Heroes of Might and Magic IV

What works

• Installation
• Starting (see »additional comments« section for details).
• Playing single playercampaign (no glitches found so far).

What does not

Nothing.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multi player

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

[First a note: don't install a crack, the game (v3.0) runs fine without! At least don't do it, if the following helps.] To get the game starting, I needed to disable the full screen mode (regedit > »HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\New World Computing\Heroes of Might and Magic IV« > »"full_screen"=dword:00000000«), then the game starts, otherwise it just crashes, see bug #15368. Setting DirectDrawRenderer to »opengl« allowed starting in full screen mode too, but gave me an empty screen with only sound. In the windowed mode HOMM4 is slow (at least in some menus), to get the performance back, just go to the options menu and activate full screen mode (again). The above was tested with an virtual desktop (1400x1120) and an in-game resolution of 1280x1024. To ease the starting (I forget to reset the full screen mode sometimes), write yourself a little script, which loads a registry file with the disabled full screen and then starts the game.

The game does not run correctly in Wine 0.9.37. Earlier and newer versions work fine

This game requires a crack to work.

Installing the patches is highly recommended, as they provide fixes for serious bugs in the game (not Wine related).

There are different patches for the different versions of the game

UK - various

Multiplayer
To get multiplayer working, place dpnsvr.exe and the DLLs in this archive in Wine's windows/system32 directory. Then, start winecfg and add dll overrides (native, builtin) for the following DLLs: dplayx, dpnet, dpnhpast and dpwsockx. Finally, update your registry by running 'wineprefixcreate'.