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.

tar -I 'zstd -v --ultra -22' -cvf YourFile.tar.zst -C /path/to/your/file YourFile

-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

--ultra -22

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.

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.

https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/33490543992467/Grand-Theft-Auto-Online-BattlEye-FAQ

Steam Deck does not support BattlEye for GTA Online

Such a crappy way of wording it and trying to blame the steam deck when BattlEye has said that they have had linux and wine support long before the steam deck came out

Official Rockstar Community (RP) Servers will not require BattlEye to play. Community Server launchers will disable BattlEye as part of their launch processes.

What makes RP servers so special that they don’t need BattlEye?

https://www.pcgamer.com/battleye-anti-cheat-confirms-steam-deck-support/

BattlEye has provided native Linux and Mac support for a long time and we can announce that we will also support the upcoming Steam Deck (Proton). This will be done on an opt-in basis with game developers choosing whether they want to allow it or not.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/genetics-firm-23andme-says-user-data-stolen-in-credential-stuffing-attack/

The information that has been exposed from this incident includes full names, usernames, profile photos, sex, date of birth, genetic ancestry results, and geographical location.

The threat actor accessed a small number of 23andMe accounts and then scraped the data of their DNA Relative matches, which shows how opting into a feature can have unexpected privacy consequences.

• Usernames Profile Photos DoB

They can be linked to other online accounts. This allows for phishing, potentially scamming or getting additonal information on them which can lead to more sophisticated/personalised scams. Older, less tech savvy users are better targets for scammers.

• Username Sex DoB Genetic Ancestry Location data

Data aggregators can sell this info to Health Insurance Companies or any other system who can then discriminate based on genes sex age or location

• All of this information

Can contribute to people committing fraud with their information if they collect enough information from different sources.

• DNA relatives

Having enough information about a user to use it to target their now known relatives in personalised scams.

The people that did this probably didn’t know what information they were going to get, maybe they were hoping for payment info, and settled for trying to just sell what they got.

Any information, no matter how useless it might seem, is better than no information and enough useless information in the wrong hands can be very valuable.

Theres countless data breaches every year and people will collect it all and link different accounts from different breaches until they have enough information. Most people use the same email address for every website and a lot of people reuse the same passwords, which is how this data leak occurred. Knowing that these users reuse the same email/password combination here means theres a very good chance they’ve reused it elsewhere.

You can check out what data breeches have occured and if your email or password has been posted in any of these dumps here https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Once the information is out there, its out there for good and what might seem trivial now to you could be valuable tomorrow to someone else

Finally a good take. Or maybe I’m just a pessimist lol

Microsoft are masters at dancing around anti competitive regulation. Xbox is struggling, they’ve said so themselves. I think they’re going to focus more on Gamepass and the Windows Store so making it as difficult as possible for the likes of the Steamdeck to succeeded is in their best interest. If they can push companies to adopt their new framework and at the same time make that framework almost impossible to implement into wine then its a win win. They can hurt wine while painting it as better security so they’re isn’t another CrowdStrike incident.

Anticompetitive practices disguised as user security.

I know linux isn’t very popular for the general public but Apple has their own implementation of wine in development and Google has flooded schools with Chromebooks. If I was Michaelsoft, I’d want to crush the competition quickly and discreetly now before I implement my Windows subscription so people don’t have any good alternatives left

Yeah, sometimes there just isn’t another option. I have a 60GiB Win11 VM for things I use every few months for a couple of minutes at a time

I’d recommend https://www.qemu.org/ for virtualisation

https://virt-manager.org/ for a gui to manage VMs, you can easily add or remove cores, memory, internet, directories etc really easily.

https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp lets you add a directory from your host to the VM to easily share files

https://github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-guest-tools-installer makes the cursor seamlessly move between the VM and host instead of pressing ctrl alt g to escape.

Win11 23H2 still allows for offline set up. Just press shift f10 when you’re at the internet set up and type

oobe/bypassnro

The VM will reboot and give you the option to select I don’t have internet so you can just use a local account

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat/ for getting rid of the unwanted bloatware

Theres also an easy way to activate windows for free, I don’t think I can link it here but its on github and MAS-sive amount of people have starred it.

