This is the OLD Duels of the Planeswalkers, alias Microprose Magic the Gathering alias Shandalar.

This has nothing to do with the 2010 game of the same name "Duels of the Planeswalkers".

If you are fortunate enough to have the original CDs and patches, you do not need this.

However, if you have one of the distributions with the uha archive, you will need some additional handwork before being able to install the full game. Here is what to do:

under any circumstances, do not run the Setup.bat program: it won't work, and will delete your files.

Instead, rename the u.___ file to u.exe:

mv u.___ u.exe

then run the wineconsole program, as the uha extractor does not work in plain wine:

wineconsole cmd

and from the command prompt run the u.exe extractor:

u.exe x /b4096 data.uha

Then convert all ogg files to wav:

for NAME in `find . -name "*.ogg"`; do
wine o.exe ${NAME}
done

At this point register the .reg using regedit /s Magic.reg

If you want you can then remove the ogg files, the data.uha archive, the Magic.reg and the u.exe and o.exe programs.

You can then proceed to install Manalink 1.32 and then optionally the fan-made Manalink 2.0

To get the game to work after installation,

first of all you need to start winecfg, and set the following options:

• In the Graphics section, enable the virtual desktop, set it to 1024x768.
  Fullscreen without virtual desktop does not work, as the game puts the popup windows on the desktop, which makes them jump out of the game onto your actual X11 Desktop. Instead, by using the virtual desktop, popups will at least be in the correct place.
• In the Applications section, set the Windows version to Windows NT 4.0. (bypass "extra cool" timer problem).
  
• In the Libraries section, setup overrides for msvcrt.dll and msvcrtd.dll . Only the versions provided with the game in the game directory work.

Save and you are done with winecfg. Now copy the libraries (msvcrt.dll and msvcrtd.dll) to C:\windows\system32, replacing the fake wine placeholders (overwrite).
If you don't do this, the game will crash in Facemaker.exe, and you will get text corruption in some text fields in the game.

Now you need to get around the problem with disappearing popup windows.

That is not easy to fix properly, so what I have now is a workaround for wine that is meant for use only with this game. This workaround will force specific popups in the game to be put in the foreground (The cards in your hand and the opponent's hand, the Attack window, the SpellChain window, the Full card popup). This means that the important windows will not disappear as much.

Here is the patch:

http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=38373

Look at the bug references elsewhere in the page.

In specific cases, some of the windows will still fail to draw properly (for example when cancelling an effect, or when the area gets really messy with cards).

When that happens, just right click on your large playing area (your territory), and choose "Duel Options..", then click Ok. This will force a redraw that will fix things for you.

Even quicker, if you know that the opponent is just waiting for you to pass a phase, just press ENTER and you will go to the next phase.