Heroes of Might and Magic III

What works

Everything

What does not

Workarounds

What was not tested

Any form of multiplayer.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

There is a problem with handling of music, which freezes the game on every multi-core system, even on Windows. This is nothing wrong with Wine, so the game deserves the platinum rating. To address the freezing issue, however, you have to do the following: 1. Install schedtool. This program binds the game to one CPU. 2. Replace the command in desktop launcher of the game with this: env WINEPREFIX="/home/marek/.wine" schedtool -a 0x1 -e wine C:\\windows\\command\\start.exe /Unix /home/marek/.wine/dosdevices/c:/users/Public/Pulpit/Heroes\ of\ Might\ and\ Magic\ III\ -\ ZÅ‚ota\ Edycja.lnk Pay attention to variables like username or localized name of .lnk file. It is best to compare it to the original line. 3. Switch the Windows version for this game to Windows 98. Only under those conditions will the game run stable. Enjoy!

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 The old howto had a link pointing to outdated directplay dlls which cause problems with wine and generally don't work as expected.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