Running Everquest under Linux with wine

[Nokio]

Hi all,

Ill try to share the best of what I know and what I did to make mine work.

I am running Fedora12 32 bits (if your using Ubuntu that should be no problem). If your using something else it will work too.

Making the game start and work!!

First of all we have to install wine. Yes we can install it from our prefered distro if we want, but i use the rpm available from http://www.winehq.org/. You can try the one using your distro or use the one for your distro available on that website. I believe it work better with the lastest version from the wine website. (Let me know otherwise!)
Use this command when you first install wine to create that .wine directly with everything it needs : winecfg
A windows will open just close it and your good.

I must say that I cheated the installation. I had it installed under windows so i made a copy of the installation over my wine directory. So i moved the whole Sony Folder into my home/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Sony

Once you have that Folder under wine on your Linux partition, we have to make some small modification.
First you will be installing ghex2 which is a Gnome Hex editor for files.
Fedora : sudo yum install ghex
Ubuntu : sudo apt-get install ghex

We need that tool to make a modification to a dll cause otherwise the game wont work correctly.
Get a copy of d3dx9_30.dll from our much loved internet.
From a command line use 'ghex2 d3dx9_30.dll'
A Windows will open and make those modification at offsets:
4c6f9, where there is a '83' replace it for '6a'
4c6fa, where there is a 'fe' replace it for '04'
4c6fb, where there is a '02' replace it for '5e'
Save the dll and your done with that.
Now move the dll to your Everquest working directory which is in our case the Sony/Everquest folder.

Under your Everquest folder there is a file named eqclient.ini. Edit that file and make sure those variable are like this :
VertexShaders=TRUE
TextureCache=FALSE
#optionnaly modify the resolution to fit your need
Save again that file


Your now ready to give the game a try
From the command line go into your Everquest folder and then start the game like this :
wine eqgames.exe patchme

If everything work you can make a small executable on your desktop to start the game corectly.


Troubleshooting

- Sounds, The only thing that does not work for me so far. But i don't care cause i always turn that off and listen to my own music

- Mouse, If your game start in Full window mode your mouse will probably be stuck in the middle of the screen. Try to Alt-Tab to fix it.

- Dual Core issue, start the game like this 'taskset -c 0 wine eqgame.exe patchme '

- See no character, If everything work but you don't see your character beside weapons, and it's the same for NPC, Mob etc. I believe it's related to your version of wine acting strangely with the dll. ( At Least from what i understood)



I know it's a long post and i hope it as simple as can be and i really hope it help those of you that wanted to give a try to this game under Linux.

P.S. Sorry for my not so good english i know i make a lot of mistake hehe!

[dokfeelg00d]

I tried this on Mint before but didnt copy from my windows installation. I will give this a try and see how it goes. Thank you for the guide!

[mrybczyn]

I've got a custom compiled wine, with the dll fix, but at server select I'm not seeing any servers...

[BurnMage]

I really think this should be stickied, linux users everywhere would be happy

[Nokio]

mrybczyn : Can you try it with a non-compiled wine version?

And when you launch everquest from a terminal do you get any ouput that might help you figure out the problem?

[Supreme]

I could tell you but why would i want even more SHOWEQ users on 1999?

[Zordana]

Superem: Dont even mention things like this :s

[drplump]

Originally Posted by Supreme [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I could tell you but why would i want even more SHOWEQ users on 1999?

Ohh how I long for the day when running a cheating program on the same computer as the game was impossible.

[Zordana]

Originally Posted by drplump [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Ohh how I long for the day when running a cheating program on the same computer as the game was impossible.

it never was

[Balme]

I'd love to get this running in wine on my laptop so I could play from other room, but regardless if I download that d3dx9_30.dll from that angelique site, or edit one myself I always end up just getting the character select list, but everything else is black then crashes.