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Unless I’m missing something it looks like it doesn’t use Denuvo? (Steam lists a custom EULA but I don’t see Denuvo listed.)

I don’t. I use the timer on my microwave.

I boil water in a sauce pot on the stove. Slosh it into my mug. Plunk in a tea bag and set the timer on my microwave for 3:30 so that I don’t forget and over-steep it. No milk. No sugar.

Have you tried Resonance? It’s a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It’s been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.

And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.

Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)

I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself – I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn’t understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it’s clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates… (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)

I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?

I hadn’t played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn’t great when you asked this question – but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such – and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It’s got orange and white stripes. It’s scratched up a little bit, but it’s still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to “improve performance”… lol)

The game opens with a short animated splash screen – a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game’s logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off – somewhat confusingly; it wasn’t immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn’t find it very helpful.

The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don’t really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it’s not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.

There’s an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.

The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don’t know well enough to name – but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going “AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!” over and over.)

I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) – and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it’s also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a “boing-a-boing-oing-oing” failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.

The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there – or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can “build” a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn’t seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).

Unfortunately I don’t have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:

By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.

which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I’m running it on has a 3.7GHz processor – obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance – but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p

Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print – although I haven’t tried it.

I’ve seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob’s Ladder. That was a night well spent.

Out of the games, I’ve played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried – never really made much sense out of that one though.

I don’t know if it’s that obscure… but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games – do you remember the song with the lyrics “I’m just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life”?

If you want minimal effort to get a good Linux setup for Steam, just buy a SteamDeck. Get the dock if you want to use it like a regular computer or console with a wireless gamepad. I did that – hooked it up to my monitor, headphones, plugged in a mouse, keyboard, and my old XBox360 USB wireless dongle and it all just worked. I’ve got a few ideas for fun projects I want to try with it as a handheld and have written some software on it using desktop mode (little Python utility scripts for shuffling data around) but mostly I just use it like a gaming console; it works well for that.

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• GLFW is intended to be built with cmake.
• After unzipping the source, make a build directory, and configure glfw3
• ^^ I like using ccmake to do this interactively, but you can also just pass flags to cmake if you know what they are
• You should build with GLFW_USE_WAYLAND and GLFW_USE_OSMESA turned off to get it to try to build against X11.
• You will probably also want to turn off GLFW_BUILD_DOCS, GLFW_BUILD_EXAMPLES, GLFW_BUILD_TESTS
• You can adjust CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX if you don’t want to use the /usr/local default install path.
• After generating a Makefile, run make and make install
• glfw3 generates a pkg-config compatible .pc file as part of its build process that lists flags needed for compilation and linking against the library. Normally, you’d just call pkg-config --cflags --libs --static glfw3 to get this info as part of your own build process (in a Makefile, for example) or else require glfw3 as part of a cmake-based build, but you can read what’s generated in there if that program is not available to you for some reason. In case it’s helpful for comparison, what I get with a custom build of the static library version of glfw3 installed into /usr/local on a slightly old version of Ubuntu is output like -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -lglfw -lrt -lm -ldl -lX11 -lpthread -lxcb -lXau -lXdmcp but you may need something different for your particular configuration.

Basically, something like this, probably, to do the compilation and get the flags to pass to g++:

wget 'https://github.com/glfw/glfw/releases/download/3.3.8/glfw-3.3.8.zip'
unzip glfw-3.3.8.zip
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -D GLFW_BUILD_DOCS=OFF -D GLFW_BUILD_EXAMPLES=OFF -D GLFW_BUILD_TESTS=OFF -D GLFW_USE_OSMESA=OFF -D GLFW_USE_WAYLAND=OFF -D GLFW_VULKAN_STATIC=OFF ../glfw-3.3.8
make
make install

pkg-config --cflags --libs --static glfw3

If you want to just compile a single cpp file after building and install, you can do something like

g++ main.cpp `pkg-config --cflags --libs --static glfw3` -lGL

Try compiling GLFW from source against GLX instead of EGL. If glxinfo is talking to a software implementation running on your system, I’d expect GLFW built to use GLX would use the same implementation on your computer.

