0:03

I'd like to tell you a little story about

0:05

packaging OBS Studio. And

0:08

if you're a very close friend of mine, this

0:10

is not the story where I did some contract

0:12

work where I was paid in one kilo

0:15

of 100% Colombian and

0:17

took it round to Popey's house for processing.

0:19

Are we allowed to talk about that? This

0:24

is an entirely different story. This

0:26

is a story about running OBS

0:29

Studio for Ubuntu on

0:31

NixOS and why this is

0:33

a pretty

0:33

fabulous experience. Right.

0:36

I don't fully understand what you mean by that. So I

0:39

expect I'm about to learn quite a lot. Yes,

0:41

I've learned quite a lot in the last few months

0:43

as well. So we'll start the story here.

0:46

A little background. I used

0:48

to maintain the snap of OBS

0:51

Studio, which is

0:53

still very popular. Some 70,000 people

0:56

are still using it, despite the fact it

0:58

hasn't been updated for over two years.

1:00

I did responsibly step down

1:02

from that, but nobody

1:03

stepped up to take over

1:06

the maintenance of that snap. But

1:09

it was a snap of OBS Studio,

1:11

including a whole plethora

1:13

of plugins that made it a very

1:17

comprehensive tool for doing any kind

1:19

of live streaming

1:20

or screen capture. I

1:23

inherited this from Popey, because Popey

1:26

did the initial hard work of adding

1:28

the OBS browser support

1:30

into the snap of OBS

1:32

Studio, which basically made

1:34

it an extremely usable tool.

1:38

Long story short, due

1:40

to the stupid stuff I do

1:42

in my live streams, the confined

1:45

nature of the snap wasn't working for me

1:47

anymore. So I needed to seek out other options.

1:50

I tried a number of different things, and whilst

1:52

I was still running Ubuntu, I

1:54

started a project called OBS Studio

1:57

Portable, which was an entirely

1:59

new project.

1:59

highly built from source version of OBS

2:03

with all of the plugins

2:05

built in clean containers and

2:07

distributed as a tarball but it was

2:09

enabled in what's called OBS portable

2:12

mode which means you could have multiple versions

2:15

of OBS studio installed

2:17

and running at the same time each with their

2:19

own discrete configuration which

2:22

was useful for me because I often needed

2:24

multiple versions of OBS running. I have

2:26

to say when you said installed you're

2:29

using the little bunny ears because

2:31

it's not installed as

2:33

such it's a tarball you unpack and dump in a folder.

2:35

Yes it's just a folder of all

2:38

of the things that make up OBS studio

2:40

in a directory and it keeps the

2:42

configuration directly adjacent

2:45

to the binary that's in that folder

2:47

so you can have multiple versions with different

2:49

configurations and scenes and all

2:51

the rest of it. Does that mean plunking multiple

2:54

copies of that in different places on your hard

2:56

drive and then whichever one you run it picks up its

2:58

own config right okay I'm

3:00

with you so far. Yep and it's quite

3:03

a niche use case but for example

3:05

sometimes I did like tutorials

3:07

on a live stream of how to configure

3:10

complex things in OBS studio and

3:12

that meant I could stream from one

3:14

copy of OBS and have a

3:17

separate copy which was a blank canvas

3:19

which I could actually use on stream

3:21

to do things with. Anyway

3:24

I now use NixOS so

3:27

some months ago I embarked

3:29

on a journey of bringing

3:32

all of these plugins and what-have-you

3:34

to NixOS which I have

3:36

done I have packaged some two dozen

3:38

OBS studio plugins for NixOS

3:41

and they have landed in Nix packages

3:43

and I've acquired my Nix

3:46

packages maintainer badges as a

3:48

result of that work but there

3:51

are some drawbacks with running OBS

3:53

studio on NixOS which

3:56

means it's not actually ideal

3:58

for what I want to do at the moment. And

4:00

it's one of these situations where if you're like

4:02

a subject matter expert in something,

4:05

you can then see the flaws in where it's

4:07

been maintained by somebody who is

4:09

not or a group of people who are not. So

4:12

some of the issues are OBS

4:15

Studio for this browser

4:17

source integration uses a technology

4:19

called SETH, which is in this

4:22

case the Chromium Embedded Framework,

4:24

which is in simple terms a

4:27

version of the Chromium browser that

4:29

enables you to use web technologies

4:31

inside of OBS Studio.

