Fallout

What works

Everything. Also tried it with the resolution patch and that works fine, too.

What does not

n/a

Workarounds

What was not tested

Played through it twice and completed most of the available missions in the process, so most everything was tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Does occasionally lock up during game start-up, but infrequently. When that happens, CTRL-ALT-FnX to a new terminal and kill the process and reset your res and you're back to normal. Once into the game it's flawless. I installed the largest option from CD, then applied the semi-official 1.2 patch and unofficial 1.35 patch as available and recommended on NMA, as well as the NPC patch that improves control of NPCs and lets them level to stay useful longer. N.b. installing these patches required modifying the case of some filenames. I will find a place to host a superpatch to bring the game to this level and provide a link here. The only special concession it needed to install or run was to specify Win98 in wine config. Admin note: rating changed to conform to the rating definitions.

Installation Instructions

1. Use winecfg to set the Windows version to Windows 98 for the setup.exe program located on the Fallout CD.
2. Run the setup.exe program with Wine.
3. Fallout doesn't correctly detect disk sizes, this problem also occurs when you try to install Fallout while running Dosbox or Windows, select the small installation for now.
4. If you have version 1.0, download the 1.1 patch, and extract it to your Fallout directory, for example:
   $ tar xf fallout_patch_1.1.tar.gz -C ~/.wine/drive_c/Fallout/
5. Use winecfg to set the Windows version to Windows 98 for the Fallout executable, falloutw.exe.
6. Optional:
   If you don't want to insert the Fallout CD every time you want to play the game, you can copy the game files to your hard disk:
   $ cp -r /mnt/cdrom/master.dat /mnt/cdrom/critter.dat /mnt/cdrom/data ~/.wine/drive_c/fallout/
   Be sure to overwrite master.dat and critter.dat, Fallout generates smaller versions of these files when running as a cache.
   Edit fallout.cfg, and change the paths specified by the music_path1, critter_dat, and master_dat options from your CD-ROM to your harddisk, for example:
   master_dat=D:\master.dat should be changed to master_dat=C:\fallout\master.dat.

Notes / Possible Issues

The sound stutters, movies stutter, game is generally slow.

Setting the nice level for Fallout can seriously increase performance:
$ /usr/bin/nice -n 18 wine falloutw.exe
You may want to try fiddeling with the exact nice level.

The game crashes, even after the 1.1 patch!

Some patches have all the filenames uppercased, Fallout only seems to look for lowercased filenames, download the patch from above.

I can't save my game!

Again a problem with uppercase/lowercase filenames, try: mkdir data/savegame, you can remove the uppercased SAVEGAME if you want

The fade-in/fade-out takes ages!

Use winecfg, and set turn "graphics->emulate a virtual desktop" on.

The game won't run: segmention error.

ALSA is known to cause this, try Wine 1.0-rc1 or use OSS or Arts.

Mouse pointer is unusable

This known bug #6033, and appear on 24bpp desktop, for workaround use this command:
xinit `which wine` /home/path/to/fallout2.exe -- :1 -depth 16