• You are running Wayland
• Your GLFW programs are using EGL, not GLX, to talk to your graphics drivers/hardware
• glxinfo is talking to a software implementation, not your hardware
• glxinfo’s output is irrelevant if you want to talk to your hardware with your current configuration; if you want to use the software implementation recompile GLFW targeting GLX and it should match that (but will be VERY slow).
• One of your old posts describes your GPU as: Intel GMA3100 (G31) – is this the same system you’re running on now? If so, that is ancient. It looks like that came out in 2007 – which predates the existence of OpenGL 3.0; so, getting 2.1 as the newest context available when talking to actual hardware is not surprising…

I’ve used Wireshark when I want to inspect the traffic going through my computer. I’ve found it particularly handy for debugging my own networking code. I’ve also used netstat to see active connections and programs listening for traffic when I don’t care about the packet contents specifically.

I think it’s probably an Indian English-ism. It’s understandable but sounds weird to speakers of American English (and maybe other English dialects).

A more natural sounding title (to an American English speaker) would use “Microsoft is making” or “Microsoft is planning to make” rather than “Microsoft might want to be making”.

With that said, can I possibly only allow traffic to and fro from the proxy through my firewall?

Yes. That is what I suggested. If you configure the firewall to only allow traffic to/from the specific IP and port combination of your proxy, other traffic will be blocked.

I should be able to (in theory) inspect traffic too, although I don’t know how far that will take me.

You can do content filtering via a proxy like that, yes. A similar sort of configuration is used on school computers to do things like block adult content, with varying degrees of success. Some ad-blocking techniques work on similar principles.

If I understood your question correctly, you’d run the proxy application (which might be Squid or Apache or some other program) either on the host computer outside the VM or elsewhere on your network. (I’m not well versed on all the ins and outs of setting Firefox up to communicate through a proxy; I just know it can be done.) The proxy would listen for incoming traffic on a specific port you configure. You then tell Firefox (in its network settings) to communicate with the specific IP and port of the proxy instead of talking to web servers directly.

To prevent other programs from communicating, you’d firewall off the VM with iptables (or maybe ufw or something else depending on what you use on your system). You’d set it to drop all traffic going to/from the VM’s network except packets going to or coming from the specific IP/port combinations you want to allow.

This isn’t a bulletproof way to block other apps from talking to the internet – anything that knows about the proxy (or which can hijack/manipulate a program like Firefox that you’ve told about the proxy) could communicate with web servers via the proxy, but depending on your specific concerns it may be good enough.

You could try configuring Firefox to access the internet through a proxy and then block the VM off from everything except the proxy and your network mount with a firewall (outside the VM).

It’s preinstalled if you buy a Steam Deck – which by default runs a corporate backed (i.e. by Valve) Arch-derived distro called SteamOS. I bought one. If you hook it up like a regular computer (plug in mouse, keyboard, and external monitor with the dock) damned near everything I’ve tried has worked acceptably. Some games need a little fiddling around (e.g. installing video codecs or CJK language support or changing the proton version from the default setting to “experimental”) and I’ve run into bugs with full screen or the on screen keyboard a couple times, but I have yet to find a game I straight up could not play even if it was marked as unsupported. (I expect some games with obnoxious DRM/anti-cheat or that need ridiculously powerful cutting edge GPU specs probably wouldn’t work well though, but haven’t really tested the limits in that direction.)

This is totally going to turn into another JBIG2 lossy compression clusterfuck isn’t it…

For those who are unfamiliar, JBIG2 is a compression standard that has a dubious reputation for replacing characters incorrectly in scanned documents (so 6 could become an 8, for example) leading to potentially serious issues when scanning things like medical and legal documents, construction blueprints, etc.

