Playing eroges on Linux

[eethjk]

So for reasons I finally want to switch to Linux after being a Windows user all my life and wanted to ask if anyone here has experience with playing eroges on a Linux system.
Can I run most japanese games with wine and does VNR work on Linux? And if I'm gonna use a virtual machine will the performance in Windows be noticeable worse? Also what version of Windows should I use for the vm? Win 10 would be my first choice because Microsoft lets you basically use it without a licence but maybe another version perfoms better in a vm or anything like that.

So basically if you use Linux as your daily driver I would like to hear what workarounds you use to play your games and how well they worked out.

 

[Onegai]

It is definitely not for beginner Linux users.

Wine is useless, and you will notice that.

If you take it seriously, then you must setup a
Japanese Windows 7 in a QEMU virtual machine
with PCI passthrough via OVMF, and for that
you will need a computer with a special motherboard,
2 video cards, 2 displays, 2 keyboards and mouses,
and I suggest also an extra audio card for acceptable sound quality.

You will suffer a lot with the setup and configuration of this.

And in case you miraculously manage to solve all problems
which may happen during the configuration, you should
absolutely make sure, that you will never ever again
update your system, as any little change applied with
an update may break the whole thing.

And you will be surprised, because game performance
is near equal or even better than on a simple normal
windows setup. Of course, if you use your Linux only
to run the virtual machine, and do not use disc encryption.

In my opinion it does not worth the pain, suffering and
wasted time, only if you are paranoid enough to need
block device level full system encryption with stenography
in order to plausible deniable hide the fact that you are
playing eroges. Oops, sorry, I am not going off topic,
you just want to play right? :D

First you should get familiar with QEMU:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU

Then you can experiment with QEMU PCI passthrough via Open Virtual Machine Firmware:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

And keep in mind, that this is only valid for Arch Linux.
First you should manage to install Arch Linux:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide

If you have no clue at all about anything, you can
go to beg for help on the Arch Linux Forums:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/

By the way, if you find the Arch Linux community
unfriendly, then you can try to pull out the same
magic trick with any other Linux distribution, but
most probably you will fail, because for other
Linux Distos the tutorials and guides are too
outdated and won't work on the current stable
releases.

In case you wanna go adventurous with Ubuntu,
here is an old guide for version 14.04:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Multiheaded-NVIDIA-Gaming-using-Ubuntu-14-04-KVM-585/


Anyway I think so, that this forum is not the right place
to ask for help in this complicated matter.

Pick a Linux Distro from Distrowatch, then master it with
the help of the community of that Linux.

And do not expect anything from wine.

The easiest walk-around of the whole problem
could be if Qubes OS would improve for
this purpose. But you should wait for that.
If you wish to experiment with it now, look here:
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/windows/

 

[tweek91330]

Very interesting thread.
In fact i was in the same situation something like 8 month ago, except for one thing : i opted for arch from the beginning.

So, yeah Onegai gave you good advice here. Wine can work really nicely with some things, but it almost always require some effort and even then it might not work good enough. I tried my chance with wine and got tons of issues, it was a time waster. ITH didn't work on most games for me and that was a no go since i need jparser/mecab help for some words. Other issue i had was in game video not working, impossibility to adjust sound in game, things like that. It can be fixed but it's REALLY annoying to troubleshoot every dll/program/codec/ect that you might need for being able to launch that eroge considering the fact that any of those can potentially mess up the whole prefix (it's a "bottle" that contain necessary windows files to run your game).

Only use wine with lutris for regular gaming. I use it for WoW mostly, they provide script for installing games without pain but sadly not for eroges (yeah, niche games after all).

As for virtualization PCI passthrough via OVMF is indeed the way to go. Forget a simple VM, some people seems to do just that, but it's really bad performance wise, and just make it unbearable even on VMware workstation with "3D support dx9" option enable.

I successfully passthough a GTX1080 and a RX550 via QEMU and OVMF in a Windows 10 VM (not at the same time of course) and use it since about 7 month. It work great so far but there was some issues with sound at first, that required some further tweaking. You can try to ask on level1techs forums (https://level1techs.com/) and watch wendel's video on their channel on this subject. On another note, it also work with others distribution and the arch wiki is a great resource, even for other distro but you need to understand what you're doing with it and not just follow a tutorial to the letter to make it work.


Anyways, it's not linux beginner friendly at all, but it still can be done with time and effort if you can understand the arch wiki.

EDIT : If you're interested into that, look into looking glass too, that allow you to have your VM graphical output on your linux desktop instead of another monitor/output (you might still need to plug something to the GPU depending on models tough).

 

[choripan]

Sorry for necroing this thread, but since I also had a similar question a while ago and managed to solve my problems, allow me to share my 2 cents.

Wine should fine for basic (older?) VNs - e.g. BISHOP games or Kiminozo (not sure about translation software though). I have to admit though, some games including animated videos were crashing on me at the precise moments in which the videos were supposed to start (specifically, it happened while playing some older Squeez games).

Do note though that If you don't want squares before actually launching the game, just in case, try to install a few extra fonts (2), generate a ja_JP locale (4) and also explicitly set the Wine locale to Japanese while booting the game, something like (3) (all of these are commands that worked on Ubuntu 20.x, FYI)

As for those games that were crashing, although the forum senpais above seem to be really skeptical about it, my workaround was to install Win 10 (Japanese edition) with VMWare player. This is definitely a beginner friendly solution, although perhaps not the fastest. It did feel slower than running a dual boot Windows; still, it was fine for VNs.
For the record, PC isn't exactly a monster in terms of today's standards (i3-6100 / 8GB RAM, no graphics card), but nonetheless, other than the aforementioned Squeeze games, I was able to run a relatively modern game (published in 2019 - (1)) without any issues as well.

(1) http://www.anime-sharing.com/forum/...イン）は友達ですか？恋人ですか？それともトメフレですか？-[h-game]-828479/
(2) sudo apt-get install fonts-arphic-ukai fonts-arphic-uming fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-unfonts-core
(3) sudo LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 wine <path_to_mounted_game_exe>
(4) sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales