Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0s9PUe3AOI
Bazzite - The Gaming OS Microsoft Doesn’t Want You To Know About
Introduction
It seems like just a short few years ago, “Linux Gaming” was something of a punchline - but not any longer, thanks to efforts like Valve’s Proton and distributions like Bazzite. But is it finally good enough to be the final nail in the coffin for Windows?
Script
This is my Atari VCS console from 2021: of course, modern day Atari’s attempt to bring back an iconic name from the 1970s - and if you’ve been watching this channel for any length of time, you’ll no doubt remember the review that I did of this a year or so ago where I tore it down and had a poke around the bundled software and was thoroughly disappointed with what Atari had come up with for this machine - and in that video I posited that perhaps you’d be better off installing an alternative operating system on it, such as a HoloISO, which is a Linux-based OS based on the operating system that Valve bundle with their Steam Deck, the handheld PC games console.
Well, I must confess that shortly after that video went out, things that very much went south for my little Atari VCS here, I ran into some problems with HoloISO that basically meant that I didn’t end up playing any games on it - and unfortunately it seems like that project’s been abandoned or it certainly hasn’t had any updates for quite a while, so rather than this going unused, I put Windows 10 on it, as you can see, and it ended up being used as a bit of a utility machine around the studio here for imaging USB sticks and that kind of thing, which isn’t really a fate befitting of such an iconic name as the Atari VCS, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Now, of course, Windows 10 is going to be reaching end of life very soon so I need to move on from that - and Windows 11 isn’t officially supported on the VCS. I have covered installing Windows 11 on unsupported hardware previously on the channel, of course, and you can check out the videos if you want to know what that’s all about, so it’s not really worth me retreading that old ground once again.
So, my dear little Atari VCS, what are we to do with you? Well, thankfully, for your sake, I have recently discovered another gaming focused Linux-based operating system, which is again derived from Valve’s work on the Steam Deck - and not only does this one have a huge amount of community support behind it, but it also has some really interesting new ideas that I hadn’t come across before in 25 plus years of using Linux and so I’ve been quite keen to check it out, and I think this is going to be the ideal test bed.
Now, if you hadn’t already guessed from the videos title, the name of the operating system is Bazzite and Bazzite is based on Universal Blue, which is relatively new in the Linux world, and the way that this works is that the core operating system itself is immutable, so nothing can modify the operating system files themselves, which of course makes for a very stable and very secure system - and anything that runs on top of that is containerized, which makes things like rolling back to previous versions if you mess up very, very easy and also just makes the whole system a lot easier to manage as far as updates and other kind of maintenance is concerned - so it’s causing quite a stir in the Linux world and quite rightly so, and perhaps an indication of the way that things might be going in the Linux world in general.
So with all of that cleared up, and I guess it did clear it up for you, I hope it did? If not, I guess you can check out the link to the website down in the description… Yeah, let’s get on and get it installed!
The first step of which of course, as always being to go to the website and download it and get it copied across to A USB stick. Now the official website is bazzite.gg, which is a bit of a strange domain, but I will link to that down in the description along with any other information that you might find useful to get this installed - and there’s loads of good info on here about Bazzite itself and how it relates to Universal Blue and to Fedora SilverBlue, which is the underlying operating system that this is all kind of built on top of.
But of course at the moment, the only thing we are really interested in is getting it downloaded, so there’s a button at the top right here - “Download Bazzite” - click on that and now it asks it a few questions about the hardware that it’s going to be installed on. Now, of course you should answer honestly because then you’ll get the right version for your hardware, but that said, Fedora is a very kind of robust and well supported OS, so I wouldn’t worry too much if you’re not quite sure on the correct answers for this - and in my case, the Atari VCS oddly enough isn’t one of the options in the list. They do have options for the Steam Deck and the Lenovo and ASUS equivalents, if you like, a couple of different laptops, like the Framework and the Surface, and a couple of different models of tablet.
But I think the option I’m going to choose is “Home Theater PC” because I think that’s probably the closest to what we have here - and the vendor of our primary GPU is AMD. Now I know some of the previous attempts like HoloISO, which I tried on this before, you had to have an AMD GPU because they didn’t actually support Nvidia GPUs, which was a kind of a side effect of it being pretty much a direct rip from Steam OS.
