Sunday, November 30, 2008

WINE makes my kids happy

Of course my kids have a Windows 2000 on their machine, used only as a "game bootloader". And of course this Windows has no internet connectivity, since I would not even know how to keep it somewhat secure.
But now my son came up with that new, apparently uber-cool game from nick.com called "Avatar - Legends of the Arena", and he really wanted me to make it work with his machine. Unfortunately this game is - of course - only available for Windows, and it needs an internet connection - something I was not willing to enable on the Windows installation.

The way out of the dilemma: WINE.
There were only minor problems, e.g. that the game would install, but then still could not connect to the game server, but a look at the console output showed

fixme:wininet:InternetSetOptionW Option 28 STUB
fixme:wininet:InternetSetOptionW Option 29 STUB


And with the help of Marcus Meissner (also here), we found out that all that was needed to get it going was that the original W2K wininet.dll had to be copied to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/ and then the game could be started with

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="wininet=n" wine AvatarMP.exe

Cool stuff, WINE developers!

Now the next thing to get going is the TomTom Software ;)

7 comments:

  1. You can use winecfg and create an entry for the AvatarMP.exe and specify the dll overrides there, thus beeing able to start it from the menu like all the other wine programs

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the info! I see this is now also in the wine bug tracking system as
    http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16266
    Until this bug is fixed, I have added a wininet verb
    to winetricks, so you can now work around this problem with
    wget http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks
    sh winetricks wininet
    which might be a bit easier than grabbing wininet yourself.
    (Winetricks downloads a fresh copy from microsoft.com.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. The bug is fixed in git. wine-1.1.10 should be able to play Avatar - Legends of the Arena without having to copy wininet.
    Thanks to Hans Leidekker for the fix.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes, Marcus already notified me of this, and I immedately followed up this post with a new one: http://seife.kernalert.de/blog/2008/12/03/wine-followup-open-source-software-rocks/ ;-)

    Thanks for your efforts Dan, this is really appreciated!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Did you have any luck getting the TomTom going..? I'm trying to update one using the TomTom software on WINE but it can't see the device..
    there is something about devices in general using tty-usb in order to be able to work with WINE but I don't have a TomTom with me to test.

    ReplyDelete
  6. No, but I did not try it anymore.
    BTW: the tomtom seems to be just a plain usb-storage device, but the software checks the product ID afaict.

    ReplyDelete