The forum

Well, i am new to linux, wine and playonlinux. over 20 years ago i was really in computers and wrote programs in basic, boreland turbo pascal and so on. today i have a complete win****-dementia or amnesia ... hope i will recover a little bit :D - and well, the terminal looks like a dos-prompt a little bit to me :D

i have a lot of old games and i am interested in knowing how it (POL) works a little bit, not just following a guide for each single game and always asking for help. So i headed for the wiki.

I went to the components and functions aera, but had to recognise, that there is hardly an information about in it. It is just a skeleton of what it should be.

So I ask the pros (you!) in here to set some flesh to it to develope the wiki to something, which may be useful to a bloody gamer, who doesn't know anything but to click an execute-button, like me, in order to let them (or me) lern more about it.

Thank you in advance ;)

Hi,

It's not obvious what you expect there, "know how PlayOnLinux works" that's still vague to me...

Well, talking about components and functions: it is only a list of those, which could be included.

Only very few have some lines written for explanation. That's far away from a documentation.

What do they do, when should they become included, which are the differences (so many different d3dx...) or exactly: which data goes in, which comes out, what is it doing ? why do i need this or those ?

PURPOSE - INPUT - OUTPUT - ACTION

When programming in turbo pascal, i wrote a comment on each unit and into the header of each function or procedure about its purpose, input, output and action. supposed to be a good style (and to make them shareable) ;)

Edited by Stargreeter

Well, about components specifically, it's impossible to describe what they do short of looking at their code; I tried once to compare the different components installing parts of DirectX DLLs, and had to give up: each one does things slightly differently, and there's no way one could write a matrix of what each installs/doesn't install.

So when do you need those? When they experimentally gets programs to work.With experience one can learn what components may be useful for games having issues with video playback, and focus on installing combinaisons of those, etc. Also the AppDB is a very useful source of informations about what others have tried. But in the end experimentation has the last word.

For PlayOnLinux own functions some descriptions can probably the fleshed out, and purposes looks like the weakest point, so I hope it can be improved without too much effort. It'll need some reverse engineering, so anybody that can read Bash code can help ;)

For some of the undocumented functions, you can look in the /usr/share/playonlinux/lib directory and look at the .lib files in there. They're just plain text, and most, if not all, have a (very) concise description of what the function does. It's  also not too hard to figure out where the function you need is---the files are separated based on function. It's not so easy to see what some of them actually do, since I understand that they call the actual PlayOnLinux Python program, but some are fairly easy to understand.

It took me a while to figure out what 

source $PLAYONLINUX/lib/sources

actually did, ($PLAYONLINUX is /usr/share/playonlinux) and then that led me to the .lib files. Good luck.