And that is no longer the case of course, because they have rebuilt all of this on top of Fedora, which is fantastic. But. Yeah, I’ve picked AMD as my GPU - and finally, what desktop environment do you prefer? Now, I must say quite recently, I have become somewhat of a GNOME user and I kind of fallen outta touch with KDE, but it says here that KDE is the desktop environment used on Steam OS itself, and I would quite like an authentic experience as well as maybe an opportunity to kind of get back in touch with KDE as well see what’s been going on in that world - so I think for the most authentic experience, I’m going to pick KDE - and that takes us to an option called “Download bazzite-deck”, which is indeed kind of the direct most authentic Steam Deck experience that we can get.
So that’s just an ISO image and you just click on that and download it. You can also download it as a torrent, and I have found in my experience that that is quite a bit quicker as well - so perhaps go for that option if that is an option for you - and once that’s downloaded, it’s just a case of flashing it to our USB stick, and in my case, I’m using Balena Etcher this time around. I don’t really have any particular alliance to any piece of software, but it’s the first one that came to mind - so that’s what I’m going to use. I’ve selected the image already and my USB stick, so it’s literally just a case of clicking on “Flash”.
Oh - in our case on macOS I need to enter my password to give it those elevated permissions to allow it direct drive access - and that’s that. 40-odd seconds. That’s nice, isn’t it?
So back over at our VCS here, of course I have my USB stick ready to go - so that just slots into the back there. Hit the power button, and in the case of the Atari VCS, it does automatically boot into USB if you have a USB stick inserted - so no buttons to press or anything like that. But obviously on some other systems you might need to press F12 or whatever just to bring up a menu to select the boot device - and on that note, you do need a keyboard and a mouse for the installation. I think I mentioned before that you don’t actually need it to use the OS once it’s installed if you install the “deck” version as I am here, and for that I am hopefully going to be able to use my funky little Atari- I think this is called the Pro Controller or something? Modern Controller?
I think it’s called the Atari Modern Controller, something like that. Anyway, I’m going to test this out as part of this video as well - and of course it works with any old kind of USB game controllers - so we have two options here, this is GRUB, the standard boot menu that’s used in most Linux distributions, and I’m sure you’re probably familiar with it, but I have two options here.
I’m not going to bother testing the installation media - you can do that for your own peace of mind if you like - but of course, I used Etcher to create this USB stick, which tests all of the media anyway, so I’m pretty confident that there aren’t going to be any issues - and yeah, just wait a moment and it should boot into the Fedora installer.
So there is no live environment as you might be used to from other Linux distros just because of the very kind of nature of this, which is perfectly fine - so we’re just going to go through and select the language options and whatnot. Obviously “English, United Kingdom” - and this is very, very straightforward and to be honest, the way that you partition the drives and things is obviously going to depend on the way that you want the system set up: Whether you want a dual boot or use the entire system - so I won’t go into that in any detail in this video. But that’s pretty much literally it. Just go to installation destination and yeah, it’s all pretty straightforward - so yeah, next time you see me, this should be fully installed and we should be in a position to test out some games!
…and here we go - and one of the things that I love about the VCS is this little Atari logo that comes up during boot. It’s very cool - and of course that’s integrated with the actual OS itself so whether that’s Windows or whatever else - so we’ve got a nice little Bazzite logo here, I just think it’s quite a nice experience, isn’t it? So yeah. At least they get some credit for that.
And as you might expect, booting from that internal SSD takes all of about 20, 30 seconds, something like that. Nothing at all by modern standards - and I will just say this isn’t the first time I’ve booted this: I have been in and I’ve been testing some games and stuff over the past few days, but I will show you some of the interesting stuff that I have come across over the course of my testing - and there is one thing that I wanted to show to you to do with this controller specifically, which might be useful to the I don’t know, the two people out there watching this who actually own an Atari VCS and want to install Bazzite on it - and for the rest of you, it should be quite interesting.
So if we go into the menu here, of course, if you’ve used a Steam Deck before or if you’ve used Steam in Big Picture Mode as I do at home on my my gaming PC, my couch gaming living room PC this should all be familiar to you - so we go through into these settings and we want to get this controller paired.
