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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Ater purchasing and downloading a game from Steam, the Steam client is not actually needed for it to be playable. Of course it will try to start up Steam, and if isn’t installed then it will complain, but if use use a “steam emulator” that can be worked around.
    This is useful if you don’t want Steam to track how much and when do you play, when is it that you are online, what achievements you got and such. This is afaik also the only way to say no to forced automatic game updates.

    One such emulator is Mr Goldberg’s steam emu.
    It has a bunch of configuration options, per-game settings, optionally portable settings, windows+linux support, and I think it’s even open source.

    Using the Goldberg emu is not piracy, neither DRM circumvention. The Steam API is not a DRM, most Steam games just make the Steam client a hard dependency, not bothering with making it work without it.
    When the game is protected by DRM (this should always be marked on its store page), the steam emu won’t be enough, but you would also need to patch it’s DRM protection. Sometimes that’s easier, sometimes harder.

    Steam emus may or may not work with multiplayer games.
    The Goldberg emu has a replacement Steam’s own multiplayer network communication system, which works through the local network or a selfhosted wireguard-like VPN, but with big centrally hosted multiplayer games you’ll run into licensing validation problems or such.
















  • Did you read my comment in it’s entirety?

    For programs, that is not a problem.
    This is a problem for data.

    Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program’s “content”, and when you do, you’ll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.

    If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it’ll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it’s users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It’s not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
    And then there’s another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can’t because of the former problem.

    Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it’s also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
    But for data, whether it’s a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it’s just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.