URU: Ages Beyond Myst

What works

Everything that is still supported (that is, the whole single player game) worked.

What does not

I experienced two crashes (I have no idea how the Windows counterpart fares) during play.

Just restarting the game and "trying again" worked.

Workarounds

In order to make the Uru CD game (from a magazine issue dated January 2005) work, I had to take several steps.

Being a trial-and-error process, I am not sure all the steps are necessary.

I elected to run the program in its own area (WINEPREFIX).

I had to install wine-vanilla, as my first tests with wine-staging failed; however, I haven't tried the finally working recipe with wine-staging.

The program wine-vanilla and all its dependencies were compiled for 32 bit, i.e. I did not use the WoW64 feature (which, by the way: wow!!).

I had to enable explicitly the 32-bit option for my video board drivers (the proprietary nvidia-drivers), because Gentoo would not enforce that.
Before that, Uru was claiming there was no DirectX 8 available.
Also, I could not get away with an image of the CD and I had to use the original one.

1. Initialised the prefix:

   export WINEARCH='win32'
   export WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/games/Uru/game"
   wine-vanilla wineboot

2. Installed corefonts using winetricks, as suggested by a previous AppDB report:

   winetricks dlls corefonts

3. Mounted the CD to ${HOME}/games/Uru/cd, then configure it; I went UDisk2:

   udisksctl mount -b /dev/cdrom
   ln -s "/run/media/${USER}/URU" "${HOME}/games/Uru/cd"
   

   (Gentoo Udisk2 mounts in /run/media/${USER}).
4. Configured the area with wineconfig-vanilla:
   • page Applications:
     • Windows Version set to Windows XP
   • page Drives: after enabling Show Advanced,
     1. Add... D:
     2. set Path to where I mounted the CD (${HOME}/games/Uru/cd)
     3. set Type to CD-ROM
5. Ran the installation: wine-vanilla "${HOME}/games/Uru/cd/Setup.exe"
   • after choosing the language, one installer window sometimes appears blank; moving the mouse around may trigger the refresh of the language dropbox and the "OK" button in the bottom center of it; I pressed OK or just hit on the keyboard
   • then I picked my options (in my case, C:\Games\Uru as installation directories, and no icon created anywhere)
   • finally, another potentially blank dialogue pops out, and I moved the mouse looking for the button declining to register Uru live — again.
   • ... done.
6. I ran the game with wine-vanilla 'C:\Games\Uru\Uru.exe' (each time making sure that the CD is mounted, or else I rerun step 3)
7. For Graphics options, I got away with the highest supported resolution (1280�1024) in window mode and 32-bit.

What was not tested

Nothing I am aware of.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Once the installation is successfully completed, the game is at Platinum level.