Hello all, I made the jump. Its been hard and I am here for some help
Hey! So I have always wanted to make the jump to linux and pc gaming and figured I would do them both together. I would not consider myself techy, just aout tech literate in that I am aware of how much I dont know.
I have linux mint, on a mid to late i5 w/16gb memory. I wanted initially to make a home server but I have jusy been poking around and ended up trying to play all the games I have in attic through emulators and the like.
So I got loads of emulators, I use Cartridge which is a Lutris fork. It just seemed cleaner and worked when I tried it out. In that I had been booting into PCSX2 and finally playing MK Deception again. After three evenings poking and gaming PCSX2 shuts down every time I try to boot a game.
I have uninstalled, reinstalled and changed from 1.7.xx to 2.2 to the nightly 2.3 (I think). I cannot get it to work.
I have so many questions but if I could get back to Konquest I would be so happy, and bother you all later.
And I saw the avatar for the community, and for this fleeting moment thought it was a post about successfully making some particularly hard jump in supertux2.
Are you only wanting to emulate games with PCSX2 or multiple different emulators? If the latter, have you tried the automated install process of Emulation Station or EmuDeck? I haven't dealt with PS2 games through it yet, but maybe the automated installers and configs will help?
Seconded. I went down the dark path of trying to hook up each emulator and it was pain. RetroArch made it so much simpler. (OP it's not just for Arch, I learned that too late)
There are emulators that works better as standalone, and sadly - as I love RetroArch - this is true for PS2 emulation since LRPS2 or Play! are not as good as PCSX2.
I have no experience with PCSX2, but maybe something in its configuration causes your issues. Reinstalling or updating it will not make a difference. If you really want to start over, close the application, remove the directory ~/.config/PCSX2 and restart the application. You will have to run through the initial wizard again. If it still won't work, some other issue is the culprit and you would likely need to share logs. Alternatively, if the application prints logging to stdout, you could run the application from a terminal (f.e. by launching pcsx2-qt) and see if anything is printed there when it shuts down.
Okay so uninstalling and then pressing the shortcut opened it meaning it wasnt gone. This confused me. So just deleting the directory is how you uninstall?
I got it back working, I left it hang for ages beyond the forcr quit prompt ans it started.
no, you uninstall with the package manager/app store, however, that directory is where your config files are kept, and those are not removed when you uninstall the app.
Emulators work pretty well on Linux. I mainly use them on steam deck with the bazzite distro, perhaps you might consider that over Linux mint? Don't get me wrong, mint is amazing for switching from windows but bazzite is full on gaming focused.
I run bazzite on a deck as well, and the main reason is because I can actually use it as a pc without as much hassle from SteamOS really wanting to be read only.
If I want to set up say, a dev environment, from git sources, and all the required libraries to compile things, bazzite comes with distrobox so it's not too hard set that up... whereas SteamOS will blow up all of that when it updates, even after you turn read only mode off.
Does it work if you install the PCSX2 flatpak from Software Manager? I haven't tried it myself yet, but this page may help and has more detail about the installation methods:
Has it got its own set of rules you'd have to learn and thus an accompanying learning curve bump?Sure. Which, in actuality is mostly just knowing that Flatseal is your go-to whenever a flatpak causes issues.
Is it a surefire method after you've become accustomed with it?Absolutely. All kinds of jankiness can prevent any piece of software from working on your system. With Flatpak, especially on distros that enable it by default, you at least know that your system isn't the culprit.
Besides, Flatpak is enabled by default on Linux Mint. The PCSX2 flatpak is even verified. So no additional setting up or whatsoever is required.
What makes you weary besides what's already stated above?
Hey thanks, it is a lot of fun but I cant explain why tinkering with basic shit makes me happy when I could get windows to do this stuff easier. I hate those guys but I feel like I spent ages setting the channels on a car radio and my brain relessed the dopamine as if I educated myself to be a mechanic
Did you have backups set up for your mint installation? Depending on how long its been, restoring via timeshift might be worth a shot. I'm relatively new to Linux so idk if that could fix it.
How did you install PCSX2? The fact that you are launching it through Cartridge makes me a little worried that you are using the windows version. Try the AppImage or Flatpak packages and see if you have any improvement (assuming you aren't already using those)
I got the flatpak initially, I realised it was a few releases behind current and got the appimage direct. For whatever reason, the flatpak version is now current in my manager.
Another oddity, opening in steam blocked my dualsense from being recognised by pcsx2 despite steam seeing it and pcsx2 seeing it when launched directly or through cartridge.
Honestly I recommend the version made specifically for your distro. I haven't had the best luck with flatpak but the ones made for Debian, rpm, etc always work great
Lutris has an option to act essentially as a frontend for pcsx2, so in theory it should be a Linux version, but I have also struggled in the past with lutris's versions of things like emulators not having the right permissions to run, since they are a sandbox in a sandbox.
Yes, I swapped to a US one when I saw a game was marked as US. I thought that kicked it off so I reset to the default swttings and selected the bios folder again