[Question] clarification on what games are allowed to be tested

[minuteworld1]

Apologizes for asking this here but I can't seem to private message @kisak-valve

I just got done testing 7 games in a row, even went through the trouble of having a windows 10 VM setup in virtmanager and spent hours of my time trying to test these games out underneath proton and I get them all locked and closed due to piracy? I get the reasoning for this but I wanna try to understand how is downloading a 30+ year old game from 1999 from myabandonware piracy? is it because some were disney? you have reports for disney games officially available on steam so it can't be copyright.

This is the only place I can bring attention to these games not working, where else should I report? do you guys know that these games this old have problems running on your software? would I just have better luck running them with lutris and getting the right dependencies? proton in itself is not lutris, this is not the lutris github, this is the proton github.

If I run into a game that straight up does not work with proton, should I not report on it here? what are my options if so?

[zrooda]

Game reports need to contain a Steam ID and the games you're testing are assumed to be available on Steam (so everyone including Valve can work with the exact same game files as you). Nothing can guarantee that a randomly downloaded abandonware archive is complete and working - many really old games tend to be packaged with certain DOSBox versions (99% for Windows) and/or some custom changes, so just for that reason you can't expect any official support.

Whether a game is truly public domain abandonware or someone still holds property rights is certainly a legal concern for Valve that's best avoided altogether, but even if that wasn't the case the uncertainty of what files you're working with is anyway a dealbreaker.

I would suggest running old DOS/Win3.1 games through the Linux version of DOSBox directly, not with Proton.

[Nyamiou]

You can report the issues on the WineHQ Bugtracker (https://bugs.winehq.org/index.cgi) if you identify that the bug is related to WINE (try with PROTON_USE_WINED3D, if the game crash in the same way it's probably related to WINE). If the issue is not reproducible with PROTON_USE_WINED3D or is a graphical issue and the game is using DirectX 8 or 9, you can report it to the DXVK project: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues

In your reports do not mention links to the games if these are abandonware, since these website are in a grey legal zone. Instead try to obtain useful logs with PROTON_LOG and on the case of DXVK you can capture an Apitrace: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/wiki/Using-Apitrace

It's possible the issues you have are already fixed by D8VK inclusion in DXVK. You can try the last Proton RC with PROTON_DXVK_D3D8=1 (see here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8006).