Piracy on Linux can be even easier than windows with the correct tools, and there is a consistent repacking scene in jc141 so most games are easy to find!
To begin with visit https://github.com/jc141x/jc141-bash/blob/master/setup/readme.md and select the correct language for you then have a quick read.
In summary:
- Install dwarFS (a read only compression system used on jc141 torrents for quick and efficient unpacking)
- Install a torrent client (any will do)
- Find the magnet link, personally i just Control + F then search the json file at https://github.com/jc141x/releases-feed/releases/download/feeds/releases.json however using one of the 1337 sites listed also works (make sure its got the right domain ending)
- Download the file with your client using the magnet url
- chmod +x /Path/to/Game/start.{n/e-w/n-w}.sh
- Run bash /Path/to/Game/start.{n/e-w/n-w}.sh none of the scripts are sketchy but I always check them with nvim before running then the game runs! no proton required if you want to run from steam you can add the .sh as non steam app and run from there
I hope you guys like this as much as I do!
common fixes:
- “error initializing file system: newer minor version” update your dwarFS installation (sometimes a problem on fedora and nix as the dwarFS packages are outdated)
- “cannot execute binary file: Exec format error” recheck the file in your torrent client
We’re very patient gamers as well, when it comes to the games themselves. For example the empress cracks are made by a very sketchy person and we decided to not have any of it’s releases uploaded. This means that we’re instead waiting for someone else to crack denuvo (unlikely) or for it to get removed. The games are also very popular and we’re missing out on some pretty big names.
Also we look at the rating of games before uploading them and only take into consideration ones held in very high regard (above 85% with some exceptions). It doesn’t really make everyone happy but it makes for more healthy gaming instead of swimming through new games every day. So I’d say we’re patient in many ways.
Back in the day there were people regularly coming to our chat just to ask us why are we bothering with it when windows repackers exist. They compress better and the amount of native games is not significant. Well even if we had the native files for every single game on our list it would barely get past a 20% ratio anyway. We started investing regularly to get native files to help with that.
Thanks for these infos, it’s very interesting to get a glimpse of what goes on behind the “scene”. Makes what you do even more impressive, keep it up 🙂
And I’m sure if dwarfs gets more popular and well maintained, it’ll get distributed more, so it’s not an issue. Also after commenting here yesterday I tried a quick tiny game (Jetstream) on a debian install and saw that dwarfs release on github comes with a dwarfsextract package that’s usable standalone, no installation required, in a few minutes I was playing the game’s exe bypassing the script.
we have a setup page for debian, and switching to sid isn’t necesarry (for now) as debian 12 is recent enough. dwarfs is easy to install from MPR (aur for debian, the hunterwittenborn ported the PKGBUILD system from arch) https://mpr.makedeb.org/