Yesterday we talked about the release of the new version of the Proton project, as well as filing a project that aims to improve the functionality of Proton by implementing the most recent changes to Wine without the need to wait for updates from Valve, the project we talked about was Proton-i.
Today we will talk about Roberta, which is a new project that aims to extend the functionality of the Steam client on Linux and is that his proposal is to be able to use ScummVM or DOSBox through Proton.
About Roberta
Roberta was born out of need from developer "dreamer_" to be able to directly execute classic missions on Steam Play using the Linux version of ScummVM , without running Windows versions.
This same developer was the one who also developed Boxtron, which is another project aimed at expanding Steam's functionalities, but which allows you to use a native version of DOSBox for Linux, to run games as you would with the Steam Play Proton.
In order to use Roberta's project, it is necessary that they have the Steam client installed on your system and in case you don't have it, you can basically look for the package with your package manager or software center to be able to install it since Steam is found within most Linux distributions.
How to install Roberta on Steam?
For those who are interested in being able to install this project on their Steam client, They can do so by following the instructions we share below.
Before installing it is necessary to have two units installed, besides the Steam client on your system, one of them is Python and the other is ScummVM and inotify-tools
The installation of the last two (since Python is found in most Linux distributions as the default package and in case you don't have it, you can find out how to install it on your distro).
For the installation of these just open a terminal (You can do it with the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl + Alt + T") and in it you will type the following command:
sudo apt install scummvm inotify-tools
Now for the case of those who are Fedora users, type the following:
sudo dnf install scummvm inotify-tools
While for the case of those who use openSUSE:
sudo zypper install scummvm inotify-tools
Finally for those who are using Arch Linux, Manjaro or any other derivative of Arch Linux:
sudo pacman -S scummvm inotify-tools
Already counting on it, now we are going to download Roberta's code inside the Steam directory in the compatibilitytools.d subfolder, if you do not have this directory you must create it (for this you can consult the publication that we make from Proton-i).
cd ~/.local/share/Steam/compatibilitytools.d/ || cd ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/ curl -L https://github.com/dreamer/roberta/releases/download/v0.1.0/roberta.tar.xz | tar xJf -
Already unzipped Roberta's package in the directory mentioned above, now we are going to proceed to open our Steam client to later select "Roberta" in the "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" section. Once this is done, it will ask us to restart the client so that the changes are loaded with the start of Steam.
Another way to use Roberta with Steam, is by installing the package, this can be done from a terminal by typing the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/dreamer/roberta.git cd roberta make user-install
At the end of this, we are going to apply the last step of the previous method to select Roberta on Steam.
How to remove Roberta from Steam?
Finally, if after trying Roberta on Steam you think that it is not what you expected, you can eliminate it in a fairly simple way.
For those who put Roberta inside the compatibilitytools.d directory, just delete the folder from this directory.
O for those who performed the installation just run the following command:
make user-uninstall
And that's it, Roberta will be eliminated and you can choose another compatibility tool for your Steam client.