My videogame collection is organized using Lutris which is a front-end designed for Linux, which is my choice of OS.

I use a front-end because I have a very large collection of videogames (that are nebulously legal in their acquisition) that I have amassed in my life since I was a vey young kid across many different platforms.

Lutris allows me to keep my videogame collection in mostly one place and load them up quickly, while letting me hop platforms with abandon.

Since it's software that is constantly in development, it often gets some quirks and hiccups that require me to troubleshoot often.

I'm recording a couple recent solutions I've discovered here in case I need to reference them in the future.

Lutris comes with a variety of built in repositories for emulators and other platform software for a large array of games. For Windows games, it features WINE, which is basically a Windows emulator (it is not an emulator but the difference for my practical purposes is purely academic).

WINE can be run as a virtual desktop, which is to say it can manifest as a separated windowed environment very similar to a virtual machine. This used to appeal to me, but as my vision becomes marginally worse as I get older, I prefer to use the whole full screen, but I ran into a small issue with my setup.

Lutris no longer supports WINE launching as a virtual desktop, which is fine, however, its configuration could not switch my WINE setup to fullscreen, and instead had it trapped on a fixed virtual desktop with a comparatively small resolution. This made playing some games generally frustrating, especially an older game like Diablo 2 which is 800x600, a decent size when it came out, but made for ants in this day and age.

Since Lutris' configuration no longer supports a virtual desktop, I seemingly had no ability to shut it off or modify it, and web searches for these kinds of inquiries is becoming trickier all the time.

Ultimately I had to learn to use WINE a little bit more. WINE comes with several configuration tools, so I launched winecfg from the Linux program menu and was presented with a variety of options, including disabling the virtual desktop, which resolved the issue.

The only downside to this is that while Lutris has a configuration option to restore the system's original resolution on game exit, WINE itself is not doing so, so if a game is launched through Lutris, it's fine, but if I have to launch it out of Lutris for whatever reason (usually for testing and configuration purposes, but currently Sonic Adventure 2 for Windows won't launch through Lutris for some reason, which is an ongoing issue) it won't restore the system's resolution on game exit, necessitating pulling up display settings and manually resetting it.

Another quirk of Lutris that caused me an issue for a while was with DOSBox, the DOS emulator.

For many years DOSBox was pretty much static as software, and I didn't see a big deal in keeping up with its development or the scene because it basically emulated everything I liked to play perfectly.

However at some point DOSBox started launching some games with some messed up configurations. I generally like to set my DOSBox to use the Eagle3x filter, for example, but for some of my favorite games it was not doing that.

It seems at some point Lutris started launching with a new version of DOSBox and the configuration text files that I kept in the folders of the games being launched were not working correctly with the new software, resulting in some sound and graphics settings being ignored.

What further confused me is that if there was a config text file in the folder where the game was being launched from, even if I had set Lutris to not use a config text, it would load it automatically.

So essentially, what I have to do is take the new version of these config text files, and compare to the old ones and essentially update them using the new config standards. As I have many DOS games, this will be a hassle and is being done on a play by play basis.

So essentially keeping this here as a reminder since it can sometimes be months or even years between messing around with these settings.