Please help me with getting Zeela’s P99 Middlemand set up on my Steam Deck
 

Hello friends,

I am seriously tech/coding illiterate and could use some help. I was able to get p99 working on my steam deck through some miracle a few years ago. Overall it has been ok, barring some general jankiness. Recenty, however, I’ve often been dealing with the issue of blank server select screens when logging in. I’ve read that this tool can help with that, but I have no idea how to set it up. Is there anyone willing to walk me through it like I’m a five year old?

Is there a way to delete your own forum posts? lol

Go to https://github.com/Zaela/p99-login-middlemand and click the green "<> Code" button, then click download zip.

The zip file will be downloaded to your computer, probably in your Downloads folder (unless you changed it). Go to that folder (the easiest way is to right click the download in the download list in chrome, then pick "open containing folder" or something similar), then right-click the zip file and extract it.

(You may want to move the extracted folder somewhere besides downloads, but it doesn't really matter.)

Open the terminal program (I don't have my steam deck in Linux mode ATM, but this should involve clicking the "Start menu" and finding Terminal, or something similar like "Console"). Inside that terminal, use the "cd" command to change your directory where you extracted the files. For instance, if you didn't move them out of downloads, the command would be something like "cd ~/Downloads/p99-login-middlemand" (and if you moved it somewhere else, use that directory instead).

Now, you're in the folder at the command line, so you're ready to actually "install" (really "build") the program. To do this, simply run the command "make" at the command line. If you get any errors, you probably just need to install some package; google the error and you'll find a "sudo apt-get install *someLinuxHeadersPackageOrSomething*" command to fix it. Run that command, then try "make" again.

Now your software is "installed" (built), so you can run (at the command line, from the same directory) the command "./bin/p99-login-middlemand" to start the program.

After that, all you have to do is edit your eqhost.txt file (in your EverQuest directory) as described on https://github.com/Zaela/p99-login-m...readme-ov-file (change your's to look like that). Everquest should now work, without that annoying missing server issue.

Note that you will have to restart middlemand every time you restart your computer (or close that terminal). The steps will be simpler though: you just have to start the terminal, "cd whatever/directory", and then run "./bin/p99-login-middlemand".

Heh, started writing that before you posted ... but oh well, maybe it will help someone.

No, I very much appreciate the help. I just realized I’d already attempted to fix it using this https://github.com/rtrajano/p99_login_helper and it doesn’t help. It’s odd because it had been working fine until recently. Maybe some update changed something. When I’m on my home WiFi I can get it to work by disconnecting from wifi, waiting a bit, then reconnecting, and right as it connects I hit “login” and that will often work and the server list populates. I can’t get the same trick to work on this starlink connection I’m on now.

I’ll go ahead and give the middlemand a shot with your instructions. Can’t hurt to try.

The backstory here is that P99 has had some crazy players over its history, and at one point one decided to "DDOS" the P99 servers. As a result, Rogean has had to introduce some networking wizardry to prevent such attacks, and that wizardry can sometimes interfere with regular users.

I'm on Starlink as well - my windows systems populate the serverlist fine, but my steamdeck 1.0 takes a few runs of eq for it to populate and is then fine for the rest of my session.

-Mcoy

Hey man I bit the bullet and followed your instructions. There were some errors involving the make command but by blindly following ChatGPT I was able to get it sorted out. After a couple hours of struggle I logged on to a server select screen with just the three p99 servers just sitting there. I couldn’t believe it! Thanks for taking the time to help!

:D