Linux gaming: Organiser app
Bring the games you’ve installed from various sources together in an easy to use Gnome 3 app. Matt Hanson shows you how.
Gaming on Linux is getting easier than ever before with services, such as Steam, offering you easy access to hundreds of new and classic computer games. While the growing number of services and websites that offer Linux compatible games is certainly welcome – allowing an increasing number of gamers to move from Windows – it can mean your games collection can become unruly with no consistent way to find and launch them.
Not only are games saved in different folders and hard drives, but some require you to launch them through another software platform or interface, such a Steam. If you run emulators then things get even trickier with the games being saved as ROM files that require specific emulator programs to open them. This can make launching your games, as well as keeping track of what you have installed, frustrating.
However there’s an excellent app called – rather appropriately – Games3.18.0 that brings all of these games together in one easy to use interface. Every game you own (as long as it’s supported by Games, which we’ll come to in a bit) can be found and launched from within the application, and any additional software that the games need to run are launched as well.
It works in much the same way a music player, such as Rhythmbox, does: it scans your hard drive for the appropriate file types and then runs them, along with any codecs or compatibility plugins to make them run smoothly. So as you don’t need to change media players when you want to play an MP3 or OGG file, it’s the same with Games.
It’s a solution that on the surface seems quite simple, but in the background Games isn’t only executing the game but also configuring the sound and visual outputs, inputs (such as game controllers) and running wrappers and emulators. The end result for the user is a streamlined and simple interface.
Many emulators also allow you to save the state of the emulator, effectively pausing the game. You can then resume the game and start where you left off next time you want to play. This has been a welcome feature especially for games which don’t support save files, and thanks to the Libretro API (which is used by many emulators, as well as Games), you can suspend and resume games directly from the Games application. It’s little details like these that makes this a great tool for organising your games library.