Mythgame player to run native Linux games

I recently started to be aware of a problem in our family. Ever since we configured Mythgame to run Xmame games, we started to ignore native Linux games. This is a shame, because often the quality of such games is much higher, and besides, they are open source, which I strongly believe in.

I looked around for help configuring Mythgame to run Linux games, and was unable to find a way to make a game player that would play any Linux game. So I devised the following solution:

Step 1: Set up directories for pseudo-roms, command switches and snapshots

mkdir /usr/share/games/roms
mkdir /usr/share/games/switches
mkdir /usr/share/games/snaps

Step 2: Define a player in Mythgame

Player name: Linux
Type: OTHER
Command: %s `cat \`dirname %s\`/../switches/\`basename %s\``
Rom Path: /usr/share/games/roms
ScreenShots: /usr/share/games/snaps

Step 3: Populate the directories with data

cd /usr/share/games/roms
ln -s /usr/games/oolite
ln -s /usr/games/starvoyager
cd /usr/share/games/snaps
cp ~synrg/snaps/oolite.png .
cp ~synrg/snaps/starvoyager.png .
cd /usr/share/games/switches
touch oolite
echo "-f" >starvoyager

Step 4: In Mythgame, “Scan for Games”

Step 5: Play!