Interesting to see two Valve employees, Joshua Ashton and Sam Lantinga, as contributors and even creator/maintainer of SDL. I wonder how many more there are.

Taking a look at the CREDITS.md file:

QuoteMike Sartain for incorporating SDL into Team Fortress 2 and cheering me on at Valve.
Pierre-Loup Griffais for his deep knowledge of OpenGL drivers.

And just as an interesting point-of-fact:

QuoteEverybody at Loki Software, Inc. for their great contributions!

That Wayland vs X11 issue is quite contentious. We've got everyone from Conan-Kudo, Xaver Hugl from KDE, to Mattias Klumpp weighing in on it. One thing that strikes me is how long it would take for Wayland support to be implemented if the missing protocol isn't merged in time for SDL3's release:

QuoteIf we do this, we are basically accepting these issues are unfixable for the next ten years (SDL4).

What's more, every major desktop is now Wayland-first, and GNOME is soon to be Wayland-only, maybe next year. The XWayland X server is still around, so there's still support for the features SDL needs...but it also has problems.

Shipping a broken default is the wrong thing to do. Unfortunately, that protocol is unlikely to be finished before SDL3's release (3+ months away).

Two bad options. There's suggestions of flipping the default later on in the lifecycle of SDL3 once this protocol is implemented, and that seems like what's going to happen. I'm not sure what the downsides of this are.

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Quoting: CalebQ42Good to see this is finally being fixed(ish). This is one of the main reasons I switched to AMD nearly a year ago as the issue ultimately comes down to NVIDIA deciding they want to do something a different way then everyone else and letting their users have a bad time. From the research I've done, there are some benefits to explicit sync over implicit sync, but since every other driver already has implicit sync no one was in too much of a rush to add it.

It seems like almost everybody is in favor of explicit sync: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317#note_1358617

There's a link to this article included: https://lwn.net/Articles/814587/

QuoteExplicit synchronization is the future of graphics and media. At
least, that seems to be the consensus among all the graphics people
I've talked to. I had a chat with one of the lead Android graphics
engineers recently who told me that doing explicit sync from the start
was one of the best engineering decisions Android ever made. It's
also the direction being taken by more modern APIs such as Vulkan.

I can't claim to have researched the topic in detail beyond what was necessary for me to understand the significance of this protocol for my flickering issue on Wayland, but this doesn't actually seem like a controversial issue: everybody wants explicit sync.

Glad to see this issue is finally going away, though.

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Quoting: LoftyHow is it different from emulating lets say a 20yr old PS2 game ? perhaps fundamentally it is not that far apart, but the developer is not losing money on sales for a start, the hardware is well and truly out of action and there is no effective DRM to bypass or machine to crack. Maybe that's just semantics.

Strictly speaking, the two are not mutually exclusive. The common rhetoric is that users should buy the Switch, hack it so it can dump game archives for cartridges they insert, and then for the user to purchase the game and dump it. Nintendo doesn't lose out on any sales this way.

What is the proportion of people doing that? That's a completely different story.

Some PS1 discs were protected by Libcrypt in 1998. Circumventing that today would still fall afoul of Section 1201 of the DMCA, no two ways about it.

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Quoting: LoftyAnd furthermore emulation was nowhere near the level that is it now with big name youtubers showing off day one releases running flawlessly on competing hardware (steam deck) from a platform (switch) that is currently on sale.

Technically that was the objective of bleem! with emulating current-gen Playstation games on the competing Sega Saturn; the quality may not have been great, but if they could have made it great, they would have. I don't think whether the emulator performs well or not really has much of an impact on the ethics.

Take second-hand products, for example. Is the only reason selling products you own second-hand is legal because they might be of worse quality than a new product? I don't think this has anything to do with it ethically.

Quoting: LoftyTrue, but slightly exaggerated. Those early emulators at the time weren't exactly performant & bug free across a wide catalogue of games and the systems used to emulate ( PC ) were not doing so with ease at 4k.

and valve showing yuzu in their promotional steam deck thumbnail

With regards to the 7 years of PPSSPP that a fair old time along but i take your point, but even so the emulation quality of today with such a large global community of developers is WAY bigger than it was back then.

I don't really have a horse in this race because I've used emulation exactly once, to play an hour of the original Mario game, over a decade ago. And...maybe a few Pokemon ROM hacks way back when?

From what I've heard, Switch emulators offer a much better experience than the Switch console. Higher resolutions and frame rates, for example. If somebody has bought the game, shouldn't they be able to play it wherever they want? Wine isn't emulation, but the same principle applies: should Linux users not morally be able to play Windows games they bought on Steam?

