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Microsoft is making our life harder

Monday 14 March 2022 at 11:28

Since 2021, Microsoft is making our life harder by removing old system files (DLLs ...) from their websites. They just don't move these to a 'archive web site', they just delete these...

This makes some pre 2010's softwares impossible for us to run anymore.

Sometimes we find alternatives URLs (many thanks to Internet Archive), sometimes not. And this requieres checking and updating a lot of scripts.

Dadu042

New quality free to play (freemium) games

Wednesday 4 November 2020 at 12:41

PlayOnMac is available on Catalina

Saturday 4 July 2020 at 17:36

Hi,

PlayOnMac 4.4 has been released. It now supports macOS 10.15

Feel free to report any bug you encounter.

DXVK support added

Monday 29 June 2020 at 15:21

Some functions added to support some DXVK versions (the list is in our Functions list).

DXVK ('Direct X to Vulkan') can make the 3D rendering faster, and can fix some compatibility issues between Wine and DirectX.

Dadu042

Rules of Survival is playable

Thursday 4 June 2020 at 21:38

The freemium game Rules of Survival (a clone of PUBG) is currently playable on PlayOnLinux !.

Dadu042

More than 25 free casual games added

Thursday 7 November 2019 at 10:09

More than 25 free casual games added, mainly for POL/POM v4.3.4, but some are OK with POL v4.2.12
Most these games are downloadable automatically by the scripts.

Note: latests scripts added and modified are listed in this area (Application tests) of the forum.

Dadu042

PlayOnMac & macOS Catalina (v 10.15): incompatibility

Tuesday 15 October 2019 at 10:45

Warning: PlayOnMac does not work with macOS Catalina (v10.15) and next, because it drop 32bits support.

Latest news in our forum.

Dadu042

PlayOnLinux 4 : free games checked and repaired

Sunday 9 June 2019 at 6:23

PlayOnLinux 4: most of the free games have been tested and repaired.

 

Note 1 : Some of these games are downloadable automatically.

Note 2 : The free games installables appears in the PlayOnLinux (and PlayonMac) application when you uncheck the "commercial" checkbox). Sorting is not possible from the website.

Dadu042

Phoenicis PlayOnLinux 5.0 - Alpha 2

Tuesday 1 January 2019 at 12:05

Hi everyone!

We wish a happy and successful year! For this first day of 2019, we are glad to release the second alpha version of Phoenicis PlayOnLinux 5.


A new wine builder

We have rewritten from scratch our winebuild platform. To make it short, it is more reliable, more transparent, easier to setup and cross-platform compatible. Any project that needs to use wine could now potentially use it and take advantage of the 1828 different builds. (We admit that some of them are outdated, though).

The winebuild project is open source, uses containers. You can install it on your machine in no time if you want to build wine by yourself.

Support of new wine distributions

Speaking about wine builds, we now support 4 wine distributions: 

  • Upstream wine builds are vanilla and unmodified wine (1)
  • Staging wine builds are the wine builds patched by wine-staging
  • Dos support wine builds contains wine and dosbox. (See the next feature)
  • CX contains a wine version patched by codeweavers

We plan to support proton in the next weeks.

All these wine build can be compiled directly through https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/phoenicis-winebuild/.

 

(1) Except the very old versions that have a specific suffix is their names, like 1.5.3-heap_allocation_v2-avoid_deadlock, but we are going to move them anyway.

DOS Support

Winebuild now provides dos_support distribution. The way these wine binaries works is very simple: Wine launch script has been modified to detect if the given .exe is Win32 or a DOS executable. If it is a DOS executable, it will set-up a dosbox configuration that will behave consistenly with wine:

  • mount drive_c as C: on dosbox
  • if a autoexec.bat file exists inside the prefix, it will run it
  • support of custom DOS configuration per prefix
  • ...

The script framework has also been modified so that you can tweak some dosbox settings directly from a script. Here is an exemple of "advanced" script

wine.run(wine.prefixDirectory() + "/drive_c/The Elder Scroll 1: Arena/Arena106.exe"); // Arena106.exe is a w32 fine, wine will run

wine.dosbox()
    .memSize(64)
    .renderAspect(true)
    .cpuCycles("max 95% limit 33000")
    .renderFrameSkip(1);

wine.run(wine.prefixDirectory() + "/drive_c/The Elder Scroll 1: Arena/ARENA.BAT"); // ARENA.BAT is obviously a MS-DOS file, dosbox will run

 

GoG support

We've added a way to add a web browser view directly inside script wizards. Thanks to this feature, scripts can now authenticate to any website.

Phoenicis can automatically download and install GoG games from your account, as POLv4 used to do during the past years.