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Manjaro, is in fact, Arch/Manjaro, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Arch plus Manjaro. Manjaro is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Arch system made useful by pacman, yay and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Around 16 TiB and I keep 3 copies of everything so 48 TiB used of around 65TiB. I encoded all my TV shows and most of my movies with AV1 and keep most of my files compressed, which saves a bunch of space so hopefully I won’t need more drives any time soon

I’ve run into issues where a game will work with a specific version of wine but then not work with a newer version but then other games that don’t work with the older version, work with the new one.

Theres also potentially issues of dependencies for one game breaking another game. Separate prefixes just make it easier to troubleshoot a game not working since you can just install/uninstall whatever dependencies that it might need without worrying about messing up other games.

Its also just easier to delete the entire prefix when you realise you’ve installed too many useless dlls and you’ve finally found the one thing you do need to make the game work lol

I also like to archive games I like since companies can just decide to remove their games from existence whenever they want. So I just add the separate prefix that has any extra dlls or tweaks to the archive so that the game should still work in 3 years without having to try and download dependencies that may not be as easy to find in the future

But if you don’t have issues I don’t think its a big deal and if you do have issues with a game, you can just make a separate one for that anyway.

Guide is maybe not the right word lol, it just exactly what I click to set up the majority of my games

I’m not 100% sure, but from my understanding yes the regisrty in the “prefix” folder would be changed. You can manually edit the wine prefix registry with regedit https://www.winehq.org/docs/wineusr-guid<br />e/using-regedit and Lutris supports this, just click the arrow that brings up the winetricks option and its under Wine Registry

I use Lutris and set up my directories a “GameName” and then 2 subdirectories “game” “prefix” and point Lutris to these.

All of the game files go in “game” and the prefix is created in “prefix” when I press play in Lutris. Any extras dlls that are needed can be installed with winetricks within Lutris to that specific prefix

This way you can just compress and decompress “GameName” folder and point Lutris to these locations on whichever machine.

You can choose which prefix version you want in Lutris and it will download that version for you. I’m pretty sure it saves the version to somewhere in ~.local/share/lutris I’m not at my PC now so not 100% sure of the path.

It saves it to ~.local/share/lutris/runners/wine and you can put a custom wine build here and Lutris should recognise it when configuring the runner options

So you could copy this over to the corresponding location on the deck and Lutris will automatically detect this version as installed and won’t have to download it again but its not necessary unless you don’t have internet on the deck, or you’re like me and want to keep an archive of the working prefix for the future in case the prefix version is no longer available for whatever reason and other version just won’t work.

If you’re new to Lutris, I wrote a step by step guide on how I use Lutris on a different community

https://sopuli.xyz/comment/9858101

Theres at least 4 websites in the megathread under the ROMs section that have a bunch of Switch games. 3 begin with N and 1 begins with Z. In the FAQ section of the Z website is where I got keys and firmware

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

https://torrentfreak.com/airvpn-stops-serving-italians-due-to-piracy-shield-blocking-requirements-240206/

“[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 see the Extend part of Embrace Extend Extinguish is about to start…

Use one of the websites in the megathread, unless you want to use the dev tools on a pc to find the video source link and try to download it from there but thats a whole lot of unnecessary effort

??? Theres a download button beside the play button that gives a bunch of sources and each source has a torrent file or magnet link to add to your torrent client

I’ve never used miui devices but I think you need to make an account and use this https://en.miui.com/unlock/download_en.html so you will probably need to have wine installed to run it, unless it has a native linux version in the zip file. Then you should have an unlocked bootloader

You should be able to kind of do both through android settings

Settings -> Apps -> YourApp -> Mobile data usage -> Allow Network access and Mobile Data

For VPN you’ll need to add a VPN and then Settings -> Network and Internet -> VPN -> YourVPN -> Always on VPN and Block Connections without VPN. This blocks all apps. There is 2 issues with this though, Blocking connections will block split tunneling connections set up through VPNs and also potentially this depending on the apps you’re using https://mullvad.net/en/blog/dns-traffic-can-leak-outside-the-vpn-tunnel-on-android

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.

Don’t forget about this