Adding More Retro Gaming Emulators to Salix

[brocashelm]

I've noticed that the selection of open-source games is quite poor in Slackware, and Salix also lacks them. Out of curiosity, would any of the packagers please port some more retro gaming emulators to Salix's repositories? I know Mednafen is in there and should cover most bases, but it would be nice to have standalone emulators.

Those such as Snes9x, PCSX2, Yabause, Mupen64Plus, Dolphin, mGBA., DeSmuME, PPSSPP, Kega Fusion (I know it's not open-source, but there exists a generic GNU/Linux build of it -- or either BlastEm or Dgen would also work), etc.

I'd understand if it's not all possible, but just to add a handful of more retro gaming emulators for those wanting to set up a lightweight gaming system without having to use the SlackBuild scripts. I'd be happy to test these out and report any issues that I'd find. If I'm understanding correctly, these would be hosted via personal public repositories, instead of the stable Salix repositories?

Thanks.

[Papasot]

I have zero experience about the consoles those emulators are about. And even if I knew about those consoles, emulators typically require hardware ROMs to "boot", not to mention the game ROMs themselves to actually use the whole thing. However, after a quick look:

• Snes9x provides binaries for older versions, which run on Salix - just make sure you install libpng-legacy12 from Salix repositories first. It worked out-of-the-box in my test, but I could not do anything with it (since it requires SNES ROMs). In theory, latest version should be easily compiled (thus making a Salix package shouldn't be a problem), but they also provide an AppImage which works.

• PCSX2 and PPSSPP provide Flatpaks for their latest versions. Flatpak is part of the default Salix installation. I would be interested of the former, only because of a particular PS2 game I would want to play, namely Dog's life, which seems to be ridiculously fun.

• Yabause has decent instructions for packagers, but building it fails. From what I read this is because of deprecated Qt code. I'm sure one could bypass the problem by modifying the Yabause source files, but well... that's too much, not to mention I never liked Qt.

• Mupen64Plus provides binaries for agnostic GNU/Linux (also for Crapbuntu but who cares about that). This binary for the latest version works in Salix, just make sure you install libminizip from the Salix repositories. Again, although it works I could not test it further because it needs ROMs.

• Dolphin requires additional steps with git before compiling, and even that didn't work. I dislike git (and even more GitHub), so I let it be.

• mGBA provides an AppImage which worked right away in Salix. Building it from source fails, presumably because it needs a specific version of Lua (go figure which one). But since the AppImage works I see no point to investigate further.

• DeSmuME is probably the worst of all, packager-wise. They use meson as their build system for the GTK+3 version and even ninja on top of it. I hate it when developers do that. Why the hell do they force us to bother with yet another build system nobody cares about? And as if that wasn't enough, their GTK+2 version (which doesn't require meson) won't build, again because of a specific Lua version needed which of course they won't tell you which one it is. Oh well, that's too much for a console emulator already...

[brocashelm]

Thanks for replying. I don't want any Flatpaks or Snaps of any kind, though. I'd much rather prefer to rely on the distro's own package manager, find a working AppImage, or compile from source (SlackBuilds). It depends on the software.

Still, it looks like some of those you've explained away wouldn't work well with Salix, anyway (although Debian has half of those on their official repositories). I suppose I'll try the SlackBuilds, and for things like DuckStation or RPCS3, they'll be AppImages downloaded directly from their GitHub repositories.

I will try to source these emulators from the SlackBuilds (if available), and then report back in this thread.

[brocashelm]

I can confirm that building Snes9x, Yabause, and PCSX2 were a success, although in PCSX2's case, I had to fetch other SlackBuild sources because Salix did not have them (such as Rapid YAML and Setuptools), I must also mention that I build FCEUX to get a bit newer build than what is provided (the recent 2.6 versions are a lot smoother to play with). I shall report back on PPSSPP, Mupen64Plus, and the rest of the emulators I've listed.

I must say, though, that building these packages has once again made me realize that Debian's way of separating development versions of packages can sometimes be a pain in the you-know-what...