So we’ll go into “Bluetooth” - obviously that puts it into pairing mode. Just press down the button for a couple of seconds on there - and this should pop up, hopefully…
Ah, there we go - so we have “Game Controller” there in the list, and I’ll just use the keyboard and go across to that, and that is now paired. No problem at all, as you might expect.
But as mentioned, there is something very weird going on with this Atari controller - so if we go down to “Controller” in the list, you’ll notice I am using the keyboard and there’s a good reason for that - and if we go to “Test Device Inputs”, we can see what it thinks this controller looks like, which, alright, fair enough, it’s close enough, the D pad in the left sticker swapped over, but that’s kind of based on the Xbox pad, I guess - and if we just go through, we can press the buttons: We’ve got B and A there no problems at all, X and Y. We’ve got the thumb stick and then that thumb stick. The D pad all working fine, but the triggers - as you can see when I press this trigger here, it thinks it’s actually receiving thumb stick input - and the trouble with that, of course, is that this right trigger pretty much does everything in modern games: It’s your fire button in your first person shooters, it’s your accelerator in your driving games and that kind of thing - and that just will not do, it makes games pretty much completely unplayable with this controller.
So I consulted Atari’s own website and apparently this thing can emulate an Xbox controller, but there is one major limitation and that is that the Xbox mode only works when this is wired - so I need to plug it in and then I’m stuck using this controller directly hardwired to the console. I have no idea why Atari decided to do it that way, it’s very annoying - so yeah, I’m just going to have to plug this in.
So that is that now plugged in - and if we go to the controller input test again we can see that it’s recognized as a 360 game controller, “Atari Xbox 360 Game Controller”, and that looks a lot better - we’ve got inputs here registering from the left trigger and the right trigger, as you might expect, left and right buttons. So that’s all working now. You do need to specifically enable this - I’ve already enabled it on my controller, but you basically just hold down these two buttons for a few seconds if that isn’t recognizing as an Xbox controller and that will switch it into Xbox mode, but only when it’s wired as mentioned.
So thank you Atari! It took me quite a while to work that one out.
So with that controller situation sorted out, of course it’s time to test some games, but there is something very important that I just wanted to talk about because I think this is really, really cool - and I don’t think a lot of people out there are aware of this.
So of course a lot of these games are Windows games, they don’t have native Linux versions - so if we just go into WreckFest here - how does this work on a Linux-based operating system like Bazzite or indeed the Steam Deck upon which this is based? Well Valve, the people who make Steam and indeed the Steam Deck also developed their own compatibility layer for Windows games running on Linux, I say “developed their own” - it is based on WINE, which has been around for absolute donkeys’ years in the Linux world. It’s a compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows applications and games directly on Linux. But they’ve done absolutely wonderful things with this - so if I just go into compatibility just to show you the list their tool is called Proton and there are multiple different versions which are kind of customized and optimized for various games - so most of the time you don’t need to touch this at all. This just happens automatically in the background.
And just wanted to kind of demonstrate Proton for you there - so as far as installing games and running them is concerned, it’s literally identical to the Steam experience in Windows - and indeed it is something I’m not going to demo in this video specifically, but it’s kind of quite widely known as well that most of these games run better under Linux on the same hardware than they do under Windows, just because it has far less overhead and just because of the efficiency of that Proton compatibility layer - so that’s something that I just wanted to give a very big shout out to - so you know what, why we have WreckFest here let’s just fire this up and make this the first game that we test on Bazzite, on the VCS.
But yeah, I just wanted to give a big shout out there to all of Valve’s hard work because that’s what makes all of this possible and it really is quite a miraculous thing.
…and here is WreckFest, one of my favorite games to just fire up when I have a quick five minutes just to have a quick race or whatever. A great game for relaxing and unwinding - and there is a sequel coming out soon as well, which I do need to check out at some point. But one thing I should point out is that this is a Ryzen embedded system from 2021. It was considered to be pretty weak when it was actually first released in 2021. Of course, this is a game from 2014, so it would’ve been seven years old at the time that this was released. But this does have embedded Vega graphics and stuff. It’s really not a great 3D gaming machine at all - and I found the performance under Windows to be pretty damn terrible, if I’m honest - so what you’re about to witness here is quite interesting.
