Retail release was Beta 4. The patch bumps it up to Beta 5.
At least, these are the version numbers reported by the patch :)
Old test results
The test results you have selected are very old and may not represent the current state of Wine.
Selected Test Results (selected in 'Test Results' table below)
What works
Everything seems to work okay.
What does not
After a while, the mouse starts becoming really sluggish.
What was not tested
Multiplayer.
Additional Comments
In winecfg, you must set "Emulate virtual desktop" otherwise you'll just see a black screen.
The only way I found to make it fullscreen was to change my desktop resolution to 640x480.
This HOWTO was written for Wine 0.9.56 (but is still accurate as of 1.1.17) and the retail version of Theme Hospital.
Installation
Run winecfg and set the "Windows Version" to "Windows 95". Don't worry, this isn't permanent.
There are two ways to run installer:
Run
wine automenu.exe
on the Theme Hospital CD-ROM. Click on Proceed and then Install. OR
Run
wine "X:\SETUP.EXE"
where X is the drive letter of your CD-ROM as listed in winecfg.
Once the installer finishes, you can change the "Windows Version" in winecfg back to whatever you want.
Download the patch. You should be able to download it from the link marked "Free download" on this page (scroll up). Yes, it does say Beta 5, but this is the latest released version.
Unzip the thpatch.zip file into the directory where you installed Theme Hospital. It should give you "patchinf.txt", which is the information about the patch (read at your leisure), and "instpat.exe".
instpat.exe is a self-extracting zip file, so don't try running it. Instead, unzip it with your favourite archive program. I used
unzip instpat.exe
You should now have HOSPPAT.EXE and DOS4GW.EXE. Wine may not be able to run HOSPPAT.EXE, since it is a DOS program. Instead, you can use a program like DOSBox to run it. Once the patch is completed, you should see a message: "Theme Hospital has successfully been upgraded to version Beta 5"
Execution (Running the game)
If you followed the installation instructions above, you should now be able to run Theme Hospital in Wine. For those of you using command-line, the program to run is called Hospital.exe. Here are some problems you may have:
If you get "Language setup failed" when you run the game, you should try changing to the directory where you installed the game before running it. If this still doesn't work, it might mean that either the install didn't complete correctly, or the patch failed. You may have to reinstall from step 1 above (I don't know of any other fixes).
Most soundcards do not support synthesisers with ALSA's OSS. compatibility layer As a consequence, if you want in-game music to work, you almost certainly will have to play Theme Hospital using Wine's ALSA driver (configurable in the Audio tab in winecfg).
Most soundcards do not have a MIDI synthesiser built-in. If you have such a soundcard, you may want to find out how to configure a software synthesiser such as Timidity++ or Fluidsynth as an ALSA sequencer. This is distro-specific, so cannot be covered here.
Mouse centres all the time
It seems like the mouse-centre issue only affects the game if you're
playing in Hi-Res mode. With a little patience (no, not patients),
while in the game, you can set the option in the Display menu to enable
"MCGA Lo-Res". It's ugly, but it works.
