Wing Commander and Wine 5.0 (stable)

Wedge009

Rogue Leader
Hello folks.

I know a number of people have been playing WC via Wine for quite some time now - I've read some of those adventures in my research - but I'm hoping for some help/advice for replaying WC in 2020.

Background: I migrated to Linux as my primary OS with the end of general support for Windows 7 a couple of months ago. (I still have Win7 machines running, but obviously I'm not keeping my most important data or day-to-day operations on them any more.) I've since been going through some of my older games (pre-Internet authentication era) with Wine and decided it was time to replay Wing Commander.

Early games were easy: WC1, WC2, Academy, Privateer, Armada, and WC3 all worked fine on DOSbox (just needed to use loadfix for WC2). All of them were my original retail copies, not GOG releases.

For WC4, I wanted to go with the double-sided DVD version so I think that means Wine. After patching the 'VirtualProtect()' error the game itself worked fine but it kept complaining about missing movies. Even with the DXMCI patch and AC3Filter installed, I still couldn't get it working properly. As a work-around, I just watched the movies in VLC - not ideal, but I just wanted to get on with playing the game. (I also tried a GOG installation but same result.)

But now I'm stuck on Prophecy (I have the original non-Gold retail CD release). I couldn't get the set-up to work so I just copied all the files and manually added the Registry entries. Starting the game asks me to insert CD1 even though all necessary files (or so I believe - this includes wcpdisc1/2/3.iff) are already installed. Regardless, I tried installing the following enhancements:
  1. HCl's original Enhancement Pack.
  2. The MUP-augmented version of the OpenGL patch (the most recent one I could find, from 2019-08-26, rather than the - older? - one from WCpedia).
  3. The DVD movie upgrade.
After all that, I still have the same problem: 'Looking for CD 1. Please insert CD to continue.' (Oh, and Wine throws an exception upon quitting.) Is this simply the copy-protection at work? It's been a while since I played WCP on Windows but I thought I previously had it running from hard disk without needing the CDs...

I assume Secret Ops, being originally distributed via Internet, won't have this problem but I'd rather get through Prophecy first before revisiting SO and Standoff.
 
After writing all that, I just tried WCP on Win7 and it asks for CDs there too. So I assume this is part of copy-protection and can't be avoided. ~sigh~
 
So I used winecfg to make a pretend-CD with the necessary files. Now I have the same problem as for WC4 - game works but VOB movies don't (the original logos from the CD-based movies did). Oh well, I'll just have to work-around that too.

The Midway looks different from how I remember it, so I assume that's the MUP at work.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top