Or should be made available

Could, then, people here in the comments bring FOSS games from other sources too?

Didn’t quite follow 3DS emulation development, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it would seem mostly done. Only StreetPass and multiplayer seem to be a question mark currently.

Afaik, without power being a concern, pretty much anything until the PS3 that ever got an emulator for it, no matter whichever “host system” (borrowing VM thermology) it got released for, can be emulated on modern computers and systems.

Biggest caveats I can think of would be the options available, and how to run them.

For example, I try to avoid Retroarch when possible, since, to me, too many systems in one interface are a limiting factor, but the only stand-alone emulator that can decently run (imo) the Metal Slug games, of which I love, was some old Windows build of an arcade emulator, so I have to run it within Wine. Similarly, if you wish to run Java Phone games, afaik, you need to run them on a Java Phone emulator for the PSP within PPSSPP.

And on another example, PC-98 emulation is usually accessible only through Retroarch, but it doesn’t seem to be able to mount multiple disks at the same time, and some games need that, so, from what I could find, either you need to figure out how to use DOSBox-X as a PC-98 machine, or you need to figure out how to compile Neko Project II Kai for recent systems.

Old PC games that require Windows’ hardware acceleration and/or 3D libraries may also be problematic to run due to VMs’ development for old system being rather slow. Android also seems to be finicky, with either emulators being full of ads, privacy issues, moody compatibility with proper VM softwares, or taking a comically large space in Android SDK’s in-built emulator.

And progress on emulators for newer systems such as PS Vita, PS4 and Xbox One are slow, progress for Switch appears to be halted thanks to Nintendo, and heard iOS emulation is possible but it is still elusive to me.

So, to sum up, most of the times, even if with varying results, from what I tested and from what I saw being reported, most systems can be run, but may take some case-by-case setting up and testing.

If you want to gradually move away from closed and/or paid software, afaik, the only way is through unlocking the bootloader and uninstalling programs through there.

Alternatively, there is the nuclear option, to replace the whole system, and start from zero with a distro as close as possible from AOSP. Worth noting it also requires unlocking the bootloader.

Whether it’s a rage-click community, a community made for an agenda, or both, I don’t know, but in either cases, I wouldn’t see as surprising for the mods in such a community to be very trigger-happy. Best you can do, I think, is to block communities and individuals with such a profile, and to recommend others to not engaging (remember to explain why if you do it, btw).

At least Sega and Sony mostly dropped their fearmongering/correlation fallacies ship after the Bleem situation, but companies like Nintendo and Irdeto insist on being setbacks to the market. And with devices more and more closing down on what the user can do, despite being glorified computers, a friend of mine would even say that “console modding is an act of self-defense”. Furthermore, if piracy is as rampant as such companies insist on saying, I wonder how much wouldn’t be a “problem of service”, as GabeN once said, and/or if perhaps they’re using correlation to justify limiting what people can do.

Mint seems decent all around. No cutting edges nor it’s specialized in any areas, but it’s a jack of all trades, and rather stable.

The team seems rather inconsistent, or perhaps erratic, from my experience some years back. Not glaring issues, but small things that keep building up. In the RetroAchievements case, I can’t help but wonder if they either want to have a walled garden, or if, looking at precedents from other companies, such as Microsoft’s “EEE” strategy (“Embrace, Expand, Extinguish”), if they aren’t trying to kill competition. And for the second point, it reminds me that the owner would throw hissing fits, at least up to some years ago, when projects he’d fork into Retroarch would change licenses, which, along with being an all emulators in one place project, making people draw in in detriment of stand-alone projects, makes me I fear it might be a precedent.

Launchers should do just that, to launch the game. Doing anything other than that is, before anything, a repurposing of the word.

And regarding this specific game, I didn’t see the whole struggle so I don’t even know which game it is, but in case it is officially sold anywhere DRM-free, I strongly suggest going for that, wherever it may be.

Thanks! Will check it.

Adding to this comment, the OP may want to be cautious about Firefox specifically. The Mozilla team has been pushing more and more anti-privacy “features” for some years now (perhaps due to Google’s influence). Its forks, however and thankfully, try to fix those issues.
And regarding Mull specifically, and this may be an issue with my specific environment but I think it’s worth noting, from my tests, downloading it from Aurora Store makes it crash on launch, while downloading from F-Droid store’s default repository works just fine, so also beware where you get your browser from.

On the joke, define “sane”. 😬

On a serious note, I think there are valid reasons to have several VMs other than “I was bored”. In my case, for example, I have a total of 7 VMs, where 2 are miscellaneous systems to test things out, 2 are for stuff that I can’t normally run on Linux, 2 are offline VMs for language dictionaries, and 1 is a BlissOS VM with Google programs in case I can’t/don’t want to use my phone.

As for consoles improved by emulation, PS Vita, although I’d argue it benefits from modding in general, with how much it can then run.

As for the OG being preferred, the 3DS and possibly the PS1. Both to me have a charm to their graphics that work better on the screens they were originally meant to run on.

Libretro folks are going to take the code of any maintained emulators anyways, so people don’t really need to port it. Also didn’t follow any news from Libretro’s side, but considering Libretro’s founder’s past interactions in license changes of emulators the project benefited from, I can’t help but wonder if he/she threw a hissing fit at the Duckstation folks as well.

Link for the platform: https://bandwagon.fm/

To my knowledge, besides the newest updates not necessarily being as stable, but also, other softwares that interact with it would need time to adapt themselves to be sure they’re as compatible as they were before. In a situation of constant updates, other software would always be on a situation of catching up, whereas updates that take a bit longer to land allow “for the dust to set down”.

About gaming, from my personal experience, it’s overall pretty straight forward. When issues happen, you just got to have patience to read through logs and search up on Google or similar any suspicious parts of the log. Worst part is usually DRM/anticheat, but from what I can gather, usually pretty isolated cases are problematic due to compatibility, usually requiring the devs to go out of their ways to make the DRM incompatible.

As for the distros question, perhaps Linux Mint? It trades off bleeding edge updates for the sake of stability. Just avoid the Debian-based variant of Mint for now as it’s still in beta.

Both tools can be used from the terminal like most Linux programs, which should also give you better control during troubleshooting and also in the rarer cases of having to set up/run some more temperamental games. There are also graphical programs that handle Wine/Proton in a more friendly way, such as Heroic Launcher, Lutris and, specifically for Proton, Steam itself.

Wiston Smith, is that you working for spotify?

Depending on a given game’s releases, horizontal arts may be hard to come by. CD/DVD games, for example, I have yet to see a second game with horizontal cover, and if you like Japanese covers for SNES games, cover orientation was all over the place.

Still, you can try to check for a given game on Gamefaqs, or if it made its way into either GOG or Steam, both of which having emulated titles. Wikia/Fandom may also have something. And I remember having seen other cover arts sources some years back, but I can’t remember their names.

But for the ones I mentioned, for Gamefaqs, you can find the box arts under Media > Boxes. For GOG, you can find the images either on your library (if you have the game), or on GOGDB (a project similar to SteamDB), and both of which require getting the link for the image, and omitting the _196. part before downloading (and optionally, also swap the extension in the link for .png). For Steam, the image should be accessible in the game’s store page.