Halo: Combat Evolved

What works

Menus work for a while. Most special effects. Connecting to internet servers as well as scrolling the server list. First half of the first level. The flashlight! Sound are working really well (most of the time).

What does not

The graphics take a turn for the worse half way through the first level. The bottom 3/4ths of the screen turns black when looking at certain things. When shadows are on, everything is black. Text gets messed up at random times. Zooming turns most of the screen black. Some specular effects are weird (the shield activator in the beginning is always on). Online, the entire screen is black. Sounds stutter when lots of things are happening.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Due to the screwy graphics, the rest of the game has not been tested. Fullscreen was not tested. A few weapons.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I would have rated this gold, but the graphics make at least part of the game unplayable, and that is the entire reason behind video games. I had to use a no cd crack for the updated 1.07 release. This is getting really close, as it was fully playable for the first ten minutes. Was going really fast too. My card is an ATI x700 Pro using the fglrx driver. I get over 5000 in glxgears and I was running halo on full quality and full speed on 800x600. The ati/radeon driver does not work, by the way. I'm betting this will be solved within the next couple of DX9 fix releases, so keep your eyes on halo. I'll post some pictures that will show the current bugs.

1. Install mfc42 - for example, with winetricks:

   winetricks mfc42

2. Insert the CD, or mount the ISO:

   mount -oloop Halo.iso /cdrom

3. Launch the setup:

   ./Setup.Exe

4. Run the updater to patch Halo, which now includes no-cd:

   ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Games/Halo/haloupdate.exe

5. Run the game. The working directory must be the Halo directory.

   cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Games/Halo
   ./halo.exe

Installing 'halotrialsetup.exe' into a clean wineprefix should work fine with wine-1.3.37.

To run the game, the working directory must be the Halo Trial directory, e.g.

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Games/Halo\ Trial/
wine halo.exe

2015-10-06 Admin note: the following issue has been patched in version 1.0.10 of Halo Custom Edition and Halo Combat Evolved.

2014-11-08 Admin note:  the following was extracted from a user comment made on 2013-10-30 and may or may not be relevant to current Wine.

THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO CURRENT VERSION OF HALO CE/PC

Wine is, like Windows, affected by a bug where Halo doesn't render shaders as well on Nvidia hardware. The most visible symptom is that the active camouflage is only using transparency instead of the proper way where it is using a pretty neat shader.
The Windows fix is based on making Halo believe it is running on an ATI card, which is not so complicated within Wine. Loosely based on the Windows fix, enter these into the registry:
As DWORD: "HKCU\Software\Wine\Direct3D\VideoPciDeviceID" = "724b"
As DWORD: "HKCU\Software\Wine\Direct3D\VideoPciVendorID" = "1002"
If your Halo is in a more vast prefix, it is recommended to specify it exclusively for the halo.exe as this fix may have the potential to burn your house down.
This picture will display the basic improvement: i.imgur.com/Rq93SgZ.jpg

Use argument -windowed to play correctly

Example: wine halo.exe -windowed