this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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What's the most noteworthy/interesting game repack you've come across? (lemmy.fmhy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by CorrodedCranium@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Some of them that come to mind for me are:

  • FitGirl's Escape from Tarkov repack that featured a single player mod

  • FitGirl's Half Life Alyx repack that with the NoVR mod

  • Gnarly's Tale of Two Wastelands repack that had everything ready to go after the install. No need to install both Fallout 3 & New Vegas and wait hours for things to compile

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[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The LinuxRulez repacks sometimes include Windows games that work almost natively on Linux with some WINE magic.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

With the way you worded it, I just want to make sure you're aware that practically every windows game works on linux nowadays. You can install windows repacks/anything through lutris with minimal tweaking. Not only do cracks almost always work on linux, they sometimes even help compatibility by stripping out DRM junk.

[–] nivenkos@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately older games often have issues.

I was trying to fix Capitalism Lab for a while, but still couldn't manage it.

It only redraws the rectangle around the cursor rather than the whole screen, it must be something to do with the clipper in DirectDraw and that conversion to framebuffer objects in OpenGL.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 4 points 1 year ago

Yep, I just downloaded a copy and tried it out and it's definitely a weird one. Old games are quite hit and miss, even on windows. Oftentimes, linux will run older games better with its array of compatibility tools, but you can still get unlucky and come across some game programmed via punchcards and duck sounds.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Personally, I haven't gotten a crack to work that wasn't a LinuxRulez or Linux native repack. I can keep trying though. I know others have gotten it to work.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi, I was going to write a quick reply with general linux cracking notes, and it turned into not a quick guide: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/19693

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago

I'd give you gold but I have no money and that's not a thing here. Cheers pal.

[–] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I install all of my cracks through Bottles and I've only ever had a problem with SimCity 2014, which is notoriously incompatible with a lot of things.

Just set up bottles, press "run executable" on the setup and afterwards bottles automatically shows the desktop shortcuts that would appear on a windows machine as a list of programs you can run. I've even had luck with running adjacent tools, for example VTOL for titanfall2 and my GTA mod menu injector.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 year ago

Bottles is something I haven't looked into yet. Thanks.

[–] minimar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my experience a lot of cracks don't work. I can't get DOOM 2016 or Heavy Rain to work, for example.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hi!

Doom 2016 has SteamDRM and Steamworks API protection, so you can crack it with Steamless + Goldberg Steam Emu. It additionally requires winetricks'ing vcrun2015 or it will crash on startup. I suspect the vcrun2015 part is why you were having trouble, not the cracks you were trying. I launched it via the vulkan executable

Heavy Rain has SteamDRM and Steamworks API protection, so you can crack it with Steamless + Goldberg Steam Emu. I was able to get this to work without any other modifications. When starting the game, there was a popup about steam controller configuration something or other, but clicking "cancel" let the game start normally.

My configuration for both games, if it matters:

  • Wine-GE 7-37
  • DXVK 2.2
  • VKD3D 2.8
  • Esync+Fsync enabled
  • NVAPI enabled

I wrote a guide for linux cracking here that might help in the future if you didn't see it: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/19693

Hope you get to play these games now!

[–] minimar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So, here's how I've tried to do this:

  • Running the vulkan executable via lutris with Wine-GE, DXVK, VKD3D
  • I've created a winetricks prefix called 'doom' with vcrun2015 ticked, and set it to use that prefix in lutris.

Still just a black screen at startup.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The black screen on startup was happening for me until I installed vcrun2015, which solved it. Have you tried creating the prefix through lutris?

  • Add a lutris game as "Wine", then type in a folder where you want the prefix to be created (doesn't have to exist yet).

  • Fill out the rest of the lutris info, e.g. wine version, DXVK, etc, and then click Save.

  • Click the dropdown next to the wineglass icon (near the play button), and click "Open Wine console".

  • It will take a second to create your prefix, then it will open a console. Just exit out of the console.

  • Go back to the wineglass dropdown and click "Winetricks"

  • Wait for it to load, then do "Select the default prefix wineprefix" -> "Install a Windows DLL or component" -> select vcrun2015 -> Click OK.

  • It will install it in the background, and it should reopen the winetricks GUI when it's done. If it doesn't open the winetricks GUI, it might have failed. Try again and hope it works

  • After it installs, fill out the rest of the Lutris configuration and try to launch it with that prefix.

[–] minimar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm afraid that's exactly what I've done, no difference.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Very strange. You could try installing vcrun2017 or vcrun2019 to see if one of those works instead, but otherwise my wine's configuration doesn't have anything special going on. I specifically made a new wine prefix every configuration attempt, and installing vcrun2015 was reproduceably the step that allowed the game to launch.

I have an AMD card, though that shouldn't matter. You can potentially check the lutris log for the game to see if anything useful gets printed there. In my experience it rarely prints anything useful.

To my knowledge, wine isn't really that complicated - there's only a couple important components that decide whether something's going to run or not, and I don't think it should really change on a per-system basis outside of maybe GPU drivers.

Did you get Heavy Rain to work at least?

Edit: Also I can at least say with certainty that if you're using Steamless + Goldberg to defeat the DRM that that is not where the problem is. The game itself is having trouble running for whatever reason.

[–] minimar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Installing the other vcrun's didn't help. I have an AMD card too, so that's not the issue.

Lutris log, just in case

I don't have heavy rain downloaded at the moment, but I have a feeling it'll be the same story... :(

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm downloading a copy of Doom 2016 to take another look. I see an Nvidia message in there, can you try disabling NVAPI under Lutris -> Runner Options?

If that doesn't work, can you try using Wine-GE 7-37 specifically? That's the version I used but you're on 8-8, so maybe there's a regression at some point that caused this.

[–] minimar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Neither have had any effect, I'm afraid.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've played around with it a bit and can't get a situation where it fails to start.

This is my lutris configuration. I've disabled as many features as possible (including dxvk and vkd3d) and it still works:

game:
  exe: /mnt/Cracking/Prefix/drive_c/Games/DOOM/DOOMx64vk.exe
  prefix: /mnt/Cracking/Prefix
  working_dir: ''
system:
  env: {}
  fps_limit: ''
  gamemode: false
  mangohud: false
  prefix_command: ''
  pulse_latency: false
  terminal: false
wine:
  battleye: false
  d3d_extras: false
  dxvk: false
  dxvk_nvapi: false
  dxvk_version: v2.2
  eac: false
  esync: false
  fsr: false
  fsync: false
  overrides: {}
  version: lutris-GE-Proton8-8-x86_64
  vkd3d: false
  vkd3d_version: v2.9

My last guess is that users are reporting a black screen on startup if pulseaudio is not installed. If you happen to use ALSA or maybe don't have pipewire-pulse installed, that could be causing the issue. If that's not the case, then I have no idea what's going on. Something from your system seems to be causing issues at a deeper level than just lutris/wine configuration.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3480

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/4016

[–] minimar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I've copied those settings exactly, still no difference. I do have pipewire-pulse installed. Very frustrating!