Total Annihilation

What works

• Campaigns
• Skirmishes
• Intro movies
• Music and sound effects

What does not

Workarounds

What was not tested

• Multiplayer
• Map editor
• All of the campaign missions except for the first ARM mission
• All of the skirmish maps except Coast to Coast

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

On startup there is a dialog box warning that the installed version of DirectX may not function properly with Total Annihilation, however everything I tested works fine.

Introduction

What works?

- missions

- skirmish

- multiplayer

- core contingency expansion

- battle tactics expansion

- runs fluidly

- sound

- music

It says in 'bugs' that multiplayer doesn't work?

DirectPlay is not implemented natively within wine, but it works using the native directplay dlls.  There is a section about multiplayer configuration below.

Installation and configuration

Wine version:

If you're not sure which version of wine to use, use 1.1.27, otherwise you could try using the version of wine that comes with your distribution, and then, if that doesn't seem to work, you could try 1.1.27.

Wine basic configuration

- In winecfg, set "windows version" to "Windows 95"

Installation:

Install TA original from cd

- run winefile

- in winefile, click on the drive icon corresponding to your cd, for example it could be "D:"

- in winefile, double-click SETUP.EXE

    - at the end you will likely get an error "cannot open readme.txt"

         - you can ignore this error    (fixed in wine 1.1.27)

Install Core Contingency

     - the bad news is that you can't install core contingency using setup.exe, because it will complain that TA isn't installed yet  (fixed in 1.1.27)

    - you can install via the installer SETUP.EXE on the cd, or by simply copying the .CXX files from the DATA directory of the Core Contingency cd into the directory where you installed TA original to

    - it is recommended to just copy the files across, otherwise the 1.0-3.1c patch may not install correctly

Install Battle Tactics

    - Just copy the .CXX files and .UFO files across as from the cd into the directory where you installed ta to, since this ensures that the 1.0-3.1c patch will install correctly.

Install 1.0-3.1c patch

- this should be installed last

     - it will ask you for the location for where you installed TA original, so give it the location and this will work fine  ( correctly detects location automatically in 1.1.27 )

Wine configuration for single player play:

You may find that TA runs out of the box, if so: good!

If wine/ta complains that it can't find an appropriate resolution - perhaps you are running on a 800x480 screen - then you could try the following, in winecfg:

- In the 'Applications', create a new application setting for TotalA.exe

    - this is important, because otherwise winecfg itself will run in the virtual desktop you're going to create, and it is not always easy to use winecfg in a virtual desktop

- select the "TotalA.exe" application setting

- switch to the 'graphics' tab and:

    - select 'Allow DirectX apps to stop mouse leaving the window'

    - unselect 'Allow the window manager to decorate windows'

    - unselect 'Allow the window manager to control windows'

    - select 'Emulate a virtual desktop', and try putting the resolution of your screen, which, strangely, seems to work great!

Wine configuration for multiplayer

Follow the instructions at http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectPlayGames (integrated into winetricks)

Note that the dll over-rides need to be global to your wine prefix, otherwise dplaysvr.exe will use the wine directplay dlls instead, which won't work. (integrated into winetricks)

You need to install the Microsoft DirectPlay dlls, which you can do by doing the following:

- download winetricks from svn at http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/winetricks

- run "sh winetricks directplay"

You can find more details about DirectPlay on this page http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectPlayGames

You might consider running ta from a new wine prefix, to avoid possible interactions with other wine configurations/programs.  See 'wine prefixes' section below.

Running:

Insert the appropriate ta cd, then simply run:

wine /the/directory/where/you/installed/ta/TotalA.exe

Issues

If the keyboard doesn't work

You may have scim installed or similar.  If this is the cause, you may get the keyboard working by typing in front of wine "XMODIFIERS=''":

XMODIFIERS='' wine /my/ta/directory/TotalA.exe

Sound

 These instructions were tested with the sound set to 'alsa' in winecfg, and with pulseaudio entirely uninstalled from the machine.  I'm not recommending you uninstall pulseaudio, but if the sound doesn't work for you, then you might consider doing this.

If game won't start at all

- the game probably won't run without the 1.0-3.1c patch applied

- if your screen won't run at 640x480, you could try creating a virtual desktop, see 'Wine configuration for single player play' above

- note that these instructions were tested on wine 1.1.26 and wine 1.1.27, so if the game still won't run you might consider installing wine 1.1.27.

- if the game still won't run, please add a comment and / or bug report, providing as much information as possible on hardware, operating system, packages installed, screen hardware, console trace, and so on.

Other configuration

Virtual cds

You can mount .iso images of the cd, for example on a netbook which doesn't have a cd player, but you won't get any music.

One might think that a .iso image is an image of an entire cd, but actually, a .iso image of a TA cd is just an image of the data track of the cd.  The music is stored in the subsequent audio tracks.  The original TA cds are mixed-mode cds.

To get sound using a virtual cd, it is not sufficient to create and mount a .iso image: you need to get an image of the entire cd, for example, by creating a cue/bin image.

Once you have a cue/bin image, you can load it as a virtual cd from within linux using cdemu.  If you're not sure which version of cdemu to use, or if the one packaged with your distribution doesn't seem to work correctly, you might consider getting the 1.2.0/1.2.1 version - you may need to build from source - which works just fine.

You don't need to "mount" the virtual cd using "mount": it is enough to "cdemu load" the cd, and wine should automatically see the virtual cd.  You can check that the audio tracks are visible by opening RhythmBox or similar.  The first track should be about 28 minutes or so: it is the data track that contains TA itself.

If you're not sure whether to use --bus=system or --bus=session , --bus=session seems to work just fine.

Wine prefixes

You might consider creating a new wine prefix to keep everything neat.  By using a new prefix, you can keep your ta wine configuration separate from your other wine program configurations.  You don't have to; things will most likely work without doing this, but they might break more easily, or something might not work and you're not sure why.

To use a wine prefix, simply, whenever using wine or winecfg, instead of typing just "wine" or "winecfg", type:

WINEPREFIX=/home/user/wineta wine

WINEPREFIX=/home/user/wineta winecfg

This will create a new wine configuration directory at /home/user/wineta

You can delete the directory /home/user/wineta/drive_c/windows/gecko , if it exists, which takes up 30M of space, and is not needed.

FAQ

How well does it run?

It runs great!  Very fluid, even on an ancient netbook with a 600megahertz Celeron.