A Look at the POBSD Alternative OpenBSD Game Database Frontend

Original Published Date: 2024-05-14

Last Updated: 2024-05-14

Thanks to Hukadan's efforts, there is now a very nice and informative interface to explore the commercial, formerly commercial, or freeware games that run (or used to run) on OpenBSD. This post is a summary to show why this is such a great resource.

To get started, open:

https://pobsd.chocolatines.org/

and you will first see the Game List which is ordered alphabetically:

Game List

This view shows some key information about each entry, including developer, engine, runtime, and status. You can filter by one of these values by clicking on the blue text, for example click on scummvm to see all games that use the scummvm runtime.

You can get more information about a game by clicking on the title. This opens a detail page with some additional information detail, including the cover art, a description, and screenshots. Those are pulled from IGDB where available.

Detail Page

Another way to find a particular game is by using the search bar. Note that this will search not just the game name, but also tags, genre, and likely the other fields as well.

Search

Now for some of the standout functions:

If you click "Random Game" in the top bar, the detail page of a random game is opened:

Random Game

This is a great way to explore the entries. The link of the button can even be used for a browser homepage or bookmark.

Click on "News" to see what has been added recently:

News

I was impressed with how quickly it updates - "If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers" showed up within minutes of being added to the OpenBSD games database.

Further to the right is RSS feed which can be subscribed to for the recent games additions.

And last but not least, "Game Stats" provides summary data as tables and graphs:

Game Stats Menu

Stats Tables

Stats Graphs

As you can see, the large majority of games has a status of "Launches". This is where you can help out - yes, you! If you find a game in the database and play it, it would help a great deal to let us know the observation about the game's status. Hopefully many more games are found to be "Completable" (or even "Perfect", the highest rating), but it's also very valuable to collect if there are bugs - minor, medium, major, or even not being able to run the game at all due to crashing etc. A more detailed description of this status rating system is in the "About" section (or at https://github.com/playonbsd/OpenBSD-Games-Database):

About Page

I hope this helps see what's possible with games on OpenBSD!