Building a better (controller-based) gaming frontend for Linux - a look at existing solutions and what I'd like to improve upon. Or, the effort to combine Steam Big Picture, Window's Playnite, and RetroPie for "console" Linux.

• RAWeb

  169 224 9.8 PHP

  RetroAchievements.org Platform

  

The frontend has support for displaying RetroAchievements alongside Steam/Uplay/whatever achievements

• legendary

  268 4,426 7.1 Python

  Legendary - A free and open-source replacement for the Epic Games Launcher

Playnite, being open source, can be examined so that we can "steal" their implementation of scraping the PC game platforms. I believe this is mostly written in PowerShell, but it should be possible to decipher the way these scrapers work. Linux-native software like Legendary may also be of use.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Playnite

  680 8,232 8.6 C#

  Video game library manager with support for wide range of 3rd party libraries and game emulation support, providing one unified interface for your games.

On Windows (exclusively, but open source), Playnite can handle all of the above - just set it to automatically start full screen and your Windows PC is fairly close to the ease of use of a console. You can import games from any platform (emulators, random .exe, Steam/GOG/Epic/Twitch/Humble/whatever libraries, you name it) with consistent metadata available. Want all your games with vertical box art instead of horizontal? Want a mouse-driven UI or controller support? Want to see all your platformers on Atari and Genesis, or your FPSes released before 2000? You can easily sift through your massive library, and all of the importing is automated. Everything is stored in a local database, and metadata can be sourced from Steam, IGDB or Wikipedia. For things like box art, there's even integration for Google Images searches to find fan art for that obscure SNES rom hack that isn't worthy of an IGDB or Wikipedia entry.

• GameHub

  49 2,167 0.0 Vala

  All your games in one place

GameHub is missing from your research list: https://github.com/tkashkin/GameHub

• antimicrox

  113 2,100 8.1 C++

  Graphical program used to map keyboard buttons and mouse controls to a gamepad. Useful for playing games with no gamepad support.

  

• skyscraper

  56 460 2.5 C++

  Powerful and versatile game scraper written in c++

It has the ability to import from several sources, including Steam. I do actually turn it off in favor of generating that metadata manually. And speaking of metadata, it supports a lot of fields. If you're not getting much info, your metadata scraper sucks. Use Skyscraper, it's good.

• MoltenGamepad

  18 265 0.0 C++

  Flexible Linux input device translator, geared for gamepads

There are partial solutions that already exist. MoltenGamepad does controller spoofing very well. But it also hasn't been touched by its author in almost a year and doesn't compile on some distros. I think it does need to be remade. I was thinking about something based on interception-tools. But my full-time job, and more pressing matters within the Linux ecosystem, have kept me from spending any time actually making such a thing.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• linux

  76 - -

There are partial solutions that already exist. MoltenGamepad does controller spoofing very well. But it also hasn't been touched by its author in almost a year and doesn't compile on some distros. I think it does need to be remade. I was thinking about something based on interception-tools. But my full-time job, and more pressing matters within the Linux ecosystem, have kept me from spending any time actually making such a thing.

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