Wine on OS X: Playing Counter Strike

Question

Today, I was a bit bored so I decided to install Wine on my Mac. I am running Mac OS X Lion. Normally, when I wanted to play a Windows-only game, I would fire up Windows 7 through Boot Camp, but I wanted to try something different.

After quite some time of messing around, I finally managed to install everything that I needed to and run it. When I fired up the game, I noticed a few things: the gameplay is not very smooth and the mouse control is not very sensitive.

The second problem can be overcome by adjusting the mouse sensitivity, but this is odd because if I were to load the same game using Boot Camp, the mouse would be much more sensitive at the same sensitivity than it would be using Wine. Anyways, the first problem is a bit more concerning.

I am running a 1999 game on 2011 hardware, so I would imagine that performance shouldn't be an issue. I could play Counter Strike (1.6) on my Boot Camp partition without a single hiccup/slow down. However when I load the game up using Wine, the frame rate is slashed by half, and the performance is rather bad. I understand that Wine is not going to give native performance, but it performs at least 150% worse than it does using Windows. Is this normal?

Have any of you had a problem similar to this? If so, how (if you) did you solve it?

Thanks a ton in advance!

Answer

Wine itself isn't optimised for graphics applications and games. The issue is less about the hardware and more about software.

Certain interfaces to the graphics drivers may not have had as much attention paid to them as they have in Windows itself.

There's also the issue of the translation layer between DirectX APIs and OpenGL for rendering the graphics in an Mac OS environment, which could be a cause of latency.

There are other derivatives of Wine that have been optimised for games, namely:

• Transgaming's Cider
• Codeweaver's Crossover Games

In regards to Cider - it's not an end-user targeted product, so you won't be able to easily download and use it to play your games. Cider is used by developers and publishers to wrap their game as a stand alone app bundle that will run on a Mac. However, there are websites out there that spend time putting windows games into Cider wrappers. I'm not 100% sure on the legality of that practise, so I won't link to it (though, I believe you need to own the game yourself and all you download is the wrapper).

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Can I play LOTRO on Nvidia ION based netbook running 64bit linux?

Question

I have a ASUS Eee PC 1215N netbook, from the Seashell series. It has a Nvidia ION graphic processor. I'm running 64bit Ubuntu Linux (11.10 Oneiric Ocelot) on it.

I've tried to install LOTRO on it following the HOWTO on

But the game fails to run with one of:

• Game Error [105], "Could not initialize Direct3D. Please ensure that DirectX 9.0c [Dec 2005] or higher is installed."
• Game Error [129], "Hardware texture compression support was not detected. This video card feature is required to run the game."

The PyLotro wine output contains eiter

err:wgl:has_opengl Failed to load libGL: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory err:wgl:has_opengl OpenGL support is disabled.

err:d3d_caps:WineD3D_CreateFakeGLContext Can't find a suitable iPixelFormat.

err:d3d:InitAdapters Failed to get a gl context for default adapter

Direct3D9 is not available without OpenGL.

Or a repeating errors ending in

ERROR: ld.so: object 'libdlfaker.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

ERROR: ld.so: object 'librrfaker.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

Xlib: extension "NV-GLX" missing on display ":2". Xlib: extension "NV-GLX" missing on display ":2".

err:winediag:X11DRV_WineGL_InitOpenglInfo Direct rendering is disabled, most likely your OpenGL drivers haven't been installed correctly

Answer

Running software using the ION processor will require extra software. Windows 7 Nvidia supplies Optimus. On linux you'll there's a project called Bumblebee.

To recap the several sources on the web for 64bit Oneiric:

Install LOTRO roughly following the howto

sudo apt-get install wine winetricks
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine-lotro
winetricks vcrun2008
winetricks d3dx9
cd /wherever/you've/downloaded/the/game
wine LOTROSetup.exe

This will have craeted a wine environtment (sometime revered to as 'bottle') in .wine-lotro in your home directory and installed the game there, including some native windows dll's that the game needs.

To launch the game from wine you'll need the special launcher called PyLotro. Normally on Ubuntu you do

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ajackson-bcs/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pylotro

But there's no Oneiric version in the ppa yet. So just get the source version (not the 'Stand-alone Version' exe one).

To have it use the Nvidia processor, you install Bumblebee

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee

And since wine is 32-bit, and 64-bit Oneiric uses multiarch, you install the 32-bit version of some libraries like this

sudo apt-get install virtualgl-libs:i386

without it you'll see thos LD_PRELOAD errors.

To have the pylotro launcher use optirun to run wine, I made a tiny wrapper script like this

mkdir $HOME/bin
cat << EOF > $HOME/bin/optiwine
#! /bin/sh
optirun wine \$@
EOF
chmod +x $HOME/bin/optiwine

In pylotro /Tools/Options, tick the Advanced Options and set /home/{username}/bin/optiwine as the Wine Program. And ofcourse set the right WINEPREFIX et al.

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Diablo 2 & Wine Compatibility

Question

I was just wondering if anyone has any experience installing & running Diablo 2 on Linux (Ubuntu 10, latest Wine) using Wine? I tried to install the other day and encountered a problem, but I think that was due to my slightly decrepit cd-rom.

EDIT : The file that it failed on was "d2video.mpq" on the cinematics disc. :(

Answer

I downloaded the Diablo II installer from the Blizzard site and was able to install it under Wine 1.3.15 on Ubuntu 11.04 without issues. If you run into issues while using CDs, don't forget that you can add your game serial number to a Battle.net account and download it.

One annoying issue was holding ctrl would move the window instead of showing all dropped items. I believe you can change this from the winecfg options.

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How do you get your Steam games to run on Ubuntu through Wine or something similar?

Question

Ok, I was kind of surprised that this hadn't been asked here before, but maybe it's too technical for this site. You guys decide.

I've heard lots of different stories about setting up Wine on Ubuntu, WineTricks, PlayOnLinux etc., but never a 'This is the best way to do it for Steam and Steam games' thread.

So has anyone had any real success getting their Steam games to run on Ubuntu through Wine or something similar? If so, could we get some specific steps?

Answer

There is no best way to do it, as such. Both steam and wine are changing, and today's best method might break tomorrow*.

1. People have reported that Steam works with just standard Wine

   • Install Wine from the Software Centre (or click the shopping bag icon)

   • Right click the installer executable, go to Properties → Permissions and check Allow executing file as program, then right click it again and select Open with Wine Windows program loader.

2. If it turns out that doesn't work for you, you can try using PlayOnLinux

   Marco has detailed the instructions on how to get it working behind the link.

3. If it still doesn't work, you can give Crossover Games a go. Though it is number three on this list on purpose.

In general, it seems that Steam will work okay. You should try to run it using out-of-the-box Wine first. If you run into any trouble, feel free to ask a question under the wine tag at Ask Ubuntu.

_{*: note: If you get it to work, updates to Wine will most probably never break it. But it may well be the Steam people are fighting off Wine compatibility. It may also be they are actively trying to make their program run well under Wine (games publishers have been known to do that).}

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