About:

This repo hosts a simple winetricks verb that installs the Untapped.gg Companion app inside a wine prefix. It can be used for any game supported by the companion app operating through the Wine compatibility layer, but our purpose here was to enable it for Magic: The Gathering Arena running through Valve's flatpak-based runtime for Steam.

In this context, Steam runs the MTGA client via Proton, which is analogous to Flatpak for running sandboxed Wine prefix installations inside of Linux namespaces. We use the protontricks flatpak to install this custom verb inside of the MTGA prefix.

These instructions assume you've already got Steam installed via Flatpak and the MTGA client running via proton but the general process should be easy to extrapolate in the case you're running Steam directly on your Linux distribution (hint: you do everything the same without flatpak equivalents of commands).

NOTE: At this time, the overlay UI causes significant weirdness. We disable the overlay, and instead use pop-out windows were possible to workaround the issue.

Instructions:

1. Install protontricks and test.

# Install the flatpak
flatpak install --user flathub com.github.Matoking.protontricks

# List steam apps. 
# '--env' flag required here only if running game under Proton Experimental 
flatpak run --env=PROTON_VERSION="Proton Experimental" com.github.Matoking.protontricks -l

2. Clone this repo and install verb

flatpak run --env=PROTON_VERSION="Proton Experimental" --file-forwarding com.github.Matoking.protontricks -v 2141910 @@ untappedgg_companion.verb @@

3. Modify the MTGA client's Launch Options on Steam as described here and set to the following string replacing [username] with your own:

PROTON_REMOTE_DEBUG_CMD="/home/[username]/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2141910/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Programs/untapped-companion/Untapped.gg\ Companion.exe" %command%

That's it! When you next launch MTGA, the Untapped.gg Companion app should be launched also. When you first launch it, you'll login and disable the overlay (for now). Your game data will now be shipped to the Untapped.gg site and should be accessible for streaming through the Twitch extension.

Other Information:

C:\users\steamuser\AppData\Roaming\untapped-companion\config.log is the configuration file. We seed this file with Linux specific options that allow this client to run on the platform. This file is read by the application at startup and managed by the client when you make changes to your settings so we only seed it and ignore after that.

C:\users\steamuser\AppData\Local\Programs\untapped-companion contains the Untapped.gg Companion.exe binary.

C:\users\steamuser\AppData\Local\untapped-companion-updater\package.7z is automatically extracted by the client during installation.

C:\users\steamuser\AppData\Roaming\untapped-companion\log.log is the application's log file.

The root directory of all of these can be accessed via the host through ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2141910/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/

After logging in, the client installs a number of registry keys. Some interesting ones are:

• Software\\HearthSim\\Common
• Software\\Wine\\Credential Manager\\Generic: Untapped Companion

Discovery of the MTGA Player.log is done through the following minified logic in the companion source:

if("win32"===process.platform)
    return k.a.join(d.app.getPath("home"),"AppData/LocalLow/Wizards Of The Coast/MTGA/Player.log");
if("darwin"===process.platform)
    return k.a.join(d.app.getPath("home"),"/Library/Logs/Wizards Of The Coast/MTGA/Player.log");

The AppID will be 2141910 in the case of MTGA, but for other supported companion apps (e.g. Marvel Snap, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, etc...) you can gather it like this:

flatpak run --env=PROTON_VERSION="Proton Experimental" com.github.Matoking.protontricks -l | grep 'Magic: The Gathering Arena' | sed -n 's/.*(\([0-9]*\)).*/\1/p'

Finally, note that there may be yet misunderstood aspects of why the normal overlay doesn't work. Pop-out windows do work, and the behavior demonstrated by the client shows that it is having issues with some form of maintaining window focus, staying on top of the applications, or passing through mouse events correctly. There may be a combination of window registry settings, driver settings, or software stack tweaking to resolve this issue. For posterity, perhaps the following winetricks should be investigated:

• usetakefocus
• windowmanagerdecorated
• windowmanagermanaged
• vd
• videomemorysize
• etc..