Star Wars: Empire at War

What works

Installation

What does not

Game

Workarounds

What was not tested

Game content

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The standard wine from the ubuntu repositories did not let me run EAW, However it will work (and I've reproduced this on different machines) and these are the steps I used to do it with thanks to everyone who has contributed some portion of these instructions.

You will be installing dependencies and recompiling wine - don't worry it's not to difficult and the game runs really well under linux now (at least ubuntu today)

Step 1 - Preparing wine

perform the following instructions, some of them will take a while to run so maybe have a drink ready eta roughly an hour - depending on how fast your machine is and the bandwidth you have. These are the commands - do them in order!!!

sudo apt-get install libglib1.2 libglib1.2-dev libltdl3 libltdl3-dev libmad0-dev libxcomposite-dev libxv-dev render-dev x11proto-composite-dev x11proto-video-dev

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-dev libxcomposite-dev gcc-4.2-multilib

ldconfig

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

 

Ok, if they all completed then you are good to go, if not try running

sudo apt-get update

and starting again. You are ready to move onto the next step.

Step 2 - compiling wine

First you have to get ubuntu ready to compile wine

sudo apt-get install flex


sudo apt-get install bison

installs the appropriate tools then extract your wine archive to an appropriate directory (or folder)

bunzip2 -c wine-0.9.??.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -

change to that directory and compile wine

cd wine-0.9.??


./tools/wineinstall

This will take some time so do as the instructions say - go rent a video or make a meal. Finally you will need to configure wine

winecfg

if this command dumps you back to the login then you have a problem with your X configuration, I've noticed this with nvidia cards, should be ok under ubuntu.

Step 3 - Prepare wine for EAW

Now prepare wine for EAW, add the following to the registry entries

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectX]

"InstalledVersion"="hex:00,00,00,09,00,00,00,00"

"Version"="4.09.00.0904"

You may also need to find a dxd9??.dll and put it in the .wine/drive_c/system32 folder but I can't see this as a necessary step for the install of wine I am examining YMMV. Get a DirectX upgrade while you still can and use cabextract to extract the required files - you may find a version on the game you are trying to install.

Step 4 - Install EAW

Perhaps the easiest part of all, load the EAW disk (I used the Best of PC version which is on a DVD and has the latest patches), if you need to install patches for an older version do it after the game is installed.

Oh, and install an Icon on you desktop, it will come in handy.

Goto gamecopyworld.com and thank the guys there for there work getting around a broken copy protection system, get the NOCD fix for the game and also a linux version of unrar to extract it.

For some reason the copy protection mechanism that Empire at war uses broken under linux. Perhaps the maintainers of wine will sort this out but I think that the copy protection is a broken idea in the first place - I don't mean you should pirate the game (I have a couple of copies) it's just until it is you will not be able to play over the internet games (yet to try out local network multiplayer games) using the NOCD patch, you could mention it to the people at Electronic Arts that you want to play games under linux (I did and they basically told me).

Unrar the files and copy them to this directory

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/LucasArts/Star Wars Empire at War/GameData

mv perceptionfunctiong.dll perceptionfunctiong.dll.000

cp /Your/path/to/PerceptionfunctionG.dll ./perceptionfunctiong.dll

and yes the case is important, then

cp sweaw.exe sweaw.exe.000

cp /Your/path/to/sweaw.exe sweaw.exe

You are ready to test it

wine sweaw.exe

Step 5 - Optional but goodness is here

Copy the following lines into a text file and make that text file an executable

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/LucasArts/Star\ Wars\ Empire\ at\ War/GameData/


wine sweaw.exe

I called it LaunchEAW

chmod +x LaunchEAW

 

then edit the icon and point it to the script. I've tried this on a couple of machines and it works well. Full graphics, full detail runs good

You may also want to put sliders on the top and bottom menu bars to get them out of the way otherwise the machine won't pass the scroll up/down events onto EAW (which is bad when you have to frag an Imperial star destroyer in a hurry).

Enjoy!

