Heroes of Might and Magic III

What works

Game, graphics, sound work fine in a single-player campaign.

What does not

The game crashes from time to time. When I ask to "show details" of the crash, I can't see them (the window disappears).

Workarounds

I installed winetricks directplay as suggested here. If before the game crashed like once in half an hour, now it crashes like once in 1-2 hours. It's better, but not so good. Usually it crashes after battles (have to replay them again).

What was not tested

Multiplayer.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

I set Windows XP in winecfg.

Multiplayer
To get multiplayer working, you need native directplay dlls. The old howto had a link pointing to outdated directplay dlls which cause problems with wine and generally don't work as expected. However with the latest dplay from DirectX 9.0c multiplayer is (almost - see note for details) flawless.
In the wine wiki is described how to get native direct play dlls.
Personally I would recommend using winetricks directplay which installs dplay dlls and sets overwrite in winecfg, however you may choose do install manually those files in which case you need to:

1. Place the following dplayx.dll, dpnet.dll, dpnhpast.dll, dpwockx.dll, dplaysvr.exe in your .wine/drive_c/windows/system32
2. Set those files to overwrite (native, builtin) in winecfg

NOTES: The game always freezes when exiting a multiplayer game.
Sometimes when you host a TCP/IP game, no one is able to connect (any client trying receives an "IP address not found" error.) In this case just rehost and the problem will be gone.

 

You can now play Heroes 3 in HD, utilizing the full size of your screen, thanks to Heroes3HD mod. It doesn't change anything gameplay wise.

With recent Wine releases, Wine prefixes are set to Windows 7. Currently, it causes rendering issues when HD or HD+ mod are installed.

Running winecfg and setting the Windows version to Windows XP solves the rendering issues.