Halo: Combat Evolved

What works

The game may be installed normally from the CD (or mounting the ISO file). However, one must install mfc42 (through Winetricks or otherwise). The game can be updated successfully, with Haloupdate.exe. The game can be launched and played normally, given that the "-window" parameter is used.

Team chat now does work perfectly.

What does not

Note the following things never worked in any version of Wine:

• The shader effect that creates the water-like glow around Chief's/Elites' shields

Note: all of these following things worked in the Wine 1.1 branch, they are all regressions of Wine 1.2:

• Fullscreen gaming (Halo reports that Direct3D couldn't be initialised)
• Changing the resolution (the "menu" for that is now empty)
• Changing the refresh rate (makes the window infinitely tiny and crashes Halo)
• The introductory (bink format) videos of MS Games/Bungie/Gearbox (black screen)
• The third part of the "-vidmode" parameter, which overrides frame rate. Nothing changes; it's still locked at 30.

An interesting bug that's again only present in Wine 1.2 is that if the window is unfocussed, the last second of sound continues to loop rather than stops.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Nothing.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Minor regression with Wine 1.2 only: upon each launch, sound doesn't work. Sound works after changing the sound quality setting in audio settings (doesn't matter to what, just change it).

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