VkBasalt stopped working in all games with my Nvidia GTX 650

Support Gaming
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1

Good day to all of you.
I need help related to gaming on my old PC.
First I tell you the background.

Almost all the games that I have are very old titles, collected them from late 90’s to 2010’s.
They are all retail games on CDs, DVDs.
Because they are old I also must use old Wine versions to run them.
Every game has it’s separated Wine-prefix and runs using specific Wine versions.
All Wine versions are placed in an external folder on a separated partition on the HDD. They are all compiled from source.
I have 30 different versions, from version 1.8 up to 9.22 so I can use whatever version a given game works with.
Like I said, they are all old games runs only with specific Wine-version, and they required a lot of fine tuning and trickery to able to make them work.
This is the reason that I use only Wine versions that are not instealled from repository.
All the Wine prefixes and the installed games also, are in this separated partition.

Most of these games won’t run on widescreen or even any higher resolutions.
So they streched and this make them looks very blurry.
This is the reason that I use VkBasalt in all of them to sharpen the images. It does a very great job.
I play various games from time to time. Sometimes I won’t play games for months or even more.
But I keep all of them on my HDD and their respective Wine-prefixes untuched.

Yesterday I discovered that VkBasalt stopped working in every game. Before they worked.
Nothing chanegd in those Wine-prefix, or in the games, not even VkBasalt.
VkBasalt last updated about 2 years ago.
All that chaged is that I updated Manjaro, and with that obviously the graphics drivers, kernels, and whatever updated in the system.
Because of this, sadly, I can’t tell you exactly when and what update broke VkBasalt.

Yesterday I decided to play the game called Cultures (released in 2000).
Formerly VkBalsalt worked in this game, but now when I started VkBasalt not working anymore.
The last time I played it was in 2024 september. (The last gamesave is dated 2024 september 9.)
Than I started a few other games that are configured with VkBasalt and VkBasalt not working anymore in any of them.
Theres also one or two games that are won’t even run anymore, but they worked some times ago.
Like I said everything is unchanged; separated Wine-prefix folders and separated Wine versions.

So whatever changed in the system since past year, something broke VkBasalt.
Currently I have the LTS kernel linux66 6.6.80-1 and Nvidia driver 470.256.02-10. I have a GTX 650 vga card.

I tried to dowgrade to previous versions, but I can’t keep packages in cacahe due to limited space.
I made the system partition incredibly long time ago, and it is now very small, and I can’t increase the size.
I searched on the internet for older Nvidia driver, but there is literally nowhere to find older driver for Manjaro, just the latest.
After this I searched the internet and here on the forum about how to dowgrade.
Never done anything like this before.

First thing that I run into was a post that said to download driver from Nvidia site,so I downloaded NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.103.01.run to try out.
I removed the Nvidia 470.256.02-10 driver and other packages described in the post.
The post said I need to boot without X. I did that and run the donwloaded driver install.
It wasn’t succsessful it gave errors and after that I can’t even boot the system.
Managed to fix it, reistalled the drivers and other packages from the offical repositories with pacman.

Than I started again from the beginning and searched for other solutions.
I find out about the program ‘manjaro-downgrade’ but it does not have driver for my old GTX 650.
I removed it and tried the program ‘downgrade’ following the posts I find here on Manjaro forum.
After I remove the Nvidia 470.256.02-10 driver and other packages that are mentioned, I used downgrade.
Version that I tried to istall was 470.74
The program worked without error, but the result was unsuccesfull.
The system started but it froze at the point ‘reached graphical interface’.
I fiexed it reistalling everything from the officail repositories with pacman.

Without VkBaslat, playing these old games that I have, is a very unpleasant experience.
I hope someone can help me to make VkBaslat work again.
Either by downgrading my system or any other solution that works.

2

If your system worked around september - you couild look up an installer ISO from that time - download and use it tocreate an environment for that purpose only.

3

Theoritically that could work. But that requires at least a new HDD or something. Theres a bit problem with that; that I really can’t afford to upgrade my PC or buy any hardware element. I never buy used hardware anymore; done that few times and they always died on a very short time. Always had very bad experience with used hardware.
As I mentioned in my post, even the system partition is very limited in size and can’t increase it. I hope you guys now understand why I use so old vga card and PC. Can’t afford new. This is also the reason that i started using XFCE MAnjaro Linux; it wasn’t required newer equipment to has. It was about 2012 when I started exlusively use Linux when the HDD with Windows XP used for gaming died.

To “create an environment for that purpose only” is only possible if I can afford to buy new storage. Not just because I don’t have enought space. Almost all the softwares that I use are installed from AUR years ago and so many of them are no longer available or the new versions won’t work on my harware anymore.
It is now several years that my system is too much customized; lot of thing I had to exclude from updte. Because they are no longer supported. It is all related to the fact that I use old hardware, that also requires those no-longer-supported software.
Im also a hobbyist musican who use oldschool MIDI and tracker softwares; even back when I started using Linux it was really hard to make the sound work as it should. The music card I have is Audigy 4; great for retro gaming, and it is(/was) good enoght to use it with more modernish softwares. It was very hard to setup the audio so the quality is best and the timing working when recording the playing on MIDI keyboard. My system using pure ALSA, becaseu just having pulsaudio installed messed up the recording; the pressing of the MIDI keybord wasn’t recorded exactly when it is pressed. Timing was a great problem.
So many factors in play, that are prevent me just simply reinstalling a new system form an ISO from that time. If it was that simple I don’t even asked for help.

My thougt was that somehow you guys can provide me an older versions of drivers and what other system component need from that time period, with a tutorial on how to do it.
The best and easiest would be if I can have all the required old packaes in .pkg.tar.zst and .pkg.tar.zst.sig form. And also a very detailed step-by-step tutorial for a guy who never done downgrading system; to make sure that it won’t broke. Like I mentined when I tried to do it on my own.
I could have the packages in the cacahe, if I should not had to remove them due to limited space.
Also I don’t even know what packages required (vga driver, kerner or what other) to turn the system back into that stage when it was worked.