So if we’ll just start up - we’ll just do a destruction derby type thing in the demolition arena. There we go. We’ll just fire that up, yada, yada, yada. Is it derby or is it derby? I never know. I always used to call it Destruction Derby back in the day, but, yeah, I dunno. Demolition, whatever.
Anyway, so as you can see, it does load pretty quickly despite those embedded graphics - and I have upgraded this to 32GB of RAM, I will say that, by default they do come with 16, but it is just laptop RAM so you can just slap some in there no problem at all - and I have also turned the graphics settings right down on this game, so everything’s on low quality.
But as you will see - let’s just get moving - we’ve got loads of stuff going on on screen. We’ve got cars deforming, we’ve got stuff exploding all over the place - and it runs really smoothly. It’s very, very playable. It looks great, you know, we’ve got those smoke effects and stuff. I don’t have an FPS counter up on screen at the moment, I couldn’t work out how to enable that, but it’s playable - and, you know, this is kind of the worst case scenario for this game as well because you’ve got everything visible and everything going on, on screen at the same time. Usually in the races and stuff, the performance is even better - so I guess we’ll have a look at that in a second.
So this is just a race, just a bog standard banger race on one of the bigger tracks in the game as well. We’ve got all the cars bunched up here, so we’ve got loads of stuff going on, but, yeah, alright, you’re not going to get you know, high-end modern day gaming PC levels of performance from this little Atari VCS, but again, I really do think this is kind of the worst case scenario when it comes to testing this and it’s handling it really nicely. You know, I don’t really have any complaints at all. Still very playable. Of course, I have that living room gaming PC that I mentioned before that I tend to play this on so yeah, I mean, look at the draw distance and stuff and we’ve got those smoke effects and things going on. Yeah, it is - obviously the FPS is kind of dropping down a bit, but hey, as someone who grew up playing games in the 90s pushing their PC and running stuff on there that it really wasn’t intended to do this is the experience I grew up with, and I’ve certainly had a lot worse. Look at that! Tires everywhere! Yeah, very cool for a little Ryzen embedded system, I must say.
Okay, something slightly different now, a first person shooter, and this is BioShock Remastered, which I actually tried to run on my old Mac Pro quite recently, running Windows, and if you saw that video, you’ll have seen that that didn’t work at all. This is a game from 2007 originally - so perhaps not pushing the hardware as hard as we can, although I haven’t changed any of the graphics settings or anything, it’s just running on whatever the default settings are - and I think this remastered edition was released in 2016, I think I’ve just read on the internet, but hey, look at that water and that fire and stuff. Still very cool effects, great looking game, good smoke effects and stuff - and this is running silky smooth.
I have actually spent some time playing this. I’ve just restarted it. Start a new game just to demo it to you - and again, this is a native Windows game, there isn’t a Linux version of this game, and it’s running through that Proton compatibility layer, which is built into the operating system - and it’s completely seamless.
It runs perfectly fine. Of course, you can go through, launch it with the controller, go through all of the menus and stuff, play the actual game with the controller and everything as well, and it works great.
[A little longer than a few minutes later]
Oh dear, that intro sequence is so incredibly long-winded. Anyway, I keep telling myself that I want to take an opportunity to play through this game again, and it looks great and runs great on this system so perhaps when I’m hearing the studio and I’ve got a bit of downtime, I can pick this up and I can play through a few minutes of BioShock just while I unwind and think about what I’m going to be filming next.
Anyway, let’s grab this electro bolt. Brilliant game, by the way. I’ve played through this a couple of times, although it was quite a while ago now, originally on the Xbox 360, I believe, and then a bit later on, on the PC, but yeah, I really don’t need to tell you how great BioShock is, it’s a classic for a reason.
Something a little bit different for you now, and this is a game called Indika and there are a couple of reasons why I wanted to demo this in this video: first one being that this is a bang up to date - this was literally released a few months ago, I think about six months ago or so - modern game, which is built on Unreal Engine 5 and it looks absolutely stunning on high-end hardware - so it will be a good test of this.