Thanks for copying the list out; I’m not visiting YouTube either at the moment. I think I probably saw this video a while ago though – at least, that particular set of games looks very familiar…

I’ve played some of them and have some things to say about them:

• Paradise Killer: I liked the music in this one. I’d never encountered the vaporwave aesthetic before bumping into this game via a Let’s Play (back when I was still going to YouTube) which probably enhanced the weirdness factor of the game for me. It clearly took inspiration from Danganronpa, so if you liked that game you might want to check it out (or vice versa if you somehow ran into Paradise Killer without having heard of Danganronpa, I guess).
• Crosscode: I found this game frustrating. I liked a lot of things the game did – like the interaction with party members (EXCEPT for dungeons) and running around the map searching for secrets – but… the default difficulty seemed to be set to maximize annoyance. I mean, it’s doable. I was very stubborn about not changing the timing setting – probably too much so – and was eventually able to beat the main game, but the way it was tuned definitely reduced my enjoyment. The game claims that adjusting the setting doesn’t matter, but tracks statistics about it (like GTA-style stats) which made me really stubborn about not changing the setting. A lot of the challenges in the game are Zelda-esque timing puzzles – from hell. Like hit the switch then run over and do something before time runs out but with 20 steps instead of the one or two you’d find in a Zelda game. (If you don’t like those sorts of timing puzzles you probably won’t have a good time with this one.) So, of course, the timing is set in such a way that it’s often tricky to actually pull off (particularly with aiming involved) even once you’ve figured out exactly what needs to be done. I did it, but more often than not got pissed off while doing it. The game additionally had the interesting idea of having competitive dungeons. Your party members would challenge you on the overall time to clear dungeons. So, in addition to the time pressure of individual puzzles, there was an overall time pressure to race through the puzzles as fast as possible. I liked the idea of where they were coming from with the party member interactions for dungeons but I’d have preferred to take my time with things frankly. It ultimately doesn’t matter that much whether you win or lose those (I won about half of them), but having the game rub my nose in it for being too slow after getting frustrated at puzzle timing and aiming for an hour or more in each dungeon kind of sucked. The overall plot of the game was interesting enough to go through, and I liked the characters for the most part, but a lot of the gameplay was frustrating. Very mixed feelings on this one.
• Phoenotopia Awakening: This game was another mixed bag. I really wanted to like it. There were a lot of parts I did like… but it is very flawed. First is the gameplay. It presents itself as a mostly cute pixel platformer/adventure game, but the developers seemed to be thinking “Dark Souls” with stamina and such and… it really did not work for me. Thankfully, you can turn most of that crap off – and I did so unabashedly. (I beat DS1 before playing it, and since playing it I’ve beaten DS2 – so it’s not like I can’t handle hard games. It just did not feel good to play with those mechanics enabled.) Second is the story. There’s a decent enough hook to get the main adventure going fairly early on, but the game doesn’t deliver on it. You get to the end and the big dramatic question of the game is… still unanswered! That is really not ok! (Instead you get a bunch of unnecessary backstory for the main character that I took as a big “fuck you”; I won’t say more than that in case someone does want to play it and find out for themselves, but the ending was really unsatisfying to me.) The game had a lot going for it – the music’s good (and I still listen to some of the tracks occasionally), and there was a lot of charm in places. Some of the areas were really pretty and there were a bunch of fun little interactions – but I really don’t know what they were thinking with some of it!

It’s been most helpful to me for tracking work and health issues like I said. e.g. being able to say specifically “I wrote the software for A,B,C,D,… and also did E,F,G,H,…” in my performance review instead of forgetting half of it. Reflecting on how many days I’d listed health issues was useful for getting myself to seek professional help instead of just sleeping walking through life as well; still working on that, but having the evidence there I can say things quantitatively like ~25% of my entries (923 days out of 3623 logged) include “tired”, “exhausted”, or “unproductive”… Life isn’t supposed to be like that.

I had a bit of trouble getting started initially, but forced myself to do it for a couple weeks until it became a habit. For me it’s part of winding down towards sleep now; not doing it feels like not brushing my teeth.

It won’t solve your problems for you, but it can help you see them if you have them, and having an auxiliary memory to brain dump into is also nice since you don’t have to keep everything in your head. I recommend anyone who can get into the habit do it; I wish I’d started sooner.