StarCraft Under Wine HOWTO

Since there apparently aren't any plans over at Blizzard to port StarCraft to Linux, here is our alternative method to obtain your StarCraft fix.

This document covers installing and running StarCraft under Linux with the aid of Wine. It also covers the known issues and problems with running

Index

• System Requirements
• Installation
• Playing
• Miscellaneous Notes
• Network (IPX) Play
• Wine Versions
• Lame Disclaimer

• Hardware - As far as we know, the hardware requirements are the same as those for running StarCraft on a Windows system:
  
  
  • Pentium 90 or better
  • 16 MB RAM
  • 80 MB free hard disk space
  • 2X CD-ROM drive (4X for cinematics)
  • SVGA card (capable of 640x480 with 256 colors (8bpp))
  • a mouse
  • a sound card


• Software
  
  
  • Linux (duh?)
  • X server correctly running at 640x480x8bit (this is a MUST)
  • Wine snapshot 980517 or newer (981108 recommended)
  • StarCraft CD
  • Kernel with Open Sound System driver for your sound card (if you want sound, that is)

If however you want to or have to install StarCraft on a Linux native partition the rest of this section is for you. You must have Wine installed to run the StarCraft installation and your wine.conf file must be correctly set up. The following is an example wine.conf file that worked with the StarCraft installation but it may not work on your system. You really should read the Wine documentation and learn how to set up your own configuration file.

[Drive A] 
Path=/floppy 
Type=floppy 
Label=FLOPPY 
Device=/dev/fd0 

[Drive D] 
Path=/cdrom 
Type=cdrom 
Label=STARCRAFT 

[Drive C] 
Path=/usr/local 
Type=hd 
Label=LINUX-LOCAL 

[wine] 
Windows=c:\WINDOWS 
System=c:\WINDOWS\system 
Temp=c:\temp 

[Tweak.Layout] 
WineLook=Win95 
  

After you've configured Wine, you need to make sure that the directory "Start Menu/Programs/Starcraft" exists in the Windows directory that you specified in your wine.conf file. make sure the case matches exactly or the installation will likely fail (ie: "start menu/programs/starcraft" probably wont' work)

Mount your StarCraft CD so it's visible to Linux and run the installation program (install.exe) from within the mount point of the StarCraft CD with Wine by using the command line: wine install.exe The installation program should work regardless of your current video mode (unless you want to see the Warcraft Adventures and Diablo II video clips), but the colors tend to be all wrong in 16bpp mode, and the graphic text buttons could not be seen in an 8bpp mode. If you can't make the texts appear in the initial screen, you can find the installation button by moving the mouse in the left half of the screen from top downwards and clicking left mouse button when you hear the first button sound, assuming that your sound is working. You'll by now if it is because you would have already heard a sound while the installation menu was.

Once you've clicked the Install button in the installation program, it will ask whether or not to install DirectX 5 - answer "no, but continue anyway." When it askes for the installation directory use something simple like c:\scraft or something else without spaces and capital letters. It will probably work with those characters, but why deal with all of the troubles involved? Continue with the rest of the installation using your gut instinct (the questions should be quite self-explanatory.)

If you've done everything correctly you should see installation status bars and you won't get any (important) errors. If it complains about not being able to create the StarCraft directory you don't have the "Start Menu/Programs" directory. If it freezes while trying to install the ScUnin.* files you didn't create the "Start Menu/Programs/StarCraft" correctly. If it complains that it can't create a Starcraft.lnk (or similar) file you can probably ignore it because you should have a working StarCraft installation by this point and you can terminate the installation program.

If you run in to an error saying "no program start menu found" immediately after you tried to run install.exe of the CD read the following, otherwise you can skip to the Playing section.

Rob Latham sent an email laying out the following fix for the "no program start menu found" problem. This text is taken directly from the email:

Solution: edit ${HOME}/.wine/user.reg and put the "Programs" key there
yourself. As I see it (please correct me if I'm wrong), the wine
versions of the registry are plain text files, with tabs to delimit the
tree hierarchy of the windows registry. I added a branch to the
"Software" trunk by adding these six lines (using actual tabs for "\t",
but you get the idea)

\tMicrosoft
\t\tWindows
\t\t\tCurrentVersion
\t\t\t\tExplorer
\t\t\t\t\tShell Folders
\t\t\t\t\t\tPrograms=1,1,C:\\WINDOWS\\Start Menu\\Programs

Why the "1,1," before the path? I don't know, but wine's registry
parser looks for two commas and then the path after the key name.

• Make sure the drive StarCraft is installed on is one listed in your ~/.winerc or global wine.conf
• Mount the StarCraft CD (make sure that the path matches the one in your wine.conf
• Killing your window manager at this point can help out with performance, and prevent wacky things from happening (like switching virtual desktops)
• Change to StarCraft's directory (the one you installed it to)
• make sure that you are logged in as root, and execute wine StarCraft.exe
• To automate the above you can use the following script sent by Brian King. Make sure you run it as root and use the actual CDROM device name, not the symlink, or it will always ask for the CD and the an alternative xf86 file. Execute this script in the directory where the StarCraft files reside, or change the script to do the enter key.

• While playing, it is extremely helpful if you can telnet in and with top watch the memory usage by Wine and the X server. Both can freak out suddenly without much notice. If you lose too much memory you can really wack out your video card (crashing X in this video mode this video mode isn't exactly pretty). When StarCraft seems to be slowing down and/or you're chewing up memory (believe me, both of these will happen), save and quit immediately, no matter how massive the computer's Zergling rush is.
• When you do quit StarCraft, MAKE SURE you kill off any stale wine processes. wine doesn't seem to clean up after itself all that well and often leaves stale processes around. Shutting down X while one (or more) of these processes is still alive makes machines grumpy. A common result is, upon shutting down X (or attempting to) it instead starts using up more and more memory until you have to kill -9 it, which is always a nasty way to end a process. Killing of the stale wine processes is usually as simple as executing killall wine
• You may want to look in to using jslaunch if you don't have a way to log into your machine to kill wine/X when your keyboard has been locked.

Apparently, Windows defaults to using IPX address 00000000, and Linux doesn't like that because 00000000 is an invalid network address(this has to do with things like routing, I believe). The way to fix it is to assign your Linux box a network address using the ipx tools(such as ipx_route) and then assigning the SAME network address to ANY other machines you would like to play with over the network. This includes Windows boxes. After I did that, everything worked great, and a friend and I played a network game which worked beautifully.

P.S. I wouldn't recommend trying to play a game unless you have assigned the same network address to all the machines. Usually, a Windows box can see the Linux game without having its network address modified, but every time I tried to get the Windows box to connect, StarCraft would crash hard, often taking the entire machine (Windows one, that is) down. Haven't tried this in a while, though. back to the top

Wine Version

• 981108: Works wonderfully, only problem is that sound stops working, but this happens only after several hours of play, at which time you probably want to take a break from playing anyway.
• 981211: Works, but sound stops working almost immediately, which is not nice.
• 990103: Didn't work at all, crashed before the loading screen came up
• 990110: Works, but suffers from the same problem as 981211 (sound stops working)
• 990131: Works, but sound stops working soon AND it crashes soon after that. On the positive side, this is the first version that works with MPQView, so I finally got to extract that game music for my listening pleasure.
• 990226: Seems to suffer from the same problem as 990131.
• 990314: Seems to suffer from the same problem as 990131, AND it seems to suck with other programs as well.
• 990328: Works as good as the 990314, ie. practically not at all (this is alarming, every version since 990131 doesn't work on my machine with StarCraft, what the hell am I doing wrong?).

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