Again, I’m going to be running it on the lowest settings, but also because it’s a brilliant little indie game and I really enjoyed it. It’s kind of a third person action puzzle type game with a really interesting story. It’s very short, as you can see: I have completed it and I’ve only played it for 5.5 hours, but it’s got well- I will show you!
So this is a third person action adventure puzzle type game where you play as a nun, oddly enough - and the story has all these really interesting kind of religious and philosophical elements to it. Exactly my kind of thing, you know if you enjoyed BioShock and the kind of fourth wall breaking stuff that goes on in that game very much kind of in the same vein in Indika.
So yeah, I just wanted to give it a bit of a shout out. But as you can see, I guess the main point here is that Bazzite will quite happily run a bang up to date, modern, Unreal Engine 5 game. The performance and the graphics, as you can see aren’t great at all, but that’s more a reflection of this Atari VCS hardware - as previously mentioned, it’s an embedded Ryzen system with those Vega graphics - so it’s trying its hardest! The fan’s running absolutely flat out although I did repaste this when I kind of upgraded it and stuff last year.
But yeah, the fact that it runs at all I think is noteworthy and I think is genuinely quite impressive.
[Fah!]
[I’ sorry…]
[Je… Jesus Christ! Wh-]
[What are you doing here? Wh-who’re you?]
[The Cloistress is here!]
[Nun is fine.]
[The conventual is here!]
[The nun.]
[Listen, you are lucky to bump into me. I keep missing. I’m no good at this.]
So that’s the Steam side pretty much covered I think - I don’t think I’m going to prove much more by going through and running any more games, but I have tested quite a few games on this and it’s all completely seamless, you just install them and run them, you don’t need to mess with any kind of compatibility settings or anything like that - and the games generally run very, very well - so I’m really, really impressed with this and there’s more, believe it or not, there is a whole other side to this OS that I want to show off to you as well, so, as mentioned earlier, this is all built on top of Universal Blue, which in itself is built on top of Fedora SilverBlue.
Fedora, of course, a very well known, well established Linux distribution that’s been around for quite a long time now. Started off as Red Hat way back in the 90s, has quite an excellent reputation and deservedly so.
So underneath all of this, we have this rather lovely KDE desktop environment. Now, the way that this is all configured, I thought was absolutely fantastic. I mean, this is such a nice looking desktop environment. This launcher works absolutely brilliantly. Everything is so well integrated into the taskbar and stuff. It is- you know- I certainly wouldn’t mind using this as my full blown day-to-day Linux desktop environment, I have to say - so we have the- what’s this called? Discover, which is the built-in app store here and there’s all sorts of stuff in here: you’ve got Spotify, you’ve got GIMP, there’s Discord, there’s Visual Studio Code, you’ve got LibreOffice, everything you would expect from a modern Linux distro, and it’s literally just one click away, you click on stuff and it installs and it’s all there and working seamlessly - so just for an example, I will fire up LibreOffice Writer. I mean, you’ve seen what the performance is like as well. I’ll fire up LibreOffice Writer - and yeah, if you saw my previous video about FydeOS, which to be honest, let’s not talk about that…
Yeah, I couldn’t get this installed on there, but yeah, literally one click and it’s all installed on here. No problems at all - and as I mentioned a second ago, you’ve got all your development tools and stuff, so I went through and installed Visual Studio Code. I’ve got Spotify so I can play my music in the background while I’m working on stuff.
It is really, really nice. You can watch your YouTube videos in Firefox - you’ll have to take my word for that, I really don’t think I need to demo that. But there’s also this Waydroid Android emulator as well, which I was playing with earlier. Again, if you think back to my FydeOS video, I did have some issues with this.
I haven’t fully configured this yet, so I won’t show that in this video. But yeah, apparently you can set it all up so that’s all integrated with the Steam side of things with the Gaming Mode as well, which is really cool to say.
Of course, this is a games console, so I suppose our primary concern should be gaming, and we are well served on that side of things in the desktop environment as well, because we have Lutris here. Now, I hadn’t come across Lutris before and I have barely scratched the surface of what this can do. I’m going to have to spend a lot more time with this because this is a launcher that brings lots of different wrappers and compatibility things together for running various different games under Linux.
