My journey into daily driving Linux is going rather well. Decided I’m gonna give myself a bit of a small challenge (or not, this might be easy).

I want to get a couple old games to work. I’ve had to do some tinkering or installed unofficial patches on these games probably since the Vista days. So I know they require some work to run on modern systems. But can’t find info on how to do it on Linux. I don’t want to do a «throw shit at the wall and see what sticks» and end up breaking something in my OS. I’m on Nobara KDE.

Installed in the EA App through Lutris:

  • C&C Red Alert 2 and Tiberian sun (Black menus, game runs otherwise)
  • Medal of Honor Allied Assault (Crash on startup)

Anyone wanna teach a Linux noob some tips and tricks to make this work? Or a way to install these .exe patch files and go the «windows» route? (Can this be done safely through Wine?)

  • rowinxavier@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    8 days ago

    Yes, this can be done through WINE.

    Depending on your method of install for WINE you will use different specific buttons and so on, but the idea is the same. Take the patch .exe file and run it inside the same WINE prefix as the game is installed in. This can usually be done by opening Lutris and selecting the game, then clicking not in Run but on the WINE icon near it. That allows you to select the .exe file and run it in the same WINE prefix as your existing game install. From there the patch should be able to find the game at C:\Path\to\game and make the required changes.

    Hope that works out for you

    • Parptarf@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      This worked for TibSun. Thanks!

      Got the cncnet patch installed. Now to check if the patch actually fix the black menu issue.

      Edit: Didn’t fix the issue for that game. But I now know how to uninstall patches using .exe files!

      • rowinxavier@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 days ago

        Nice, good to hear it worked out mostly. As for the black menu issue, consider looking at using various different libraries. For example, some games need the actual Windows .DLL files depending in exactly how they use them. The substitutes in WINE are just that, substitutes, so they have very slightly different behaviour in some cases. For GUI libraries if you get something wrong it is easy to have problems like a black menu box from something loading out of order, returning too fast or slow, or just being formatted differently. The native libraries can be used and that can sometimes solve the issue.

        • Parptarf@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          7 days ago

          I’ll look into this too. I’ve had this issue with TibSun for years but the unofficial patch from cncnet usually fixed it.

          A lot of the stuff I come across in Linux makes more sense than in Windows honestly. It’s just completely different and that makes it hard when you’re used to messing with .exe files, .dll files and regedits.