Edit: The GNU Testament is here! The GNU Testament supersedes the original guide so read that instead
I think this instance has a 10k character limit on posts, and as luck would have it my post is almost exactly 10k characters. Hopefully I don’t need to add any extra info later.
(Bonus meme: After you get in the rhythm of using these tools, it becomes very funny when piracy groups drop releases like
-XKILLDEATH STRIKES AGAIN! THE UNRELENTING FORCE! RESPECTED BY ALL...
and what they’ve actually done is put a generic steam emulator into the folder and changed an app ID. Making the NFO probably took 20x the effort)Thanks for writing this out! This is one to save for posterity.
Wow thanks for this post, OP, very well written and informative for the community.
thank you!
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Tx 4 the post op. Ur awesome. Any easy beginner game/s we can practice?
Ur a legend! Ty ty. I have some h.w. to do. Ty again 🙏🙇
Amazing post! Thank you for sharing this!
Finally a good piracy post. Thank you OP
Any notes on, say, visual novels from DMM using SoftDenchi, Buddy Launcher, or DMM Game Launcher? I’d like to one day play some of the games I bought.
I don’t have any notes on those - do you have an example of a game that I could easily source from cs.rin to give a look?
Ah, well, that’s a little trickier. Visual novels tend to have a lot of different releases, so if I gave you a suggestion of one that was on DMM, you might also be able get it from DLSite with PlayDRM, which does work through WINE. It could also be a physical release that comes with no DRM at all. Even if you wanted to buy the game from DMM, you need a Japanese IP address, so you’d need to get a VPN…these guys don’t make it easy.
There’s this version of Maji de Watashi ni Koishinasai which is supposedly exclusive to DMM: https://vndb.org/r44104
I know the download edition of Flyable Heart is encumbered by SoftDenchi on both DLSite and DMM: https://vndb.org/v1179
The download edition of Aiyoku no Eustia is only on DMM, and it uses DMM Game Player: https://vndb.org/r37403
However, I own the physical edition of Aiyoku no Eustia (it cost about…$150), and it is encumbered by AlphaROM. That DRM actually has a legal bypass because it’s apparently so dodgy it fails to work for some Windows users, so I managed to wrangle it to work through WINE by getting a file from the DRM company. If you get a “No disc” error, then you’re running the AlphaROM version.
Nonetheless, thanks for the offer anyway if this sounds like far too much effort to wrangle some eroge.
I found a copy of flyable heart on rutracker, but when trying to run it the font is garbled and after clicking OK on the textbox at 1:21 in this video nothing happens. Nothing useful in the log. I’m not sure whether the crack (I think one is included?) or wine is having a problem with it. I think you’d probably be a lot more of an expert in this area than I am, unfortunately.
Ah, yes, you do need to configure WINE to display Japanese characters before you can run most Japanese visual novels.
You’ll want to make sure
ja_JP.UTF-8
is uncommented in/etc/locale.gen
and that you’ve runlocale-gen
afterward. You also need some Japanese fonts installed to display the characters: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Localization/Japanese#FontsUse
LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8
when invokingwine
.That’s probably all you need at a basic level to get characters displayed, but there’s a more complete setup here: https://learnjapanese.moe/vn-linux/
Yes, I suppose this is somewhat obscure. Oh well - I can get the DMM games working in a Windows virtual machine, and most visual novels run slow, but otherwise mostly fine without dedicated graphics.