4:34

But OBS has a very specific ABI

4:37

requirement for the version of SETH it

4:39

supports. Now in Nix packages,

4:41

some clever people have patched OBS

4:45

in order to work with newer versions of SETH,

4:47

but just because it compiles doesn't mean

4:49

that it actually works correctly. So

4:52

a whole bunch of stuff that you need to do

4:54

just doesn't work and in fact will cause OBS

4:57

Studio to segfault. And similarly,

5:00

the higher quality audio

5:02

codecs which are technically linked

5:05

in the Nix packages aren't exposed correctly.

5:08

And there's a bunch of plugins which simply

5:10

do not work or cause OBS

5:12

Studio to segfault. I would hasten to add

5:15

none of the plugins I've added to Nix packages. Of

5:17

course, of course we wouldn't dare to add any of them.

5:20

So I've been on a streaming hiatus

5:23

since about May this year. Is

5:25

that because the package is broken? I've

5:27

been trying to get OBS Studio

5:30

in Nix packages up to where

5:32

I need it to be to support all of the stuff I

5:34

do. And I've upheld

5:36

my end of that, but I've still run into

5:38

a bunch of incompatibilities. And

5:41

the other issue is this, there's new plugins

5:43

coming out for OBS Studio all the time.

5:46

Almost in the last month, there's like four

5:49

or five really interesting plugins being

5:51

released that I'm already using.

5:54

And I'll get on to that in a moment that

5:56

I haven't had time to package in Nix

5:58

packages yet. And also the

6:00

speed of getting my PRs

6:03

merged in Nix packages has been

6:06

quite slow. I'm in a rather privileged

6:08

position that I can speak

6:10

to colleagues at work who have got

6:12

commit access to Nix packages and

6:15

sort of fast track my stuff. But

6:18

I don't like to do that. It's a bit like what

6:20

Mark was talking about a couple of episodes

6:22

ago in Moodle, where there's a whole

6:24

bunch of people that are Nix packages

6:27

maintainers and anyone

6:29

could do this. But because anyone could

6:31

do it, nobody does. It's

6:33

sort of that weird deadlock that happens.

6:36

Reminds me of the patch pilot thing

6:39

that used to happen in Ubuntu where you'd nominate someone

6:41

to do it on a rotor because otherwise

6:44

it falls through the cracks. Absolutely.

6:47

Maybe you need that. Absolutely. And

6:49

so Nix packages doesn't

6:51

have like a traditional maintainer

6:53

ship model over like a

6:56

package or group of packages

6:58

or like a domain like you would find in

7:00

sort of Debian where you've got things broadly

7:03

broken up to special interest

7:05

groups and then within that particular packages

7:08

within that special interest group. So

7:11

enter George Castro, friend of the

7:13

show, and his project

7:16

Universal Blue and the

7:18

ever amazing distro box.

7:21

So what I did is I dusted off the

7:24

OBS studio portable project

7:26

that I have been maintaining for a year

7:29

or so, which is this build of

7:31

OBS built against the Ubuntu.

7:34

And I said to George, hey, George, I've got this

7:36

working inside distro box on Nix

7:38

OS. This is pretty great. I've got access

7:40

to all of the stuff I want. Wait, wait, wait, wait,

7:43

wait.

7:43

You mentioned a bunch of things here. So you're on Nix

7:46

OS

7:47

and then you're running distro box on top of Nix

7:49

OS, which is probably a Nix package for distro

7:51

box. And inside that is

7:54

Ubuntu and inside that is a tarball

7:56

containing OBS

7:59

unpacked. and you just run it in there, right?

8:01

Is that what you're saying? Yes. You

8:03

have unraveled the inception perfectly.

8:06

When we say inside that

8:08

is Ubuntu, how much Ubuntu

8:11

is it? All of Ubuntu. All of

8:13

Ubuntu. So it's running an Ubuntu kernel

8:15

on top of Nix or is it a

8:18

container with some

8:20

Ubuntu packages or how much

8:22

is it? Right, yes indeed. So for

8:24

the uninitiated distro box

8:27

sits on top of either Docker

8:29

or Podman. So it's an

8:31

OCI container that's running

8:34

within distro box. So

8:36

for my initial proof of concept,

8:39

I had just a regular Ubuntu

8:41

container that I stood up inside

8:44

distro box. And then I downloaded

8:47

my tarball, Ovia

8:50

Studio portable, extracted

8:52

it, ran my little script

8:54

which satisfies all of the dependencies.

8:58

And then I ran my Ovia Studio

9:00

portable launcher and

9:03

it appeared and it worked and it was

9:05

all running at full speed. And in fact, you

9:08

can see me in this conversation

9:10

we're happening, not you dear listener, but my

9:13

co-hosts by way of Ovia

9:16

Studio portable running inside Nix OS,

9:18

this composited version of me that you see

9:21

is all running inside that container

9:23

right now. So in

9:25

simple terms, it's a Docker container

9:28

with Ovia Studio inside

9:31

it built for Ubuntu that

9:33

I can run on OBS. But the

9:36

real magic is I've got all

9:38

of the Nvidia hardware acceleration

9:40

working and the AMD

9:42

hardware acceleration working and Intel

9:45

and all of the other bits. Does

9:47

that hardware acceleration get passed through

9:49

from distro box through to the underlying

9:52

OS? Yes, it does. Yeah.

9:55

So Universal Blue has another

9:57

project called I think it's pronounced Bayes.

10:00

which is basically SteamOS

10:03

in a container. So it doesn't

10:05

matter what Linux distro

10:07

you're using, you can use

10:09

their container of Bayesite and

10:12

get this comprehensive

10:15

full SteamOS experience

10:17

entirely isolated inside this

10:19

container, which also updates

10:22

using the traditional sort of container

10:24

primitives. And what I've been able to

10:26

do with George and Kyle,

10:28

who is also instrumental in the Universal

10:31

Blues project, is do the

10:33

same for ABS. So

10:35

they've created inside

10:38

the UBlue OS GitHub organization,

10:41

a whole bunch of CI that ingests

10:44

my Ubuntu build and

10:46

creates this 1.6 gigabyte

10:49

container, which is Ubuntu

10:51

plus ABS studio and all of the gubbins.

10:55

And I can now run ABS studio

10:57

anywhere and so can you. So

11:00

it doesn't matter what Linux distribution

11:02

you're using now, if you're using Debian

11:04

stable and you want a current version

11:07

of ABS studio, you can

11:09

access it this way. If you're running

11:11

Ubuntu 2204 LTS,

11:14

which doesn't have the required libraries

11:17

to unlock some of the new features of ABS

11:19

studio, you can now run

11:21

ABS studio portable from this container,

11:24

because that's built against current Ubuntu

11:26

interim releases with all of the library

11:28

support for all of the current features. It

11:31

also runs on immutable distributions

11:34

such as Nix OS and Fedora Silver

11:36

Blue. So it really doesn't matter where you

11:38

want to run ABS studio

11:40

or SteamOS for that matter, and the whole

11:42

host of other stuff that Universal Blue provides,

11:45

you can run these things anywhere isolated,

11:48

and forever safe. I

11:51

feel like this should have been fixed with Flatback

11:53

and Snap, but it isn't, clearly.

11:56

So I have used the Flatback of OBS

11:58

studio and that's terrific and

12:01

it's the officially endorsed way to

12:03

get OBS Studio for Linux

12:06

from the upstream project. But

12:08

where I struggled is adding

12:10

support for the 50 or so plugins

12:13

that I require to that flat

12:15

pack is hard, read impossible.

12:18

So that

12:20

fell short for me and also these confined

12:23

technologies don't work so

12:25

great for how I would need to use OBS

12:28

Studio because I have all of these integrations

12:30

executing all sorts of arbitrary things

12:32

to control lighting and various

12:35

other peripherals. And

12:37

distrobox, although in a container, runs

12:40

as if it's natively running in your host

12:43

operating system. It opens up all the

12:45

access you need to get to everything.

12:47

So it's a pretty robust solution.

12:50

So I will have links in

12:53

the show notes to Universal

12:55

Blue, Bazeite because they may be interested

12:57

people wanting to play with SteamOS

13:00

in a container and also my

13:03

OBS Studio portable projects.

13:07

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contact.

