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9 days agoI’m wondering what the problem even is. I mean, can’t you just put all the stuff relevant to 32 bit gaming into a ‘retro-gaming’ package and be like “there, now if you want updates, better find maintainers”?
If you have an old game, chances are you won’t need many new features. Only problem could be other packages or the kernel becoming incompatible. I don’t know how relevant that is in this instance.
There is a way to kinda make this work, this would be hardware based security. You could use a TPM to make reasonably sure the kernel is e.g. mainline / hardened / anything else acceptable. Hardware vendors (i.e. Intel, AMD etc.) would have to provide a service where they hash the kernel alongside their keys for the game devs to check against (probably not for free). You would absolutely have to use Secure Boot tho, and eventually keys may be leaked. Another possibility would be devs connecting directly to your TPM to make sure (afaik this is possible in principle, but not mean to be used that way).
I think there are easier ways to prevent cheating tho, for example simply detecting suspicious activity on the server side, i.e. stats go way up, looking at data coming from clients other than yours.