Running SC4+RH in Linux under Wine

[AIX 270]

Okay I have spent the last several hours searching on various forums and Google...

I am trying to get Simcity 4 to run on my old laptop (would love to lay in bed while ruling my cities). I was able to get it to install and apply the update patches with success.

When I try to run the game, it crashes to desktop immediately. I don't even get the splash picture.

*Wine 1.3.28

*Linux Mint 12

The laptop is older, so I don't expect game performance to be stellar (I plan to only use it when I can't sit at my desktop), but still has enough power to at least run the game. I have a 1.6 Ghz processor and 2 GB of RAM. I am not certain of the graphics card. Could someone shed some light on this please?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I am running LM11 with wine 1.3.15. I have yet to have satisfactory results with LM12, probably due to some problem with my AMD/ATI driver, fglrx. Suggest you back out to LM11, as I am not convinced that LM12 is really viable on some machines.

LM12 has Ubuntu 11.10 as a base, and I have run the game successfully on it with wine 1.3.30. However, the desktop on 11.10 doesn't please me, and I switched to LM11. I have LM12 also loaded, but not working to my satisfaction as yet. I will test Ubuntu 12.04 after it has been released. I expect that Mint will upgrade shortly after that.

Also, the game will not start if you do not have accelerated sound.

[AIX 270]

In my Wine Config, I have sound set to full acceleration , 48000 sample rate, and 16 bit. Is there anywhere else I should look? I am not in an easy position to just swap out the entire OS back to 11.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Fine. I was running on LM12 today. I did set the wine system to use the virtual desktop. If you want to run full screen, set it to your screen size in pixels, and if you are running a 16:9 screen you will need the -CustomResolution:enabled and the -r:x,y,z option. Here is my command script that starts up the game:

#!/bin/bash

# for the new version of fglrx

date

env WINEPREFIX="/home/john/.wine" \

wine "C:/Program Files/Maxis/SimCity 4/Apps/SimCity 4.exe" \

-intro:off -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 &>~/sc4.log

date

The date calls are so I can see how long my session was, and the redirect to the log file is for reporting problems on the wine site. It records the wine console output which you will need if you report a problem. Please note that there is a space required before each hyphen in the completed command line.

Note that my command line is in three parts for easy editing. My screen is DVI.

With my fglrx driver, I have had the screen go nuts without the virtual desktop. I experienced a loss of sound fairly quickly, so I switched back to LM11, but this is a problem between wine and pulse coded sound. Copy this, make the relevant changes, and good luck. I run from this script in a console rather than the shortcut. Don't forget to make it executable.

If you create a directory named bin and put the file there: /home/<you>/bin/sc4 the next time you boot, the shell will include your private bin directory in your search rules, right at the front.

If you need more discussion, please post again.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Today I got an update for wine from the LM12 distribution. No improvement. So I took matters into my own hands.

If you go to the wine home page and click on download, you get a chance to load the latest beta, which I have used most of the time when I was on Ubuntu. Current version is 1.3.37 which is way beyond what you get from the LM distribution. You have to edit your software sources to make this happen. You will find that dpkg objects to this version because there is something wrong with the signature, but it is OK to override this.

Results: Runs in DVI hardware mode at 1920 x 1080 without the virtual desktop. I played for about three hours using my usual cautionary in-game saves but had not one CTD.

Tried this on LM11 too. Works fine over there as well.