13:42

I have been updating Snaps for fun

13:44

and no profit. And how

13:46

much fun exactly? Yeah,

13:49

we'll get to that. It turns out

13:51

I currently have 62 Snaps registered to

13:54

my name in the Snap Store. Is that all

13:56

the Snaps in the Snap Store now? Oh,

13:58

me.

13:59

out there are over 5,000 snaps

14:03

in the snap store. Minus a bunch of test

14:05

snaps, minus some that don't work, and minus

14:07

a few others. So I

14:10

acquired a bunch

14:12

of snaps basically because

14:14

I thought, oh that would be good, I should snap that

14:16

and I snapped it and then I thought, oh that'd

14:18

be good, I'll snap that

14:20

and I've

14:21

eventually got lots of them.

14:23

When I left Canonical I'd kind

14:25

of been burned out by this, especially as I was

14:28

maintaining a whole bunch of my own ones, plus

14:31

some snap crafters ones as well, like

14:33

OBS and Discord and a whole bunch of others.

14:36

So I got a little bit burnt out and I didn't

14:39

rage quit, I stepped down gracefully I think

14:41

because I started a post on the forum and

14:44

saying could I please hand these over to someone and

14:47

basically nobody stood up for

14:49

most of them. I think about half a dozen

14:51

people took them but some

14:54

of them just weren't people interested

14:56

in maintaining them and I kind of

14:58

gave up on them a little bit, I can say I was a bit burnt out

15:00

by the whole thing. So some

15:02

of them I flipped to being private and

15:05

so nobody could install them and

15:07

over time a few people have nudged me and said,

15:09

hey could you update this or could you update that and

15:11

I've I've updated a few and then made

15:13

them public again because nobody else is going to maintain

15:16

them and sometimes I've been contacted

15:18

by upstream developers either

15:20

to say please could you update that or in

15:23

some cases please could you remove it because

15:26

either it doesn't work or it's outdated or

15:29

yeah for whatever reason and obviously I'm going to respect

15:31

the upstream developer when they say could you please remove

15:33

it so I just make it unlisted and stop it building

15:35

and remove all reference to it right.

15:38

But I had a spare weekend

15:40

recently where I thought I'll have a go

15:42

at attacking some of these and see

15:45

if I can get them to the point where they work, are

15:47

up to date and I can make them public so people

15:49

can enjoy these applications. What

15:52

was your turnaround in attitude

15:55

and motivation for doing that? That is a great

15:57

question. A lack

15:59

of hobbies. I'm

16:04

not sure. I think maybe taking

16:06

some time out from it, because there were so many

16:08

of them, and having the

16:11

Snapcrafters ones offloaded back to canonical

16:13

law, the community, meant I didn't have

16:15

to worry about those. And I was reduced

16:17

down to a much smaller subset of the ones I was

16:19

maintaining. So I think, and

16:22

the fact I could just pick them off one at a time, I haven't

16:24

made all of them public, there's a fair number of them

16:26

that are still broken or outdated. But

16:29

I thought I'd mention a few of them. And I wanted to mention

16:31

some of the challenges, and a

16:33

few specific things that made it challenging

16:36

and were part of the reason why I got

16:38

burnt out with it. And I'll come

16:40

to a conclusion at the end. So one of them,

16:43

Bomb Squad, which I

16:45

snapped because that was a game

16:47

that me and my son used to play

16:50

on the oo-ya when that first came

16:52

out. That's where I first saw that game.

16:55

And it was such a good sofa multiplayer

16:58

game. When there was

17:00

a desktop version, I thought I have to snap it. And

17:02

so snapped that, but it was

17:04

broken. So recently, I tried to update

17:07

it, and I had some challenges because

17:09

Bomb Squad packages its own Python

17:12

debug mode runtime thing so you

17:15

can poke at the system with a Python

17:17

command line. And none

17:20

of the versions of Python within the Ubuntu

17:22

repository were compatible

17:24

with it. And so it was a bit difficult to juggle

17:27

getting all the Python libraries running right. And

17:29

then I had a weird challenge in that the audio

17:31

stopped working. And then I had

17:34

a weird problem where the audio wouldn't

17:37

work the first time you launch the game. But

17:40

it would work the second time you launch the game.

