Hearts of Iron II

What works

Installation works, but is very slow, because the game contains thousands of small bitmap files and Wine does some case-insensitivity checks for every file. This lasts hours. An installation workaround is described below.

Overall, I have not seen any glitches. Gameplay, graphics and sound are working great.

Workaround for slow installation:

1. Start the installer, but cancel it when it does progress only slowly (about 22%). At this time, all necessary registry information (needed for correctly applying the 1.3 patch) are already written.

2. Delete the directory of the broken install.

3. Go to the mounted CD and use the commandline tool "unshield" (at least in Ubuntu 8.04 repositories) to extract the contents of data1.cab. Enter, for example

unshield x data1.cab -d /path/to/a/fat32/partition/Doomsday

This can be an external USB drive, for example. If you do not have a case-insensitive fat32 partition, you will get problems when applying the 1.3 patch, because the patch often uses lowercase letters for filenames, while the original files are often uppercase. You would then have a mixture of old and new files and the game won't find important files.

Note that the actual game files reside in a subfolder, obviously named after the language of your environment. For me, the folder is called "german". All other folders can be safely deleted as they only contain files for the obsolete installer.

4. Get and install the 1.3 patch from Paradox. It will install to the directory where setup wanted to install everything.

5. Copy the content of the directory into the "german" (or whatever) folder. If you use a fat32 partition, you can safely overwrite all existing files with the new ones.

6. Now there's still a thing to do: In the subfolder gfx/interface are two folders:

 button_area and button area

(one with underscore and one with space) Copy the content of the folder with underscore to the folder with space.

Only this way the game will find ALL needed interface graphics.

7. Now everywhine should work fine.


Alternative: Install the game and the patch using real Windows and copy the program folder.

What does not

?

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

In general, everything seems to work fine, including installation. However, as I did not test multiplayer, I only give the game gold. If you don't want to wait SO long for the installer to finish, there's a workaround above. Note that this is not necessary, only conveniant for the impatient ;)