Getting WoW working on OpenSuSE under Wine

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’ve been playing WoW. I’m not usually the gamer type, but my girlfriend pressured me into it a bit and, hey, if a woman’s idea of quality time is sitting in the same room in front of computers playing a MMORPG, who am I to complain? My non-work-hours productivity had suffered quite a bit, but I’m not yet at risk of becoming a full-on addict.

So, for a slight diversion from the usual content…

Of course, I’m not going to run Windows just to play a game, and the screen on my MacBook Pro is pitifully small compared to the 24” LCD on my desktop. So I’ve been running WoW through Wine on an admittedly out of date OpenSuSE 11.1 install on my workstation (a Dell Precision 470 - 2 Gb 400Mhz DDR ECC RAM, 16 Gb swap, dual 2.8GHz Xeons with HT, 16 KB L1 cache, 1 MB L2 cache, and a pitiful ATI Radeon 3600 HD, and everything in /home (including the game) on a 7200 RPM SATA disk).

With my recent need to upgrade to Burning Crusade, I hit a few bumps. I ended up wiping out my entire ~/.wine and starting from scratch with a fresh install, and having to apply all of the patches (luckily I backed everything up to another drive so I already had the patches downloaded). Of course, I backed up the data if import (Interface and WTF and WoW was the only thing I had installed through wine).

I went through a number of different attempted settings for wine, OS settings, etc. through the different patches (essentially try a patch, change settings until it worked, move on to the next). The biggest snag I hit was every few patches, X would lock up. No keyboard or mouse input, the caps lock, num lock, etc. keys wouldn’t respond, Ctrl+Alt+{Backspace|Delete} wouldn’t work, but I still had SSH access, so I could just kill the Wow.exe process and try again. Each time this happened was right after I accepted the second message (TOS or EULA, whichever comes second)… the last thing I’d see in the log is:

fixme:reg:GetNativeSystemInfo (0x374045c4) using GetSystemInfo()

and then it would lock up with Wow.exe using 400% CPU as per top (which does make some sense given dual CPUs with HT). Needless to say, I have 4 pages of notes detailing the process it took me to get to a working fully-patched install. I don’t know if different patches need different tweaks, and don’t really feel like transcribing the entire process. But here’s the final state of all the things I tweaked.

I’m running OpenSuSE 11.1, kernel 2.6.27.45-0.1-default (SMP x86_64), wine 1.3.1 (1.3.1-1.1 from the OpenSuSE Emulators:/Wine/openSUSE_11.1 repo) running under WindowMaker 0.92.0-204.6.

If you happen to find this post and give it a shot, please comment if it worked, or what you did differently. If it will be of help, drop me a line and I’ll transcribe and post my entire process.

First note that I start WoW via a bash script (~/bin/warcraft.sh) that sets up my switched mouse buttons in WindowMaker (yeah, I’m very left-handed) and also chmod -R‘s the whole .wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft 777, which seems to be required for WoW (and the perms get gronked after patches). The chmod is a good starting point for troubleshooting.

  1. winecfg under “Libraries” tab add overrides for msvcr80 and wldap32 as “(native, builtin)”
  2. winetricks vcrun2005sp1
  3. Run warcraft Installer through wine, auto-install Gecko when asked. When install finishes, begin patching.
  4. winetricks fakeie6
  5. add SET gxApi "opengl" to Config.wtf
  6. winetricks nt40
  7. wine regedit, create a key HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine -> Direct3D if it doesn’t exist, create string value “OffscreenRenderingMode” => “backbuffer”.
  8. winecfg, in Graphics tab, check off “Allow the window manager to decorate the windows” and “Allow the window manager to control the windows” (fixed my last hang at patch 3.3.5-12340)

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