Theme Hospital

What works

• Installer

To run the installer you must set wine to Win95/98 and set up the cd drive.

• Single Player Game

You must change to the game's directory before you run it or you will get the "langu­age setup error". The game requires the cd, but only for files in hosp. Copy the contents of that to your install dir (no overwrite) and you should be able to set your hospital.cfg to point to your install dir instead of cd/hosp and run without the disk.

• Sound

What does not

• Patcher

The patcher is a dos program and must be run with dosbox.

• Music

Though this is apparently fixed in a wine patch, to be included in Wine 0.9.39 .

­

Workarounds

What was not tested

• Multiplayer Game

The multiplayer options are IPX, modem and serial. IPX doesn't seem to work but I can't test the others.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Bug 881 (X Mouse cursor not hidden) is still a problem, and can be quite confusing.

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.