 

A complete demonstration video of gog.com support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fopp-x9Fz3g&feature=youtu.be

Also, we have made a script pattern for all GoG games: it has drastically simplified them from POLv4. The script are so much easier that we believe that they will be a lot more maintained.

POLv5 script POLv4 script
include(["engines", "wine", "quick_script", "gog_script"]);

var installerImplementation = {
    run: function () {
        new GogScript()
            .name("Teenagent")
            .editor("")
            .applicationHomepage("")
            .author("Quentin PÂRIS")
            .gogSetupFileName("teenagent/en1installer0")
            .category("Games")
            .wineVersion(LATEST_DOS_SUPPORT_VERSION)
            .wineDistribution("dos_support")
            .executable("TEENAGNT.EXE")
            .go();
    }
};
[ -z "$PLAYONLINUX" ] && exit 0
source "$PLAYONLINUX/lib/sources"
 
GOGID="teenagent"
PREFIX="Teenagent_gog"
WORKING_WINE_VERSION="1.6.2-scummvm_support"
 
TITLE="GOG.com - Teenagent"
SHORTCUT_NAME="Teenagent"
 
POL_GetSetupImages "http://files.playonlinux.com/resources/setups/$PREFIX/top.jpg" "http://files.playonlinux.com/resources/setups/$PREFIX/left.jpg" "$TITLE"
 
POL_SetupWindow_Init
POL_SetupWindow_SetID 1214
POL_Debug_Init
 
POL_SetupWindow_presentation "$TITLE" "Metropolis Software" "http://www.gog.com/gamecard/$GOGID" "Pierre Etchemaite" "$PREFIX"
 
POL_Call POL_GoG_setup "$GOGID" "e5e3a8cd9bbbcec5a956d1f41281b4af"
 
POL_Wine_SelectPrefix "$PREFIX"
POL_Wine_PrefixCreate "$WORKING_WINE_VERSION"
 
POL_Call POL_GoG_install
 
POL_SetupWindow_VMS "1"
 
cat <<_EOFCFG_ > "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/GOG Games/Teenagent/teenagent.polcfg"
[teenagent]
platform=pc
gameid=teenagent
description=Teen Agent (DOS/English)
language=en
guioptions=sndNoSpeech lang_English
_EOFCFG_
 
POL_Shortcut "teenagent.polcfg" "$SHORTCUT_NAME" "$SHORTCUT_NAME.png" "" "Game;AdventureGame;"
 
POL_SetupWindow_Close
 
exit 0

 

We are planning to add tons of GoG games in the library so stay tuned!

Installation of verbs directly inside a container

You can now install verbs directly from a wine container.

Standalone packages

  • We are now providing standalone packages that can work on any distribution without the need to install JDK runtime. These packages also remove all the feature that we don't need from the JDK. In the future, there will be probably two sorts of packages, but we want to make things easier for you for now.
  • We now provide macOS packages
  • We also support flatpak

 

 

I'd like to thank once again all the developers that helped us during the past weeks, plata, madoar, and also all those of you that contributed by reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, or tested phoenicis-winebuild.

Our next goals is to focus on prefix management (change of wine version inside a prefix, add debugging tools, etc...) and performance optimization.

If you have any suggestion or encounter any bug, we encourage you to come in our Github page: https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/. This version is still at alpha-stage, so please be indulgent.

I also take the opportunity of this news to also announce you that PlayOnLinux and PlayOnMac 4.3.4 has been released. They have been updated to support the new winebuild system, and the different windows of the application have been made resizable. It should fix the HDPI issues some of you were encoutering. We continue to maintain these versions until you are 100% satisfied with POLv5

Download packages:

 

Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!

 

Winebuild update

Tuesday 27 November 2018 at 0:16

Hi everyone,

Just a short news to announce that we have updated our wine build environement. If you are experiencing issues with our current wine builds (freetype problems, windows too small, ...), this piece of information may interest you.

Pursuing the work concerning the decentralization of our services, we have released a tool than can compile any version of wine directly on your computer or on your server: https://github.com/PhoenicisOrg/phoenicis-winebuild

What are the advantage of this new tool?

So what do I have to do if I have problems with the old builds?

Because they are compiled with more up-to-date dependencies, we are expecting the new builds to work better on recent distributions. This should fix most of the problems that you have reported to us recently.

However, we are rebuilding the old packages one by one and it takes time. We advise you to follow the build status here to ensure that the versions you are using are rebuilt: https://www.playonlinux.com/wine/. Then, uninstall your current wine versions from POL and reinstalling them should fix the problem you are encoutering.

As you may have noticed, POL / POM 4 have already been updated to use this new format. If you are using 4.3+, you are good to go smiley

Roadmap

  • We plan to mirror all the builds in / near the United States
  • We will probably provide a web interface so that you can request for custom builds with custom patches. This web interface shall be open source so that you can host it where you want.

Links