Theme Hospital

What works

Everything seems to work okay.

What does not

After a while, the mouse starts becoming really sluggish.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

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.

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Installation

1. Run winecfg and set the "Windows Version" to "Windows 95". Don't worry, this isn't permanent.
2. There are two ways to run installer:
   
1. Run
   
   wine automenu.exe
   
   on the Theme Hospital CD-ROM. Click on Proceed and then Install. OR
2. Run
   
   wine "X:\SETUP.EXE"
   
   where X is the drive letter of your CD-ROM as listed in winecfg.
   
3. Once the installer finishes, you can change the "Windows Version" in winecfg back to whatever you want.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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".
6. 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
   
   
7. 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"

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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:

1. 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).
2. 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).
3. 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.
   

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.