The standard install of wine from the fedora repositories do not seem to work for this game so you will need to build wine. These are the steps I used to do it with thanks to everyone who has contributed some portion of these instructions (borrowed from ubuntu). YMMV

This may not work for all video card YMMV, I was using a Nvidia 8600gt with the proprietary drivers, I'll give it a bash with an ATI card when I can. Fortunately one of the requirements for the proprietary nvidia drivers is also required for wine so if you have one of these cards and have configured X properly it should work good.

Step 1 - Preparing Fedora

Through the package manager install the X development environment and check you /var/log/Xlog.0.log to ensure the 3D drivers are working correctly. You will also need the development system to be installed. If you have not got xorg-x11-server-sdk-1.3.0.0.fc7.x86_64 installed (check your Package manager) you will need to install this AND re-install your nvidia drivers *BEFORE* you proceed.

Step 2 - Prepare wine

Pretty standard but here we go, extract your wine archive to an appropriate directory (or folder)

bunzip2 -c wine-0.9.??.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -

change to that directory and compile wine

cd wine-0.9.??



./tools/wineinstall

This will take some time so do as the instructions say - go rent a video or make a meal. Finally you will need to configure wine

winecfg

if this command dumps you back to the login then you have a problem with your X configuration, I've noticed this with nvidia cards especially under fedora. If you break your X config even once (ie the box doesn't boot to X for some reason) symbolic links will break, checksums on the nvidia drivers will change and you will get very annoyed trying to work out what is going on. Save your sanity go back to the nvidia drivers and do a sanity check - if it passes the problem is in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (run nvidia-xconfig). If the sanity check fails reinstall the drivers (which implies the kernel source). _{^{If you don't understand what I am talking about here you should be using Ubuntu, which while friendlier is not as gunty as the Fedora boxes (Personal experience - no need for a distro war here please).}}

Step 3 - Prepare wine for EAW

Now prepare wine for EAW, add the following to the registry entries

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DirectX]

"InstalledVersion"="hex:00,00,00,09,00,00,00,00"

"Version"="4.09.00.0904"

You may also need to find a dxd9??.dll and put it in the .wine/drive_c/system32 folder but I can't see this as a necessary step for the install of wine I am examining YMMV. Get a DirectX upgrade while you still can and use cabextract to extract the required files - you may find a version on the game you are trying to install.

Step 4 - Install EAW

Perhaps the easiest part of all, load the EAW disk (I used the Best of PC version which is on a DVD and has the latest patches), if you need to install patches for an older version do it after the game is installed.

Oh, and install an Icon on you desktop, it will come in handy.

Goto gamecopyworld.com and thank the guys there for there work getting around a broken copy protection system, get the NOCD fix for the game and also a linux version of unrar to extract it.

For some reason the copy protection mechanism that Empire at war uses broken under linux. Perhaps the maintainers of wine will sort this out but I think that the copy protection is a broken idea in the first place - I don't mean you should pirate the game (I have a couple of copies) it's just until it is you will not be able to play over the internet games (yet to try out local network multiplayer games) using the NOCD patch, you could mention it to the people at Electronic Arts that you want to play games under linux (I did and they basically told me).

Unrar the files and copy them to this directory

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/LucasArts/Star Wars Empire at War/GameData

mv perceptionfunctiong.dll perceptionfunctiong.dll.000

cp /Your/path/to/PerceptionfunctionG.dll ./perceptionfunctiong.dll

and yes the case is important, then

cp sweaw.exe sweaw.exe.000

cp /Your/path/to/sweaw.exe sweaw.exe

You are ready to test it

wine sweaw.exe

Step 5 - Optional but goodness is here

Copy the following lines into a text file and make that text file an executable

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/LucasArts/Star\ Wars\ Empire\ at\ War/GameData/





wine sweaw.exe

I called it LaunchEAW

chmod +x LaunchEAW

then edit the icon and point it to the script.

You may also want to put sliders on the top and bottom menu bars to get them out of the way otherwise the machine won't pass the scroll up/down events onto EAW (which is bad when you have to frag an Imperial star destroyer in a hurry).

Once you get this working under fedora you will not believe how good the game play is - I'm on 1280x1024 full detail and it runs very soothly :-)

Enjoy!