Civ3 and Linux

[MoonWolf]

Have anyone tried to run Civ3 on Linux through Wine or something? Want to know if it works at all and if anyone can tell me the perfomance (some games run worse with Wine other better....)

[Gramphos]

Problem with copy protection

[MoonWolf]

Will it help with a no-cd patch/crack? If it's a violation against Poly's rules to answer me please send me an PM or let me know... (I'm tired of windows, ready to try something else )

[Gramphos]

I don't know if a non cd patch would work. That is since the only legal way to get one isif your Windowsinstallation in combination with your hardware won't find the CD. And don't even think about asking where to find one illigal non-cd patch.

[MoonWolf]

Thanks anyway!

No worries! I know better than asking about that!

Hmmm, is it illegal here to post possible positive results in using a non-cd patch on Linux to make it work? Maybe others as well want to run Civ3 under Linux...

[Gramphos]

I'm not sure on the rules exactly what is allowed or not. Go and ask in the community forum.
It's the owner's call in the final turn.

[chimaera]

hope this isn't considered thread-hijacking, but anyhow:

i have all civ3s running here using winexcvs. winexcvs requires a way to get around copy protection, winex binaries should work out-of-the-box (can't verify for i don't have binaries).

for more information check http://www.transgaming.com/dogamesea...civilization+3

[EzInKy]

I use the winex3 binaries, works fairly well with vanilla and ptw. For Conquests I had to search for a "workaround" to get it to load though. Most important thing to have is patience, particularly on larger worlds.

Oh, since Gramphos posted that reminds me, any luck getting his multitool to work? I have to boot to windows to use it and the editor which is a real shame.

[Ari Rahikkala]

I got a Civ3 CD, noticed that the installer wouldn't work with Wine (gave an error message saying it couldn't find iKernel.exe). I got Unshield from http://synce.sourceforge.net/synce/unshield.php and extracted the .cab files (data1.cab, data1.hdr, data2.cab) into a new directory instead. Then I got a no-CD cracked Civilization3.exe. It worked, but not too well - that is, it was slow, crashy and most importantly, text rendering was screwed up - multiple lines of text were rendered on a single line. A non-cracked exe would just hang Wine in a poll() that, AFAICS, would never return.

I figured that updating the game might be of help, so I got http://www.firaxis.com/downloads/patch/Civ3v129f.exe . When I ran it with Wine, it appeared to be an InstallShield executable that unpacked some stuff - however, then Wine hung on a read() (that's on filehandle 7, but a grep for open.\*=\ 7 anywhere in the strace output yielded no results - anybody know what's up with this?). After some experimentation I found out that cabextract could fetch the contents of Civ3v129f.exe just fine (thank lord for the concept of self-extracting archives!). That yielded a couple of apparently InstallShield-related files and some cabinets. I unshielded them into the directory I'd originally put Civ3 in, and got an up-to-date no-CD cracked exe. Trying to execute that one with Wine just caused a "No Civilization III installation detected" window to appear. I think it's pretty likely that this problem is caused by the fact that I don't have the registry entries the game wants to see. If one of you guys would want to show the relevant piece of your user.reg/system.reg (I'm not too familiar with the Windows registry so I don't really know if a program like Civ3 would like to put its stuff inside \\User\\), I'd really appreciate it. I should be able to change all the paths and settings to work with my own installation if the keys' names are understandable enough.

P.s. yeah, I know, I've probably violated the DMCA and whatlawshaveyou in this post, so if someone sics a lawyer on you, just tell them something like: "You don't understand the jargon in this post, do you? Actually he was talking about flowers. Didn't you mean to ask about flowers?>"

[Ari Rahikkala]

Hm, cool. I called upon the forces of serendipity and happened upon http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=31257 . Quite an useful thread. So lessee now, xfontsel shows 6297 matches for -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*... time to finally start figuring out how XFree (well, Xorg in my case, actually) and/or Wine handle fonts. Of course, I'd still prefer to play the updated version, so my offer for giving my appreciation in return for Civ3's registry entries still stands.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Yayness. Read http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine...2/07/0206.html , touched LSANS.fot and it works. Still a bit slow, yeah, and of course that doesn't solve the problem that the updated version doesn't work, but... at least I can play Civ3 now!