What about the binary blobs?

[jiriks74]

Hi!
I found your project and it seems like a really cool one! AFAIK it's the only one that can do online couch gaming on Linux (apart from games enabled on Steam).

Looking through the source I found binary blobs for ViGem (the now dead emulation controller emulation project for Windows).
You probably understand my skepticism about binary blobs because of some past issues in other projects.

I'd like to know if there's a possibility for me to easily patch them out. I'd like to make it work and if possible upstream to NixOS (Nixpkgs). The problem is that while I probably wouldn't feel that bad building something with binary files for my system I would feel bad if I did upstream this to a trusted repo, if it wouldn't get rejected first.

I can think of a few options:

• Patching out the binaries before building (is it possible for me to do so?)
• If you'd point me to a release where the binaries are from (I could only find the installer) so that the binaries could be sha256 checked
• If you'd point me to where can I find information about building the binaries I could build them myself in the package build script
• Adjusting the build system to fetch the binaries from a trusted source (the upstream project src/release)
• Adjusting the build system to build the binaries from source

Just to clarify - I'm a random guy opening a conversation. I don't, in any way, demand you to change things. I'm just opening a discussion that I think should be held IMHO. All respect to you, I'd have great trouble making something like this.

Keep on the, what seems to be (I haven't tried this out yet so I won't judge), great work!

[PiterWeb]

Hi @jiriks74, thanks for pointing this out.

When I did the binary blobs I wanted to implement the faster I could but I forgot to document about that part and automate making a build from ViGEm source.

Right now I am very busy with other features of the project and my daily life, due to those reasons "fixing" this will take very long.

For the moment I can tell you what I have done to compile the binaries from source and what resources are available to do this:

The installer you talked about is in the ViGEmBUS repo the installer I embed is the following https://github.com/nefarius/ViGEmBus/releases/tag/v1.22.0 I just download it and drop it on the folder.

Talking about the DLLs used, they are built from the ViGEmClient SDK repo, the DLLs were generated from the last commit using XMake build tool but theorically the same result can be achieved by cloning the repo and using the Make build tool.

If you compile the binaries by yourself and you replace the ones put by me you should be able to compile the APP successfully.

Edit: If you want I can assign you an issue to resolve this and make this a more transparent project.

[PiterWeb]

It's also worth keeping in mind that I know absolutely nothing about Go so my solutions would probably take some time and wouldn't be the best.

No worries about that, it shouldn't be necesary to modify any Go code. If you want to know more about the build system is using it is called Task. You can find a Taskfile.yml at the root of the project. It is very simple to use and I think that is composable so you can create a separate TaskFile and it can be imported from the main one.

You can assign it to me and I'll look into it when I have time but I can't promise you that I'll have the time between work and family to properly look into it.

It is not a high priority in the project, so it is fine. Create an issue and will assign it to you. No pressure, if at any point you are not interested you can say so and I will unassign you.

[jiriks74]

Thanks for the info but task really won't work that well for me because nix is a bit special. It prefetches dependencies, etc, because it want's to be as reproducible as possible.

Anyway, I was able to make a build without the binary blobs as the file has the _windows appendix which means that go ignores it when building on Linux. Although I have a successful build all I get is a blue screen:

Screenshot

Is there something I'm missing? I know that some apps in electron require a variable to be set when the app is ran using external electron. Is there something similar here?

If that helps here are the build flags used:

  ldflags = [
    "-s"
    "-w"
    # "-X 'main.version=${src.rev}'"
  ];
  tags = [
    "desktop"
    "production"
  ];

[PiterWeb]

Are you compiling directly with Go or are you using the Wails CLI? The app must be compiled using wails CLI build command as you can see in the TaskFile.yml.

Talking about flags -s is for skipping frontend build so you must do it before before or removing it, also I don't know what is that -w flag.

[jiriks74]

Talking about flags -s is for skipping frontend build so you must do it before before or removing it, also I don't know what is that -w flag.

AFAIK the -w is needed so that it compiles as if it was wails.

Are you compiling directly with Go or are you using the Wails CLI?

I tried both. Currently I do

pnpm run build

for frontend and

wails build -m -s -devtools -debug

for backend/go.

The result is mostly the same (flash of blue, then white blank window). With 3.0.1 I can see the UI (with broken translations) until I resize the window, then it's blue again.

[PiterWeb]

Ok, did you try to run wails doctor? This command checks if you have all the necessary libs installed depending on your system. Maybe something is missing because I never had those issues that you mention.

https://wails.io/docs/reference/cli/#doctor