then thats user error and bad OpSec.
In the example you linked, if law enforcement didn’t know the guys email address then they couldn’t have forced Proton to log his IP.
Proton only started logging his IP after they were legally forced to do so, just like any other law abiding company would have to do.
Proton offers an onion site of Protonmail which the activist should have been using since he allegedly committed
theft and property damage, crimes - the latter two - that enable surveillance
this is a case of user error and bad opsec, not a company bending over backwards to share their users information. If you’re going to do things that are likely going to get you arrested, no matter how noble the cause, make sure you have excellent OpSec
Just tar and zstd. They’re probably installed by default for most distros anyway.
I think this is what I used when I first tried out zstd https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-and-use-zstd-compression-tool-on-linux
Tar supports input from zstd so I put everything on one line.
-I takes the input from zstd which is in quotes.
–ultra it should be redundant but for some reason its needed for higher levels of compression.
-22 the highest level of compression offered by zstd.
-c for compress.
-v for verbose.
-f for the file name.
-C excludes the absolute path to the file/directory and just takes YourFile as the file/directory to compress. Its not needed if you’re in the same directory as YourFile.
I would recommend leaving out
and just test how much compression you get with the default level first because 22 is super slow and if it just can’t compress the file you won’t see any difference in file size compared to the default compression level.