Playing in Linux / Wine

I found a link to the demo of this game and thought will give it a try. To my surprise - GSB runs VERY smoothly on my old laptop, on Wine, on Ubuntu Linux 9.10 ! This is also made possible by being DRM-free.
Well done ! :smiley:

As I wrote this Iā€™ve just bought the game. And I will recommend it to my friends looking for Linux games.
Itā€™s not perfect, of course. But itā€™s playable, and Iā€™m having a lot of fun. So there :slight_smile:

In this thread Iā€™d list the problems encountered, and if available, its solution :

(1) Black box shown when thereā€™s a cloaked enemy ship
Solution: http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=4468&p=26994&hilit=wine#p27058

(2) Wine Error : no sound : (error message: GUI_Sounds.cpp 635)

There are 2 ways to solve this problem:

Install special version of Wine on Ubuntu:

http://dalenscomputerblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-to-install-winepulse-for-ubuntu.html, or :

Set Wine output to OSS - then forward it to PulseAudio:

Run winecfg (or, Start - Wine - Configure Wine)

Click on ā€œAudioā€ tab

Choose OSS. Donā€™t forget to click ā€œTest Soundā€ button

Now, run GSB with the OSS wrapper program, padsp. Usually the command will be something like this :

(all in one line)

btw - Thanks Cliff for the fabulous game. Long live indie developers ! :smiley:

Cheers, HS

Thanks, its cool to know it works under linux.

Doesnā€™t work at all under wine on my Ubuntu Linux 10.4 system, neither the demo nor the full version. (I bought the full version because I have access to a Windows machine as well, but Iā€™d really like it to work on Linux.) The outline of the game window flashes briefly and thatā€™s it.

Wine version: 1.1.42

GSB version: 1.38

Contents of debug.txt:
----DEBUG FILE----
Windows XP detected
GSB Debug File. App version Full 1.38
Desktop resolution is 1600 x 900
Initialising Direct3D

Contents of drawdebug.txt:
Initialising 3D Engine
Driver : ati2dvag.dll
Description : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600
DeviceName : \.\DISPLAY1
Checking For Shader Support
NumSimultaneousRTs:4
hal_caps.PixelShaderVersion < D3DPS_VERSION(2, 0)
About to Create 3D Device with width: 0 and height : 0
Attempting hardware Vertex Processing

Output from wine:
swolchok@starman:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Gratuitous Space Battles$ wine GSB.exe
fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32db10,0x00000000), stub!
err:x11settings:X11DRV_ChangeDisplaySettingsEx No matching mode found 0x0x32 @0! (XRandR)
err:d3d9:device_parent_CreateSwapChain (0x1697dc) CreateAdditionalSwapChain failed, returning 0x8876086a
wine: Unhandled exception 0xc000000d at address 0x50dc1e (thread 0009), starting debuggerā€¦

Observed behavior:
A wine error dialog pops up, stating ā€œThe program GSB.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.ā€ Nothing useful there, but that exception code is ā€œinvalid parameterā€.

I tried to get some more information about the crash using winedbg, but I donā€™t see the unhandled exception in the debugger. Not sure why, but itā€™s apparently not unheard-of with wine. (is there perhaps some anti-debugging going on?) One item of note is that my computer has a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650, not a 2600 as drawdebug.txt seems to think. Another is that it also doesnā€™t work in Windows XP under VirtualBox on the same machine, but I suspect that thatā€™s unrelated.

Hi, just something that you can quickly try ā€“ install Wine 1.2 instead :

sudo apt-get install wine1.2

Cheers,
Harry

The lines above are pretty interesting too - basically, I think, GSB is going to run with 1600x900 resolution; but somehow Wine is trying to create a screen with 0x0 resolution.

Possible fix: you can force set the resolution for GSB / any apps in winecfg :

winecfg

Another possible solution: fake desktop :

http://www.thenerdshow.com/index820a.html?page=wine
(search for ā€œwine desktopā€ on that page)

Another possible solution : Hardware acceleration is not yet setup properly in your computer (which may explain the wrongly detected 3D card) :

Hope it helps.

Cheers,
Harry

Sorry for the necromancing.

Now with the latest wine (1.3), GSB works out of the box.
On Ubuntu 10.04 - add this repository: winehq.org/download/deb
Then;

winecfg wine <GBS installer>

For Crossover Games (9.0.x) users, itā€™s quite simple:
Double click the GBS installer.

Note that wine/crossover Games works best with Nvidia close source driver. The ATI and intel open source driver is more or less out of the question.

Excellent info, Thalic !
Just a bit more info - I have Intel 3D card + its Linux driver, and GSB plays alright.

Thanks a bunch for sharing it with us :slight_smile:

Cheers, HS

Thatā€™s good news. One less thing for me to have to switch back to Windows to use. Now I just need to find out if it works with Ubuntu 10.10. I might have a chance to do this in the coming weeks, but I doubt it. Anyone out there running 10.10 yet that can try it out?

I like CodeWeaverā€™s Crossover Games for running it. Works well, although i did get a few odd errors i canā€™t remember

It works as good as in 10.04

If you run into problems you can contact me here: ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=19

I have tested ā€œGSB Conquestā€ with the latest version of Crossover Games (9.2.0) on Ubuntu 10.10 (64 bit) - Works perfectly!

Just make sure you use the latest version of GSB 1.50.

Tested with GSB Collection + nomads extention + Conquest v1.53 still working 100%

Iā€™m running GSB on a stock wine from Ubuntu 10.10 (i386). It works, with three problems:

  • Cloaking ships produce nasty graphical artifacts. (Workaround: edit the module file so cloaking modules run out immediately.)

  • Sound dies from time to time. Donā€™t know why, but this seems to be a Wine problem, not GSB-specific.

  • The game sometimes dies while trying to carry out a network operation. In particular, when I renew my list of challenges, the game freezes (in fact the process becomes ā€œdefunctā€). Upon killing and restarting the game, all the challenges have been successfully downloaded. More annoyingly, the conquest expansion will sometimes (thankfully not always) die at the beginning or end of a battle, forcing me to kill the game and restart the game. This is cheat-y in a statistical sense, since Iā€™m more likely to have to retry turns where Iā€™m randomly attacked. In spite of this the challenge mode is playable.

This last problem is kind of nasty, since I donā€™t think itā€™s possible to trigger it with the demo. Iā€™m still happy I bought both the base game and the conquest expansion in spite of the problems.

Just reporting back that the latest version of GSB 1.57/1.58 plus all the expansions still works with latest stable version of wine (1.3) and with crossover games 10.1.

I am a long time Linux user at my work and I use WinXP to play games. Now i moved to wine. Satisfied!