Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

What works

Installed smoothly and plays well- until it doesn't, see below.

What does not

1. [minor] It will randomly stop when loading the
intro movies, but I can alt-tab out and back in to make it load
properly (exact details may vary). (I did the same thing on my
Windows laptop when the game would start but only having a black
screen.)

2. [moderate] It will randomly crash when almost done loading a new area, forcing me to manually kill the game by hitting
control-escape and pulling up task manager equivalent. Alt-tab fails
to work in this case. It’s happened about 5 times so far.

2B. This also leaves the screen at 720
pixels wide, which requires going into settings and resetting the
monitor resolution. Though I did get it to auto-fix by restarting
immediately and closing the game properly.

3. [minor] Once, in the underground on Taris there
were big “spider webs” all over, some graphics glitch. Then in
the sewers the walls all vanished- I could still walk around, but
they were invisible and I could see all the other things just
floating in space (hah). I fixed this each time by fiddling with the
settings, apparently changing them forces it to reload the
assets(???). I removed shadows and grass, and since I have had the
missing walls happen 2 or 3 times, but no other graphical errors.

Workarounds

What was not tested

I'm still on Taris, about 4 to 5 hours in, so most of the game hasn't been tested. 

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Please note that I'm basing my rating on what I feel to be technically correct: the risk of crashing on average once an hour counts as "issues for normal use" to me despite how much I enjoy the game itself.

by ­NSLW on (April 6th 2010)

Method #1

   1. Create empty file and name it SWKOTOR
   2. Fill it with following content

      #!/bin/sh
      X :3 -ac &
      sleep 2
      export WINEPREFIX=${HOME}/.wine
      export WINEDEBUG=-all
      export DISPLAY=:3
      cd "${HOME}/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/LucasArts/SWKotOR"
      wine swkotor.exe

   3. Allow executing that file as program by e.g. typing in terminal

chmod +x SWKOTOR

  4. Add yourself to audio group by e.g. setting it in system-config-users
  5. Start the game by SWKOTOR file
  6. After you quit the game press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace

Method #2 (NVIDIA only)

   1. Type in terminal

sudo nvidia-xconfig --no-dynamic-twinview

   2. Start the game as usual

by ­NSLW on (April 6th 2010)

It's possible to run this game in widescreen resolutions. For more informations visit www.widescreengamingforum.com

by ­NSLW on (April 6th 2010)

Option Enable Hardware mouse, in configurator, works only in fullscreen (Method #1), in other cases you should disable it.

by ­NSLW on (April 6th 2010)

To disable anoying system tray do following:
   1. Start Registry Editor by e.g. regedit
   2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Software->Wine
   3. Create X11 Driver if it isn't created already
   4. Create new String Value in X11 Driver key and name it ShowSystray
   5. Set false in Value data for ShowSystray

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic can be easily installed and patched by PlayOnLinux. You can download PlayOnLinux from here.­