Fable III on Steam Deck, and the Framework 13 AMD board

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Greetings, all! It’s been a while. Recently, I’ve done some tweaking and tinkering to get the good old Fable 3 game from the early 2000s running fine on the Steam Deck. I’ve also gone ahead and upgraded my OG Framework 13 to the recent AMD 7840U board.

I don’t have too many photos of the motherboard replacement process for the FW13 board replacement, but needless to say, it took only about 4-5 minutes and the tool that they shipped with the laptop was all I used. What a wonderful experience!

Ended up having to get new DDR5 RAM for the Ryzen 7 7840U board, as it doesn’t take DDR4. Now, the only issue after updating the BIOS to 3.03 is that only one of my sticks is being seen. Am currently testing things and sorting that out with Framework’s support staff. Also need to replace this warranty-replacement screen, as it’s pretty bad. That will all get sorted in due time, though! Onwards to the other projects I’ve been working on.

With GloriousEggroll’s recent GE-Proton8-24 release, he’s made a few protontricks edits. While I’m not much of a coder myself, he figured out how to streamline the changes I and a few others made in the Steam Discussions tab for Fable 3. I went ahead and reinstalled the game using his recent Proton GE release to see if the game would start up.

Looks like, as per previous attempts, it gets stuck here even with the protontricks enabled.

I forgot if that protontricks change grabbed certain DLLs that were required, according to the community, to get this to work. I went ahead and opened up the protontricks application to grab those, but it looks like it still sticks at the install script part. I might need to replace that basic xlive.dll with one mentioned in an article, so let’s go try that.

Next, I went ahead and downloaded this file linked here as a Games For Windows Live DLL replacement that doesn’t seem to get added into the game directory by default when using GE-Proton nor Valve’s official Proton releases for some reason. I downloaded the zip file, extracted it in my Downloads folder and then moved the file to this directory where the local Fable 3 files are: /home/gamer/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Fable 3. Please note that it will be /home/deck/ for those of you currently on a Steam Deck. Note that I’m doing this on my Steam Machine ChimeraOS box in the living room, as this is the only machine I don’t have Fable 3 currently installed on.

BAM it works! Looks like you mainly need to replace that xlive.dll file to redirect the game to a local activation server or something and it’ll work fine! I’m not entirely sure if you need to do the protontricks thing, I think it’s mainly the xlive.dll holding us back.

Also, I’d like to note that this game saves game data to this directory on the Steam Deck, once you’ve opened it and started the game for the first time:

/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/105400/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Saved Games/Lionhead Studios/Fable 3

I went ahead and started a new game. Having messed up my syncthing configuration, it appears the 10 hours or so that I previously put into the campaign had disappeared. This game is so old and defunct that it doesn’t support Steam Cloud Saves, so you’ll have to come up with your own save-syncing solution. As sad as it is, I did it to myself, so I only have myself to blame. Onwards to a new campaign! Definitely going to sync this with the Framework as well, so I can play it on that too.

In other news, here are some articles and videos I’ve watched recently that I found interesting:

Short sweet June update

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Greetings there! I’ve mainly been slowly gathering supplies to turn my Framework Laptop 13, the OG model shipped in 2021, to a Tablet. I don’t have many picture updates here, other than this one of all the stuff on the desk waiting for me to do something with it. I’ve been working a little on my Steam Deck script too, which I’ll discuss further in this post.

Having been pouring a fair few hours into Diablo IV, tinkering with Steam Deck theming, cleaning the place (minus workbench) and job hunting, I haven’t gotten around to it. I’ll be following WhatTheFilament’s guide here on how to turn the old mainboard into a tablet. He was kind enough to send over his 3D-printed enclosure as well, as my AnkerMake3D doesn’t have a large enough bed.

On the Diablo IV front, I can confirm it works perfectly fine on both Steam Deck and Desktop Linux installs through the Battle.net Lutris installer. You just install Lutris via your GUI software store or via terminal through your package manager and then install Battle.net. Once that’s installed, open ‘er up and install Diablo IV.

Part of my Deckscript that I’ve been working on over on my Github here will install Lutris and all these other fun little utilities automatically for you…but do note that the pacman packages noted there may need to be reinstalled when there’s a new SteamOS stable update if you’re on the stable update channel. Most are by default.

Fedora 35 on my Framework + eGPU setup

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Hi there! Back again. Today I finally made the move to Fedora 35 on my Framework and started testing out GloriousEggroll’s Nobara Project additions to Fedora on my Pangolin pang10.

This time around I decided to use Gnome Software to upgrade.

The only anomaly I found after booting was that the newest kernel from the fsync community repository didn’t work, so I made sure to remove that and disable the repository until newer kernels were working:

sudo dnf remove kernel-core-5.14.16-302.fsync.fc35 && sudo dnf remove kernel-devel-5.14.16-302.fsync.fc35 
sudo dnf autoremove
sudo dnf copr disable sentry/kernel-fsync
sudo dnf distro-sync -y && sudo dnf update --refresh -y

After removing that, running updates to get the newest fedora kernel, and rebooting into that, I was right as rain.

Graphics: Device-1: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] driver: i915 v: kernel
Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 23 [Radeon RX 6600/6600 XT/6600M] driver: amdgpu v: kernel
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: loaded: amdgpu,modesetting resolution: 2560x1440
OpenGL: renderer: AMD DIMGREY_CAVEFISH (LLVM 13.0.0 DRM 3.42 5.14.16-301.fc35.x86_64) v: 4.6 Mesa 22.0.0-devel
.',;::::;,'. s31bz@framework
.';:cccccccccccc:;,. ---------------
.;cccccccccccccccccccccc;. OS: Fedora Linux 35 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
.:cccccccccccccccccccccccccc:. Host: Laptop A8
.;ccccccccccccc;.:dddl:.;ccccccc;. Kernel: 5.14.16-301.fc35.x86_64
.:ccccccccccccc;OWMKOOXMWd;ccccccc:. Uptime: 1 hour, 35 mins
.:ccccccccccccc;KMMc;cc;xMMc:ccccccc:. Packages: 2578 (rpm), 17 (flatpak)
,cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cc;;WW::cccccccc, Shell: zsh 5.8
:cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc: Resolution: 2560x1440
:ccccccc;oxOOOo;MMM0OOk.;cccccccccccc: DE: GNOME 41.1
cccccc:0MMKxdd:;MMMkddc.;cccccccccccc; WM: Mutter
ccccc:XM0';cccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc' WM Theme: Sweet-Dark
ccccc;MMo;ccccc;MMW.;ccccccccccccccc; Theme: Adwaita-dark [GTK2/3]
ccccc;0MNc.ccc.xMMd:ccccccccccccccc; Icons: Nebula [GTK2/3]
cccccc;dNMWXXXWM0::cccccccccccccc:, Terminal: gnome-terminal
cccccccc;.:odl:.;cccccccccccccc:,. CPU: 11th Gen Intel i7-1185G7 (8) @ 4.800GHz
:cccccccccccccccccccccccccccc:'. GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX 6600/6600 XT/6600M
.:cccccccccccccccccccccc:;,.. GPU: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics]
'::cccccccccccccc::;,. Memory: 5744MiB / 31880MiB

Good to see that No Man’s Sky is functioning well on the newest mesa, fedora kernel and proton as well now. Multiplayer is nice to see.

As it’s only been about 9-10 hours since I’ve upgraded to Fedora 35, I’ll have to see how well this plays with other games and whether or not some things may need patching. That said, this seems like yet another bulletproof released and I look forward to enjoying it!

Here are some fun things I’ve read or watched recently: