Thanks for the list. For the moment I’m only interested into official licensed games for this topic. In the coming days I will probably dive into researching more to come up with something. I was thinking of Racing games, maybe sports or fighting games would be likely to have them. Or some classic collections with added bonus material and achievements. But ultimately, I don’t remember ANY game from the old days doing that. Your list is definitely a good starting point.

I just started such a curated list for ingame achievements for any game that can be emulated in RetroArch. Problem is, its currently empty. :D Who knows maybe I write a blog post someday if the list becomes long enough.

Nah, its not for bragging or like that. I personally find the achievements cool, its just nice. I think this has something to do with collecting and finding and doing extra challenges you didn’t care much before. But not at that cost. The games itself stay DRM free to be honest, its just the achievement would not be validated at runtime. I think its more of a thing they don’t know how to do it right and have no time for (and no personal interest from devs), not with the intention to DRM the games for any customer.

While I rant, I also come down to earth (like now) and have an understanding and defend them (lol multiple personalities…). Realizing ingame achievements would be even more complicated and you would play a game that is not the same anymore. And the experience and integration into the system UI wouldn’t be the same too. So I do not think that Romhacks is the correct answer. They either find a way to do it like Steam does, or they give us a way to download achievement sets and use it offline without any account in our favorite emulators (off course the emulators would need to be adapted to the “new” system too). It’s just unfortunate, because I really really liked achievements. That’s why it’s bitter.

As for any games with ingame achievements, I would love to have such a list. Good idea, need to start collect it now. :-)

So its not time to wake up yet. :-)

Unfortunately not. Lot of people asked for this and discussed with the “developers”. They say its hard to implement, while preserving their other goals of providing Leaderboards and Scores (you get points for each achievement). With offline achievements its easier to cheat them. You need an account too, otherwise it would not sync to the online database. I wish there was a way to download and use it without an account, so its not possible to cheat, because I personally don’t care about the online Leaderboards. This is the official reason.

Rant incoming: love the idea and how it works with RetroArchivements. My only problem, and that’s the reason I do not use them, is that with RetroAchievements games turn basically into an always-online game. Especially with handhelds this is annoying, because I do not have online connection on my Steam Deck all the time. And once I was playing a JRPG and could not play it offline, because I did not want to miss the achievement. That’s when I realized this is not for me. I would love to have offline achievements.

There are also services by fans to revive the online experience of servers that are shutdown. One famous (and funny name) is Pretendo Network. I never got into these fan created online servers, but the idea is amazing.

Otherwise there are so many great games one can emulate. Also one of my favorite stuff from the emulation and retro scene are Romhacks and Mods. Think of it as Mods for your PC games, but instead for the classic console games. They can take any form, like DLC like new content like characters, vehicles, maps, randomized builds, new graphics or bug fixes, new stories, game modes, or new attacks or skill sets and even simple cheats. Romhacks are a world of its own to explore. In past years I wrote a few articles about this with many recommendations. You just need to know how to patch them (its explained in the article). Have a look as an inspiration to play next: https://thingsiplay.game.blog/2025/01/23/snes-mods-and-romhacks-collection-2025/

Which distro has it already? I know one can try it out in CachyOS, but is it enabled and working by default? I don’t think its already in Archlinux or Fedora.

indeed we take those

Sony would have called this a “Remaster” and sold it separately for 50 Dollars.

I hope the downloaded collection will be uploaded to the Internet Archive. This would be a pretty cool preservation.

Science.

What is “The Year of the Linux Desktop” exactly? How do we measure this exactly and what does that even mean? (I use that phrase for memes usually.)

Disappointing, but not surprising. The performance of the browser is not an issue on my side. These are just synthetic benchmarks, so not very interesting to me. I wonder if one can “feel” (not just measure) the difference of performance when using both browsers. I don’t use Chrome and probably never will, so cannot compare.

Does Intel even have the same issue? Maybe this is an issue with AMD only. Wish they had been more explicit about the other brands and drivers.

RADV is a driver for AMD cards. The linked blog post https://pixelcluster.github.io/VRAM-Mgmt-fixed/ title is “Fixing AMDGPU’s VRAM management for low-end GPUs” and the word nvidia does not appear once in it. Unless I am misunderstanding this, it looks like AMD only. If anyone has direct confirmation that this works on Nvidia too (proprietary or open source drivers), I will update my previous replies to reflect that.

It was the right choice to switch to AMD. But the future of Nvidia Open Source seems not that bad, as they are improving in that front too.

Noteworthy its for AMD graphics cards only.

Thank you for looking into, appreciate the help. I wanted to read the article later to figure out the details. I think a custom Kernel goes a bit too far for my taste, so will then wait until its officially integrated.

I think RADV Vulkan means its for AMD, not Nvidia. Nvidia has their own set of drivers. Unless I am misunderstanding here something.

Archlinux BTW. When?