King of Dragon Pass

What works

Can start new games. Sound works (but see below). Can save games.

Can restore saved game from launch menu.

What does not

Wine adds scrollbars on edges, and a menubar. In Compiz window manager, an "mTropolis Windows Player - mPlayer" titlebar is also displayed. The game's copy protection does not work on a loop-mounted ISO image -- it requires the CD-ROM to be physically present and configured in Wine.

Game crashes (page fault) if a saved game is loaded from mid-game.­

What was not tested

Long-term gameplay. (Sorry, playing through to the end-game is very challenging!)­

Additional Comments

Although ALSA correctly shares my sound card via the hardware mixer in other applications, it does not work in Wine. Needed to manually configure ALSA dmix through .asoundrc, then sound works fine.

Here's the .asoundrc file I'm using which allows Win­e to correctly produce sound on ALSA. ­This will, obviously, be different on your sound hardware. You may want to refer to the ALSA Wiki if you need information about this.­

pcm.AurealVortexau8830_0_asym{
    type asym
    playback.pcm AurealVortexau8830_0_dmix
    capture.pcm AurealVortexau8830_0_dsnoop
}

pcm.AurealVortexau8830_0_dmix {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1190
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 8192
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

pcm.AurealVortexau8830_0_dsnoop {
    type dsnoop
    ipc_key 1170
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 8192
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

pcm.AurealVortexau8830_0_surround {
    type plug
    route_policy S16_LE
    slave {
        pcm AurealVortexau8830_0
        channels 2
    }
}

pcm.AurealVortexau8830_0 {
    type plug
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"
    }
}

pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm AurealVortexau8830_0_asym
}

ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}

pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave {
        pcm AurealVortexau8830_0_asym
    }
}

winecfg isn't quite smart enough to configure an ISO image of a CD-ROM correctly. It attempts to use the block device the .iso is located on, instead of the .iso directly. However, wine can be coaxed accessing the virtual "hardware" directly, which should work with most forms of copy protection.

Check which drives are currently configured with wine:

$ cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
$ ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 lade lade 10 2010-05-28 22:36 c: -> ../drive_c
lrwxrwxrwx 1 lade lade 13 2010-06-05 17:34 d: -> /home/lade/kodp.iso
lrwxrwxrwx 1 lade lade  8 2010-06-05 17:34 d:: -> /dev/sda

Remove any old links you don't want.

$ rm "d:" "d::"

Mount your iso image.

$ mkdir /media/iso
$ mount -t iso9660 -o loop ~/kodp.iso /media/iso

Create a symlink for file-level access in Wine.

$ ln -s /media/iso "d:"

And here's the magic... create the symlink for device access by pointing directly to the iso image.

$ ln -s ~/kodp.iso "d::"

If you look at this drive in winecfg now, it should correctly detect the volume name and serial number of your CD image.

This should allow you to run King of Dragon Pass (or any other copy-protected application) on a netbook or other device without the original CD-ROM present.

Scaling using Xephyr and VNC
by Peter Berry on Monday September 29th 2014, 20:26


#!/bin/bash

# Run a program in an embedded X server and open a scaled VNC session on it.
# For example:
# scale playonlinux --run "King of Dragon Pass"
# You can change various options here, or pass them in as environment
# variables.

# Log files. If you want to actually record logs (e.g. for debugging purposes),
# replace them here.
if [ "x$XEPHYR_LOG" == "x" ]; then
XEPHYR_LOG=/dev/null
fi
if [ "x$CLIENT_LOG" == "x" ]; then
CLIENT_LOG=/dev/null
fi
if [ "x$X11VNC_LOG" == "x" ]; then
X11VNC_LOG=/dev/null
fi
if [ "x$SSVNCVIEWER_LOG" == "x" ]; then
SSVNCVIEWER_LOG=/dev/null
fi

# The client to run
if [ $# -le 1 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 [client]"
exit 1
fi

# Options.
if [ "x$REALRES" == "x" ]; then
# viewer adds scroll bars, so make it bigger than 640x480
REALRES=670x510
fi
if [ "x$SCALE" == "x" ]; then
SCALE=2
fi

echo "Running Xephyr. A window will appear - you can minimise it."
Xephyr -once -screen $REALRES -extension GLX :5 >> $XEPHYR_LOG 2>&1 &

echo "Running X client."
DISPLAY=:5 "$@" >> $CLIENT_LOG 2>&1 &

echo "Running VNC server."
x11vnc -localhost -scale $SCALE:nb -display :5 -o $X11VNC_LOG 2>&1 &

echo "Press enter to run VNC client."
read
ssvncviewer localhost >> $SSVNCVIEWER_LOG 2>&1