Earth 2150: The Moon Project

What works

- Installing and patching the game
- Playing the game in single- and multiplayer mode
- Sound effects and music

What does not

- Ingame cinematics of any kind
- OpenGL renderer(the Direct3D one is fast enough on almost all systems today)­­

Workarounds

What was not tested

- Extensive playing

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

You need to use some native dlls and add some entries in the registry. You must own a valid Microsoft Windows(XP SP2 if possible) license in order to legally use the native dlls. See HOWTO below.

Earth will install and run almost flawlessy without further tweaking, at least if you don't need any sound effects or music ;). If you use Wine 1.1.23-1.1.25, you'll have to set OffscreenRenderingMode to "backbuffer". The default,fbo, seems to be fine in Wine 1.1.26+. Since you won't be able to see any cinematics, you can install Earth without them. If you decide to install them, be sure to untick "Show Intros" in Earth' Setup.exe, or you will have to kill those intro processes everytime you start Earth. Set "Hardware Acceleration" to "Emulation" in winecfg in order to hear sounds. This does only work in Wine 1.1.26+. You'll have to use the OSS driver(maybe in conjunction with alsa-oss) if you use an older version.

Be sure that everything is set up correctly to hear sound effects. Just start the game and click on a button, you should hear that click sound. If you are _sure_ everything is set up correctly, and you still can't hear any sound effects, try to raise your sound volume in your operating system's mixer settings(no joke, the Earth sounds are quiete low). Get the files "quartz.dll" and "amstream.dll" from somewhere. Extract them from your CD, install Microsoft Windows in a virtual machine, whatever. I used the ones supplied by Microsoft Windows XP SP2, German version. The md5sums of mine are:

151cf6dab5a7bd01e18907462fb9e3e amstream.dll
3b7519b6a2f5a08929291caeb54ce927 quartz.dll

Copy them to your Earth installation directory and configure Wine to use native "quartz" and "amstream" in winecfg. As the last step, you have to add some registry entries in order to actually use native quartz.dll and amstream.dll. Close all running Wine processes, open $WINEPREFIX\system.reg and paste the following lines somewhere inside it:

[Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{4a2286e0-7bef-11ce-9bd9-0000e202599c}] 1245191940
@="MPEG Audio Decoder"
[Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{4a2286e0-7bef-11ce-9bd9-0000e202599c}\\InprocServer32] 1245191961
@="quartz.dll"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"
[Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{49c47ce0-9ba4-11d0-8212-00c04fc32c45}] 1245190309
@="SFilter Class"
[Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{49c47ce0-9ba4-11d0-8212-00c04fc32c45}\\InProcServer32] 1245190329
@="amstream.dll"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"
[Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{8496e040-af4c-11d0-8212-00c04fc32c45}] 1245190548
@="AuStream Class"
[Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{8496e040-af4c-11d0-8212-00c04fc32c45}\\InprocServer32] 1245190607
@="amstream.dll"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"
[Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{f2468580-af8a-11d0-8212-00c04fc32c45}] 1245190548
@="AuStream Class"
[Software\\Classes\\CLSID\\{f2468580-af8a-11d0-8212-00c04fc32c45}\\InprocServer32] 1245190607
@="amstream.dll"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"

As Earth uses DirectPlay, and Wine's DirectPlay support isn't that good, you need to use Microsoft's DirectPlay implementation. The easiest way to achieve that is to install DirectX9 using Winetricks. It will do all needed steps for you, so you just have to launch Earth and enjoy multiplayer mode ;).
If you can't get a connection between your machines(they can't see each other for example), be sure that your hostname resolves to the computer's IP in your network. See http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-0344b4325219c69636aeffeaa3596d6855283afd for details.