Games: Steam, GCompris, FEX, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 06, 2025

• Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Clients, including Legends of Dragaea: Idle Dungeons - 2025-11-05 Edition

  Between 2025-10-29 and 2025-11-05 there were 58 New Steam games released with Native GNU/Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 541 games released for backdoored Windows on Steam, so the GNU/Linux versions represent about 10.7 % of total released titles. This time after Halloween there’s not a lot of good stuff, at least nothing exceptional. There’s an idle dungeon-based game with super retro graphics called Legends of Dragaea: Idle Dungeons that’s getting some love, so if you are into idle games and RPG, this may be right down your alley.

• GCompris meets KITE in Kerala – 2025

  This post is about how we met KITE‘s team and visited some schools during our family visit trip in Kerala. For those who don’t know, KITE stands for “Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education”; they are in charge among other things of the GNU/Linux distribution for Kerala schools and training teachers to use it. GCompris is used a lot there, as it is the main software used in their ICT curriculum textbooks for classes I to IV. The widespread and official use of Free Software in Kerala schools really is an awesome model.

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ JP to EN Game Translation Mishaps

  Mr. Nicoletti emphasized that the localization error was just that, completely unintentional, and the fact that it helped the game gain attention among Japanese Steam gamers was a mishap having a coincidental good outcome. I suspect that some people may be suspicious. Perhaps the team behind The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicle went with a comically bad mistranslation of the title to generate buzz about their game with Japanese customers. But for reasons I now turn the page to discuss, I am not suspicious at all.

• [Old] Jeff Quast ☛ HAMURABI.BAS and its dystopian lessons

  When I loaded this onto my Apple 1 and played a few rounds, I was reminded of how difficult it was to play this game as a child. I pulled out a HP-15C calculator and used this basic strategy: [...]

• FEX or Emulation

  • FEX ☛ FEX 2511 Tagged

    You would think doing this month after month we would eventually run out of things to work on, but in true emulator fashion the work never ends. Let’s jump in to what has changed for the release this month!

    [...]

    It’s been known that FEX’s memory usage hasn’t been amazing, we cause a decent amount of memory overhead for every emulated process which adds up quickly. This becomes a huge burden on systems with only 8GB of RAM, but also hits 16GB RAM users; This is why most of our developers run on systems with at least 32GB of RAM to sidestep the problem. The vast majority of the problem comes from our JIT’s lookup caches, called L1, L2, and L3 caches depending on the tier. The L1 and L2 caches are a per-thread resource, while the L3 cache is shared between all threads in a process. All these caches end up doing is storing where to find JIT code for relevant x86 code, it’s not the JIT code itself until the L3 cache!