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Tech tip #7: Using PlayOnLinux to run applications already installed by vanilla WINE.

On 26 August 2010 with 2 comments

RTS is an acronym for real-time strategy. It’s a game genre. There’s a classic RTS game known as StarCraft. Although only a casual gamer (say, might I recommend Machinarium?) I have played (and somewhat enjoyed) a few more "hardcore" games – like for instance, StarCraft. Although being pretty pathetic at it, I did enjoy it and appreciated the balanced strategy between the various "races" you could control in the game. With StarCraft II already out (hell, it’s about time!) I decided to revisit the original StarCraft: Brood War game to refresh my memory.

I downloaded the game from Battle.net, installed the latest version of WINE (1.3.0), ran the Blizzard downloader flawlessly, ran the installer flawlessly – and true to its Gold ranking on the WINE AppDB, ran the game flawle- no wait. It was laggy. Not particularly laggy. But it wasn’t as fast as it should’ve been, and too many critters on the screen would make it choke. I tried all the lag-fixes suggested on the AppDB submission to no effect. It was a sort of phantom, website-loadingish lag.

However one comment on the AppDB page said that using PlayOnLinux to install WINE 0.9.14 to run StarCraft fixed all lag issues. I decided to give it a shot. Turns out any version below 1.0 is no longer supported (as any sane developer would do) and no longer available in portage. PlayOnLinux was, however – and PlayOnLinux did still allow WINE 0.9.14 to be installed. Unfortunately it wasn’t particularly intuitive to tell PlayOnLinux to run my installed .exe file with WINE 0.9.14, so perhaps this blog post might help others in my situation. Using these steps I was able to install a prehistoric version WINE via PlayOnLinux, and tell it to run the already installed version of StarCraft on my computer:

1. Install PlayOnLinux, Tools -> Manage wine versions -> install v0.9.14. Should be straightforward.
2. mkdir /home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft && env WINEPREFIX=/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft wineboot
3. cp -r /home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/StarCraft /home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft/drive_c/Program\ Files/ (or mv it, doesn’t make a difference)
4. touch /home/username/.PlayOnLinux/configurations/installed/StarCraft
5. Place the following in the StarCraft file:

#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX="/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft"
export WINEDEBUG="-all"
cd "/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft/drive_c/Program Files/StarCraft"
wine "StarCraft.exe" $@

And that’s it! Run PlayOnLinux and you’ll be able to run the program from there. This guide should be able to work for other scenarios as well so feel free to adapt it.

Oh, and as for the lag? Yep – oddly enough it did get completely fixed. Regression time.

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