17:42

And it was infuriating. If you remove

17:44

the snap, and then reinstall it, and

17:47

then run it, you get no audio, you

17:49

run it again, and it works fine. And

17:51

from that point onwards, it works fine. I

17:53

could not find out why that did not work. So

17:56

I replaced a whole bunch of code. I asked on the forum and

17:58

I got a solution, which was... was replace

18:01

that piece of code with this piece of code and it will work.

18:04

And it was very much like cargo

18:06

cult, copy, paste, pieces

18:08

of code from, you know, another

18:10

thing that works. I don't

18:13

fully understand why the old one didn't work and this

18:15

one does work. And that is a story that happens a

18:17

lot in SnapCraft, I find is

18:19

that there's a snippet of a yaml that

18:22

you see works for someone. And

18:24

so, right, well, I'll use that. And

18:26

I don't know if that's just me. I'm pretty sure

18:28

other people do that as well. Marcy, tell me something

18:31

else, does that. Yeah, yeah, I'm not, yeah,

18:33

for the benefit of the listener, I'm nodding along. Definitely,

18:36

SnapCraft was really born out

18:38

of cargo cult in good reference examples,

18:41

a lot of which Popi and I created when we

18:43

were at Canonical. And some of them don't

18:45

work anymore, yes. I

18:48

also found recently a relatively

18:50

new game. Well, I say

18:53

new, it's called Classic Cube. And

18:55

it's actually a whole cloth implementation

18:57

of Minecraft Classic. And

19:00

so I snapped that or I tried snapping it

19:02

a while ago and I couldn't get it working. And

19:05

I started on this back in June and I gave up. Is

19:07

this actually Minecraft re-implemented

19:10

or just a way to launch

19:12

Classic Minecraft? It's

19:14

a re-implementation. Wow. Yeah.

19:17

And it's fast and

19:19

designed to run on low-end hardware as well.

19:21

And I moved that, I updated

19:23

it to build on Ubuntu 2204, so

19:26

Core 22. And I

19:29

had to throw away the i386 builds because we don't

19:31

support that anymore, which is a bit of a shame. And

19:33

I had to do some real nonsense with the graphics

19:36

card because it worked

19:38

on my machine here, which is an Nvidia

19:40

card. And you would think that Snap

19:43

should just work on any machine. What it works on one

19:45

machine, it should work on any machine because they're all isolated,

19:47

right? Well, that's wrong. So it works

19:50

on my Nvidia. Perversely, it worked

19:52

on the proprietary driver but wouldn't work on

19:54

an Intel or AMD machine, which

19:56

was infuriating. And the

19:59

solution, I think, found in the Ubuntu

20:01

discourse. Now on the Snapcraft Forum there

20:03

was a document, a thread that was started by

20:05

one of the Snap developers, one of the maintainers,

20:08

that was documentation. But it was in the Ubuntu

20:10

Forum which I found really super weird. Why is it

20:13

there? Why are they not putting it in the Snapcraft Forum

20:15

or in the documentation? I don't understand.

20:17

But I found it and Cargo

20:20

Cult copy pasted it into my Snap

20:23

and it worked. So now I've got

20:25

Classic Cube works. So

20:27

that's another one that's now public and that works fine.

20:30

Another one that I've got is called B2 which

20:33

is a BBC Micro emulator. And

20:36

I was motivated to update that one because

20:39

I recently wrote a blog post about when

20:41

I wrote a virus for the BBC Micro many

20:44

years ago. So I was motivated to get the emulator

20:46

running so I could get screenshots and

20:49

I updated the Snap so that I could

20:51

take a screenshot for a blog post. And

20:54

so that Snap is now public. That's great.

20:56

That had similar problems as Classic Cube. It works on

20:58

some GPUs but not others. So I

21:00

copied and pasted the code from Classic Cube

21:03

to B2. Now it works.

21:05

I remember when we were working

21:07

on Snaps way back, that

21:10

multi GPU support

21:12

thing. It's very familiar

21:14

to me. It's nice to see that the

21:16

solution these days is a bit more

21:18

elegant in that Canonical

21:20

have now created what are called content

21:22

Snaps of the different graphical

21:25

driver stacks that

21:27

you can pull in as a sort

21:29

of a framework that you sit

21:31

on top of which once you

21:34

know that this is the new pattern makes

21:36

all of these problems go away. Yes. But

21:38

the problem is if you built your Snap on

21:41

Core 18, so up until 1804 and then you move it to 2004,

21:44

you have to update some libraries and

21:46

bits and bobs. And then when you update to

21:48

Core 22, it's

21:50

not just a bunch of libraries that change like the version

21:53

of, I don't know, libpango

21:55

or lib whatever changes.

