The Operative: No One Lives Forever

What works

The entire single player game.

What does not

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: AMD
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

The game can no longer be purchased so the ISOs are available from My Abandonware  however the ISOs are in bin/cue format so you'll need to install bchunk to convert them to proper ISO formats.  

Installation: As expected, a clean $WINEPREFIX is recommend for installing this game. I found it easiest and fastest to mount both ISOs on some place like /mnt/disk and /mnt/disk2 thus when it's time to swap disks just tell the installer to use /mnt/disk2. Remember where you mounted the second ISO because if you don't want to use a nocd crack you'll need to mount that ISO in the same place you used during installation.

Next, you'll need to install directmusic for the game to launch (winetricks directmusic).  Once that's done, run up winecfg (with the correct $WINEPREFIX) and go to the Libraries tab and set "*dsound" to "bultin", otherwise the sound will have unpleasant echos and other sound problems. 

At this point the game is playable and worked perfectly for me.  Unless you use a nocd crack on this game, you'll need to mount the ISO every time you play.  I usually launch my games from a script so this is what I did:

export WINEPREFIX=""
cd $WINEPREFIX
cd "drive_c/Program Files/Fox/No One Lives Forever"
sudo mount -o loop /mnt/disk2
wine NOLF.exe
sudo umount /mnt/disk2

The game never crashed or behaved badly in any way and it ran perfectly on my Ryzen 2400g as well as as my i5-8259u NUC.  

• To get NOLF running on newer versions than Wine 1.5.1, run:

  winetricks dsound directmusic

  Afterwards, open up winecfg, go to the "Libraries" tab and set dsound to Builtin.
  You can also disable the music if you really want to play without it.


• If you are stuck on the loading screen, disable animated loading screens in the launcher, too.


• If the launcher fails to find your CD, start the game with lithtech.exe and all rez-files as parameters.

  ­$ wine lithtech.exe -rez rezfile1.rez -rez rezfile2.rez ...

  This script should w­ork with all version of NOLF:

  $ wine lithtech.exe $(for f in $(ls|grep -i rez$); do echo "-rez $f"; done)

• For widescreen, you can pass more options to the command line:

  ++screenwidth "1920" ++screenheight "1080" ++screendepth "32"

  However, this stretches the game. A better widescreen fix is available here, but you can't play online with it.


• To be able to play online, edit your /etc/hosts.