Emulators allow people to play games they haven't bought, but the fact is, you can play games you haven't bought on a hacked Switch itself anyway. If Yuzu and Ryujinx went away for good, people who don't pay for games will still be able to play those game ROMs on the Switch and get the same experience as a paying customer.

At least they have to buy an older Switch now, I guess, but companies usually lose money on every console they sell, so that's not really a benefit...

The difference is, emulators seem to offer a better experience than a Switch. Isn't it...anti-competitive not to allow that?

That being said, if Valve taking a harsh stance against emulation convinces Nintendo to bring their games to Steam, that can only be a good thing.

I don't really have a horse in this race, but that's how I see it.

Quoting: LoftyId argue Retro gaming is becoming more popular than current year gaming. Because most AAA games are garbage.

On this, I can agree. Though I still really like Rainbow Six: Siege for the social aspect.

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Quoting: LoftyNot that i ever want to side with a giant mega corporation but i can kind of understand the Nintendo perspective on switch emulation, i mean people are emulating games that are practically day one release on emulators, sometimes games that have been leaked. Emulation is meant for game preservation and nostalgia (edit* not exclusively) It's not very nostalgic emulating a current gen game on non supported hardware and it's not a game that needs preserving whilst its still on immediate sale.

Many emulators have emulated current generation games for other hardware.

Dolphin emulated Gamecube only 2 years after it was first released, in 2003.

PCSX2 started in 2002, only 2 years after the Playstation 2 was released. PCSXR was started 4 years after the first playstation released, and the emulator would eventually be used by Sony themselves in their classic console.

Connectix was released 5 years after the first Playstation was released.

PPSSPP started 7 years after the PSP was released while it was still being sold, which is the same amount of time between when the Switch was first released and now.

Bleem! emulated Sony games for the Sega Saturn in the same generation.

Unsurprisingly, Citra was started 3 years after the release of the 3DS.

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Quoting: elmapulthey lose the opportunity to call it uwu

We still have UwUntu.

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: Pyretic

Quoting: devlandAmazon probably paid gog to do this since they are struggling financially.

GOG is struggling financially??? I'm out of the loop here, since when were they struggling?

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/11/gog-to-go-through-some-reorganization-after-suffering-losses/

Old news.

That's one of the problems with the Internet is that it's too easy to mistake old news for current news. GOG posted their financials for 2022 back in May 2023. They made a $1.2M USD net profit in 2022.

GOG Facts & Numbers of 2022

I think that the media and the investor community overreacted somewhat, viewing things in the short-term as they do. GOG did an excellent job of bouncing back from what amounts to a blip in their annual financial results.

Great to see, thanks for the correction.

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QuoteWhile I'm a KDE Plasma user and fan myself, I'm still impressed by all the features and small touches the GNOME team manage to keep bringing to the table too.

I use both. KDE on my NVIDIA card because the Wayland experience is better, and GNOME on my laptops because I really like GNOME. I don't have a preference necessarily, but new GNOME updates are always more exciting.

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QuoteDo you think Nintendo will attempt to shut this down too?

Nintendo is already going after forks: https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-hits-circumvention-tool-linkers-with-dmca-trafficking-violation-240314/

QuoteIn the wake of its one-week lawsuit targeting the Yuzu Switch emulator, Nintendo is back to clean up the house. The company has just shut down around 30 GitHub repos offering circumvention tools with attempts to evade liability given short shrift. One Nintendo takedown notice makes it clear that, even when people link to a third-party site that hosts tools available via different links, it still amounts to trafficking in circumvention devices under the DMCA.

I previously thought knowingly linking to circumvention tools wasn't illegal in the US, but it's actually unclear because there's a precedent for both cases.

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Quoting: Woodlandor

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

QuoteDid this update solve an issue you were having, or are you waiting on NVIDIA fixing something else?

It has not. I have 5 programs that flicker (the Steam client being the absolute worst) and I am starting to get really sick of it.

Explicit sync patches won't land until the 555 release, which is likely a couple months away. Once that lands, my biggest problem with Wayland will be solved, and we can move on to the second-biggest: Color Management.

The flickering nonsense is very annoying.
But if you go into Steam settings, and turn off GPU acceleration it goes away.
It’s a solution for this transition period anyway.

I turned it off because a recent update made Steam completely unusable, but the flickering doesn't go away completely. It is dramatically reduced and Download/Install/Play buttons have stopped disappearing. The Steam Overlay is still really hard to use.

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