Heroes of Might and Magic III

What works

After installing, when trying to run the unmodified Heroes3.exe I initially received the following error:

0024:err:seh:NtRaiseException Unhandled exception code c0000409 flags 1 addr 0x79c51f30

The game works, but requires a workaround (see details below).

What does not

Apparently GOG has modified their version of the Heroes3.exe executable to use their own xdd.dll instead of ddraw.dll, likely for better compatibility on Windows. However this change prevents the game from running with Wine.

There is some discussion of the issue (and the solution) here:
https://www.gog.com/forum/heroes_of_might_and_magic_series/if_you_cant_get_homm3_to_work_after_the_latest_update_on_linux_with_wine_read_this

Workarounds

Switch into the directory that contains Heroes3.exe and run the following command:

sed --in-place 's/xdd\.dll../ddraw.dll/' Heroes3.exe

This replaces "xdd.dll" with "ddraw.dll" in the Heroes3.exe file.

What was not tested

Map editor

Campaign editor

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

The workaround described above is required to make the version available on GOG at the time of this report be able to run.
setup_heroes_of_might_and_magic_3_complete_4.0_(3.2)_gog_0.1_(77075)

An alternative workaround command which achieves the same result is this following:
printf "DDRAW.dll" | dd of=Heroes3.exe bs=1 seek=2475928 conv=notrunc
However this may only work with the English version of the game, as other languages will have the required string at a different position in the binary.
For other localizations, the sed command above has been reported to work.

It may also be possible to rename the ddraw.dll file as xdd.dll, replacing the one provided by GOG. (I did not test this method.)
Some additional discussion is here:
https://www.gog.com/forum/heroes_of_might_and_magic_series/homm_iii_the_game_is_no_longer_smooth

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 The old howto had a link pointing to outdated directplay dlls which cause problems with wine and generally don't work as expected.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.