So we click on “Add Game”, we’ve got “Add Games to Lutris” here, and there are various installers built in, which are available from their online service - so if I just type in “Doom” here, we’ve got Action Doom, Brutal Doom, Brutal Doom 64 loads of games I hadn’t heard of. But if we scroll through here. We’ve got a wrapper for the PlayStation version of Doom.
The various different versions of the original Doom. We’ve got Doom 2016 - and essentially what this means is that you can install these games locally - you can copy the files across, and then you can just add the game to Lutris and it will all be configured and it will run it in whichever environment it needs to actually run it properly.
So this is a really, really powerful thing, and as I say, not a thing that I really fully understand and something that I barely scratch the surface off - so I’m going to have to get to grips with this. But one thing I did install was GOG Galaxy because I’ve bought a few games on GOG over the years - Good Old Games - not many, just a very small handful that I’ve used in previous videos because I wanted to run the legitimate version on my DOS machines and stuff. Did I actually click on that properly? I don’t think I did - and yeah, I would show the installation process for this, but to be honest, it was very straightforward: I went into “Add A New Game” at the top, searched for “GOG”, clicked on GOG Galaxy, it ran through the installer, a couple of minutes and then prompted me to log in. It all works exactly the same as the Windows version, so this is really cool: I can actually go in and buy games on GOG and install them and run them!
So just by way of a couple of very quick examples I bought the Moto Racer Collection for my Moto Racer review video a few years ago, and I hadn’t actually played Moto Racer 3, which is kind of a Windows XP era game - and it’s quite a tricky one to get running under modern Windows as it is - of course, GOG do all of that, they kind of ship it with the fixes and stuff, but perhaps quite a good test to see how this works just out of the box in Linux. Now I have tested this before hitting record, but I haven’t done any kind of configuration here at all for this game. I haven’t had to tweak anything, any config files or install anything else or anything like that.
So as you can see, it fires up the launcher here. We’ve got our AMD Radeon Vega 3 three graphics driver here. It’s detected that, so that’s using a Windows DLL file and whatnot. It’s detecting it as Windows >= XP - and this is a Moto Racer 3 - and you can go through and configure all of the graphics options and stuff, but we’re just going to launch this and it launches as per it would’ve done on Windows XP.
So got the title screen here. We just click on “Go”, just click through, go to “Solo” - and I was just playing with this a few minutes ago, so we’ll leave all of this configured as it was - and just click on play and see if we can get into a game, see what the performance is like.
Straight in - and the controller also worked straight out of the box, I didn’t need to configure anything at all to get this to work, which considering this is running - what? Within a wrapper within a wrapper - I mean, I don’t know how many layers of abstraction we’ve got going on here at this point. It’s super smooth. Of course it’s a 20+ year old game, I wouldn’t expect it to run badly at all, but yeah, no difference whatsoever as far as the user experience is concerned as it would’ve been running back in the day when it was new. I don’t know if it’s actually a good game - I don’t think it has a very good reputation, to be honest, but it is what it is and it means that I can fire up, GOG Galaxy now and I can browse through it, see what games are on offer and if there are any of those kind of older Windows or DOS games that I fancy checking out that aren’t on Steam or I want to download them DRM-free and whatnot, I can actually install them and play them on my Atari VCS under Linux!
And as hinted at a moment ago, of course, one thing that’s GOG is really well known for is its excellent selection of DOS games - and of course, they’re all shipped with their own DOSBox-based wrapper as well - so you just run them straight off, no configuration, no messing around under modern Windows.
So I suppose it’s worth seeing how one of my favorite DOS games of all time runs under GOG Galaxy on Bazzite.
There’s DOSBox and you know, as per the GOG version, if you run it on Windows, just go through and you’re basically running the original game, full screen. Now, this isn’t quite such the success story, I must say: the audio is a little bit skewiffy, I think it’s fair to say - I’ve had this before when DOSBox has been badly configured or it’s not running very well, and yeah, it’s very, very sluggish. It takes quite a long time to navigate through the menus and everything else.