21:59

There's also... Entire structural changes

22:01

to your YAML that make it quite

22:03

different. And I think what's missing

22:05

is these migration guides from

22:08

core 18 to core 20 and from core 20 to core 22. That's

22:10

what was missing in this whole process for

22:13

me anyway. And another one

22:15

was Session Desktop. Have you ever

22:18

heard of Session Desktop? Yes, no. It's

22:20

a crypto nonsense chat client

22:23

and it's built upon

22:25

the code for Signal Desktop. It's

22:28

called Session Desktop and it's crypto chat stuff.

22:31

I'm hand waving that away. And

22:33

I bumped that to core 20 because

22:35

it just stopped building one

22:37

day and I couldn't figure out what it was. And

22:40

it turns out that the upstream was

22:42

building one of their components using

22:44

GitHub Actions and GitHub

22:46

had moved their GitHub Actions bots

22:49

from Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 20.04. Oh

22:52

yes, I remember that happening. So

22:54

one of their components was building

22:57

now in 2004 and thus

22:59

wouldn't work in my 18.04 snap.

23:02

And so all I did was bump that to core 20 and then suddenly

23:04

Session Desktop started working again. So

23:07

I've got that published in public as well. So there's

23:09

still a few slightly broken

23:11

ones. I'm getting there though and I'm

23:13

spending a bit of time in the weekends and sometimes

23:15

in the evenings to try and fix these and update

23:18

them. And the conclusion I've come

23:20

to is I over

23:22

committed myself and I have all

23:24

these snaps that it's kind

23:26

of painful to maintain. And I've

23:29

learned from Martin the joy that

23:32

is GitHub Actions. So I want to automate

23:34

a lot more of this so I don't have to do stuff

23:36

manually. But what I'd also like to

23:38

see is when you go to the

23:41

Ubuntu Summit, Martin, can you bring up the idea

23:43

of maybe having migration guides and better documentation

23:46

for Snapcraft? Because stumbling

23:48

upon documentation in the wrong

23:50

forum is not the right

23:52

way for us to be documenting,

23:55

I say us, for them to be

23:57

documenting the product.

25:59

I'm going to carry on doing it, but I'm

26:02

probably not going to try and package

26:05

the whole world like I used to.

26:10

Alan, you wrote a blog post not on

26:12

Go about some old phones, didn't you? Yes,

26:16

I did. That got me thinking about

26:18

mobile gaming, because my

26:21

experience of mobile gaming these days is

26:23

that you install a game on Android,

26:26

and it's either some

26:28

sort of malware trying to sniff all of

26:30

the data off your phone, or some

26:32

sort of pay-to-win micro-payment

26:34

scheme. Or both. Or both. And

26:37

they're generally not that fun. But there were gamers

26:39

before this on mobiles, weren't there? There was

26:41

this thing called J2ME. Oh my

26:43

gosh. Which was a mobile, well,

26:46

it wasn't specifically for mobile, but it was the embedded

26:48

version of Java, which before

26:51

we had smartphones, was basically how

26:54

you got apps on a phone. And

26:57

so I thought,

26:58

well, I wonder, I never really played any

27:00

games on my phone back then. I remember

27:03

I installed my first Twitter client that

27:05

I installed back when sort of

27:07

the way to use Twitter on your phone was via SMS,

27:10

was a J2ME app. So I definitely had phones

27:12

that did it. But I don't remember ever playing

27:14

any games. So I went searching

27:17

for whether, firstly, whether

27:19

you could play J2ME games

27:21

on a modern phone. And secondly, if

27:24

there are any decent J2ME games out there.

27:28

And surprisingly, I found the answer to both was

27:30

yes. Oh wow. Yeah.

