Running retro games in Endless with GNOME Games!

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Hi community!

In case you did not know, contrary to previous versions of Endless OS, the 3.x series enables users to install third-party applications via flatpak, the underlying technology in charge of controlling how applications get delivered and installed in our users’ computers.

That is great because now Endless users have a wider variety of choice when it comes to install software, making it possible to configure external repositories with many ready-to-install applications to choose from, as well as specific applications, all in just a few clicks.

Now, starting with EOS 3.1.2, two additional external repositories will be available by default in Endless: the GNOME flatpak repositories! This enables users to install a whole lot of stable applications from the GNOME community right from the Application Center, just by searching for them and clicking on the “Install” button.

And one of those new applications is GNOME Games, which is the one I’d like to talk about here today:

From the GNOME Games website: Games is a GNOME application to browse your video games library and to easily pick and play a game from it. It aims to do for games what Music already does for your music library.

So what does that mean? As they mention in the documentation, GNOME Games provides an unified interface to help you browse certain types of locally installed games, but it also lets you play retro games from a variety of gaming systems, in case you are lucky enough to have the relevant ROM files.

Once you have installed GNOME Games from the Application center, all you would have to do is to make sure you place your games’ files in some location searchable by Endless (if that’s not the case, please follow the instructions to add games here) and run GNOME Games from the desktop icon or from EOS desktop’s search box: the application will run, search for your games, download covers for them when available and let you play them just by clicking at them!

Now, unfortunately, some not-so-good news also worth mentioning: as it’s explained in the documentation, the flatpak version of GNOME Games can only play retro games for a particular subset of gaming systems:

  • Famicom/Disk System/NES games
  • Game Boy/Game Boy Color games
  • Super Famicom/Super Nintendo games
  • Some PlayStation games

…and still it might have trouble sometimes running games for the platforms in that list, even though in general it works fine (e.g. I mostly play Super Nintendo games, and they all worked fine for me so far).

This said, this is Open Source Software in continuous development, so hopefully support for more platforms and games will be added in the future, along with bug fixes and general improvements, so don’t despair if you are unlucky to hit one of those issues :-).

And of course, there are many ways you can contribute to the development of GNOME Games if you wish, to make it even better or to help the developers fix that annoying issue that is keeping you from playing your favourite game. All you have to do is visit https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Games/Contribute and take it from there (spoiler alert: no, you don’t need to be a programmer to contribute, that’s just one way of helping but not the only one).

So, that’s all I think. Hope this post is useful, and please post your comments and/or questions if you have any.

Enjoy!
Mario

PS: If you don’t have EOS 3.1.2, you can manually install the GNOME repositories from the terminal by running the following commands (remember to press the ENTER key at the end of each line):

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-apps https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-apps.flatpakrepo
1 Like
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@mario
não aparece biblioteca de jogos
eos-diagnostic-170222_183349_UTC-0300.txt (340,3 KB)

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Hi @LeandroStanger,

As the documentation explains, GNOME Games does not find all the games you have in your system, only certain types, and for the retro games it needs to know the location where you have them installed, which you can extend from the control panel.

See this instructions on how to add more games for more information, hope that helps.

Thanks,
Mario

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@mario
Não funcionou mas podia já vem pré-configurado com todos os jogos disponíveis na central de programa
e poderia substituir a pasta jogos na área de trabalho

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Hola Leandro,

GNOME Games is an app external to Endless (from GNOME repositories) and, as such, it is not possible at the moment to ship any kind of pre-configuration for it.

The way GNOME Games is meant to be used at the moment is that you install it and then it searches for your installed games (and not all types are recognized) among those installed in locations that GNOME is aware of (see Control Center > “Search” panel) and then it shows you those ones.

That said, integration with flatpak is still not great (as mentioned in the wiki) and so this addition to Endless should be considered as some kind of “beta” product which should add some value, but it’s not quite perfect just yet :slight_smile:

By the way, any issue you observe in how GNOME Games handles (or doesn’t) the games you already have installed is something that should be reported to the project itself, following the links provided in https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Games/Contribute. I’m sure the project developers would be more than happy to fix what they can and help making that app even more awesome than what it is already.

Thanks for your feedback in any case!
Mario

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