[A few minutes later]
The utterly bizarre thing here is that once you get into the game itself it actually runs perfectly fine. I mean, if you’re not familiar with Wacky Wheels, you might think that this looks a bit sluggish, but no, this is just how it runs. It’s just what the game is like, it’s what it was like on the original hardware back in the day and it’s also kind of exactly how it runs on a higher end PC as well - so this is pretty much the 100% perfect, authentic, Wacky Wheels experience. It’s just the music in the menus and navigating through the menus, which is very, very slow and very painful - so we’ll just pause this because I can’t race and think at the same time - and I think what’s going on here is that we’re running GOG Galaxy Under WINE, which is that compatibility layer for running Windows applications on top of Linux - and then GOG is basically launching its own version of DOSBox, which will be the Windows version of DOSBox, which is then emulating DOS.
So, yeah, we’ve got an emulated DOS running under an emulated Windows, running- Yeah, I mean, it’s no surprise really that the performance of that isn’t brilliant, but there is a potential fix.
So we’re back in Lutris now, and I have zero experience of this as previously explained, but we’ll go through and we’ll attempt to do this live - so if we check for installers, do they have- They do have one for Wacky wheels. Okay - so if we click on that, that’s DOSBox, GOG. “Uses the files from the Linux installer from GOG”. Okay. Games… Wacky Wheels… Continue. Obviously, I already have this installed so I’m not quite sure how this is going to work.
“Select the-“ right! Okay.
Oh! Okay… Is that just going to work!?
Right! Okay - so what I actually did there was I went to GOG.com and I downloaded the Linux installer - so I didn’t do it through GOG Galaxy, not quite as well integrated, I must say. But what that has done is added that to Lutris and it’s now using the native Linux version of DOSBox so the performance is much, much better. It’s absolutely spot on. That is brilliant. Okay, well that wasn’t too much hassle at all was it really?
Slightly more hoops to jump through than the other stuff that we’ve demoed here, but it’s a very small price to pay, I guess - and yeah, that runs great! Okay, so we have a DOS-
That’s interesting - so is it best to go through GOG Galaxy or is it best to download the installers and add them individually to Lutris? Hmm. That’s something I’m going to have to investigate a bit more. But if we close this-
MS-DOS… Now, ah, “Create Steam shortcut”.
“Delete Steam Shortcut” - so I guess that’s been created - so if we now go back into Gaming Mode…
Ha! Non-Steam games, Wacky Wheels - wow!
I haven’t actually configured the controller for this.
Oh, it’s got the onscreen keyboard.
What!?
I don’t really want this onscreen keyboard - let me get rid of it.
So there we go: a DOS game, purchased on GOG.com, downloaded, installed via Lutris and added to Steam, and all working seamlessly through Steam. That is really good stuff!
And there we have it, that is Bazzite, a free, convenient, and indeed also a very easy way of turning any old commodity hardware like my Atari VCS here into a fully fledged modern Linux gaming powerhouse - and as you might expect from a modern Linux distro, no issues whatsoever with the installation or with compatibility with any of the hardware inside this machine.
But I think the thing that surprised me the most was the performance of some of those games - I must say based on previous experiences with the VCS, I wasn’t expecting some of them to work at all, let alone as well as they did and that is a real testament to Valve’s work on Proton, that compatibility layer that allows those Windows games to run seamlessly under a Linux-based OS, such as the one that runs on the Steam Deck or indeed Bazzite here, which is based on that as we know - so yeah, all in all, fantastic result. I’m going to be keeping Bazzite on my VCS.
I’m going to have to find a different controller to use with this - probably my 8BitDo Ultimate or an Xbox controller or something like that. You know, anything Bluetooth will work perfectly fine, but of course that’s not the fault of the operating system, that’s the fault of Atari and some weird decisions that they made a few years back.
But that’s all I have for you for this video - so if you enjoyed it or found it useful please do remember to give it a thumbs up: it does help the video as far as the YouTube algorithm is concerned. If you are looking to replicate anything that I have done in this video the links will be down in the description for you to check out, and indeed, if you have any thoughts or comments or suggestions, please do let me know down in the comments section. A big thank you as always to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and indeed my YouTube channel members as well: they get videos a little bit early and also ad-free. But that’s all I have for you for this one so thank you ever so much for watching, and hopefully I’ll see you next time.
Original Video Links
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Episode Links:
Bazzite: https://bazzite.gg
Bazzite Installation Guide: https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/Installation_Guide
Indika: https://indikathegame.com
Lutris: https://lutris.net
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