27:33

So

27:34

on Android, I was looking in the FDroid

27:37

open source app store, and

27:39

there is an app in there called J2ME Loader, which

27:42

you basically give it a JAR file of

27:44

a J2ME app and it launches it and gives

27:46

you a virtual dumb phone

27:49

number pad to control it with. And

27:51

works surprisingly well. You can

27:54

give it different, like, tweet the screen resolution,

27:57

so not all apps expect to run on

27:59

J2ME.

29:59

of all, here's all of the games that were

30:02

written for this platform, whatever, and some

30:04

of them have good information about what resolution

30:06

particular J2ME games were designed to run

30:09

at. So that's useful in configuring

30:11

J2ME Loader. But

30:13

yeah, once I was disappointed with all these Elder Scrolls games,

30:16

I just sort of started having a look around

30:18

for what else was available. And did

30:21

you know that

30:22

there were two Doom RPG games?

30:25

I was not aware of that. No,

30:27

just two. I'm shocked. They

30:29

were released shortly after Doom 3

30:32

was released for the PC. And

30:34

they are sort of the old style graphics

30:37

of Doom in a turn-based

30:40

dungeon crawler style RPG. Wait,

30:43

the contemporary time of Doom 3

30:45

was J2ME phones. Yes.

30:48

Wow. Mad, isn't it? I

30:50

think we would chalk up episode 14 as

30:54

the timeline for

30:56

Mark is old. This

30:58

is retro gaming for me. These

31:01

weren't actually really good playable games. I

31:03

think they are actually really good playable games. Doom

31:06

RPG, the first one, is a bit on

31:08

the cheesy side, very

31:10

sort of fourth-wall breaking, like nudging

31:13

a wink from the developer that you're playing a game

31:15

kind of thing. But at the same time,

31:17

it's a decent Doom game. You're running around

31:19

picking up weapons, and the combat

31:21

is obviously very different because it's turn-based.

31:23

But there's a decent amount of tactics because

31:26

the closer you are to an enemy, the

31:29

more damage you do, the more likely you are to hit.

31:31

And so it's worth getting close to them, but

31:34

then they're more likely to attack you.

31:36

So you might want to wait in a certain

31:38

position and draw them to you and things like that.

31:41

And yeah, plenty of exploration and finding

31:43

secret rooms, just like in normal Doom. And

31:46

that's really good. But then Doom 2 RPG,

31:48

actually, I was kind of blown away to think

31:51

about that it would run on the kind of devices

31:53

it was meant to because the animation is really

31:55

smooth and you've got sort of pseudo 3D

31:57

effects of it, like warping as you look.

32:00

down at the floor and it's actually

32:03

mightily impressive for the time I have to say.

32:05

Are they colour? Oh, yeah. I've just

32:07

got like Game Boy graphics in

32:10

my mind here at the moment. If

32:12

you just saw a screenshot of it you would say that's

32:15

Doom 2. Right. Java wasn't

32:17

the era of black and white televisions Martin.

32:20

No, but the phones of that era were not

32:22

great. I don't know. Yeah, but they had

32:25

colour screens. We're not talking about the Nokia 3310.

32:28

We're talking about the 6680 and the 6610, that kind of era. Yeah.

32:33

I think just slightly better though. I'll

32:35

tell you what though, some nice additions to the Doom

32:37

universe I have to say are the fire extinguisher

32:40

and the pet dog. I've no idea what that's

32:42

about. So yeah, new weapons you can use.

32:45

You can now wield a fire extinguisher and

32:47

you can capture the demon dogs

32:50

and walk around with them on a leash. Brilliant.

32:54

Have you considered installing any of these on

32:57

your Steam Deck? Ha ha ha ha. Funny

32:59

you should mention that. So yes,

33:01

following our previous discussion about Retro Deck I installed

33:03

Retro Deck and I found there was in fact

33:06

in the ROMS directory a J2ME

33:08

folder. No. No. So

33:10

I thought, ah, excellent. I'll give this a go. So

33:13

I plonked one of the jars in there and launched it.

33:15

It came up in the Retro Deck launcher and I selected

33:18

my game and I got a nice red

33:20

text on grey screen message saying,

33:23

J2ME supported in progress. Please

33:25

try again later. I

33:28

hear that Retro Deck 0.72

33:30

was released just a few days ago. So

33:33

maybe it'll work now. Oh my gosh.

33:35

Watch this space.