Battlezone 1

Hi, is it possible to install BZ in Ubuntu, I'm sure that it could happen with "Wine" but, since I have to make some changes in the .exe that could bring some problems. Has anyone tried it? Either way, I'll give it a shot and let everybody know the status in any case someone is interested. Thanks in advanced.

Looking at the Wine DB entry for it, the last two test have been bronze / gold (on Ubuntu Hardy)..but before that it was all 'Garbage' ratings (albeit from the same user)... this probably means that it needs quite a lot of tweaking to work well. If we could get it to work well in Wine...or even better, get a loki installer then it may also bring a few people in - I know half the people who play Tremulous a while back (another FPS / RTS..kinda..mishmash) were linux users.

I'll have a go with Wine & BZ later.

Had a quick go with some success as you can see from the screenie below.

I used wine 1.12, not the 1.01 that comes with Jaunty (from the archived debs off the main wine page) - after seeing the comments from the guy who got it to work. I switched Wine to Win98 and emulated a virtual desktop (1024x800). Installed BZ and BZ 1.4 patch and deleted the anims folder...and then started it by the command line (i.e. wine bzone.exe). I used hardware acceleration.

Two problems so far:

(a) When playing there is a loud sound in the background that seems to correspond when the tank is on the ground (kinda) - changing audio settings in game doesn't help
(b) I'm getting "err:d3d7:IDirect3DDeviceImpl_3_GetRenderState Unexpected texture stage state setup, returning D3DTBLEND_MODULATE - likely erroneous" a trillion times a second

Haven't tried MP or TRO. Video works fine.



Edit:

Tried MP and played a game of stock colli with Westpac..apart from my severe lack of skill there were no problems..aside from my FPS being way high (100+) - I know this can cause problems - is there a fix? Inputting my name into the MP pre-lobby screen was a bit 'sticky'. Westpac reported no problems from his side

Music doesn't work..despite me using an original CD - it obviously detects the CD from the fact that I can play SP missions. Hmm

Another screenie:



Edit 2:

On the most current Wine version and using Jaunty the problems are (so far):

(a) Sound is lagged by a fraction of a second - this is a pulseaudio problem. Going back to ESound solves it.
(b) The 'pointer' in the game is missing - you know when you are going to put down a building or show a unit where to go..well the line between the square and the HUD has gone.
(c) The background sound fx are kinda messed up (not the shooting or voices or anything) but it sounds like the background noise is turned too far up (kinda difficult to explain). Going to keep on looking - pretty sure this is a straight wine problem =/
(d) I can't seem to reliably get it to work fullscreen - sometimes it crashes X, sometimes it leaves me with a BZ resolution desktop..sometimes it works...and the screens don't auto-stretch, so the mission selection / load screens are in a 640x window, then it goes to a 1024x windows (i.e. the size window I want) for the game. Not a huge problem

OK been fiddling with this for a while now and redone it with a HowTo. Battlezone in Ubuntu with Wine works well apart from the following problems (as far as I can tell)..

1. Music doesn't play in-game (may be solvable - it's something to do with the way Ubuntu / Wine handle mixed-mode CDs)
2. Target lead and the selection square line HUD elements are missing.

For this I am using Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid), Wine v1.3, a Nvidia GTS250 card and the original BZ disk.

Install the Wine repository and Wine itself - see here

'Winetricks' should also be installed now, in a terminal:



..and the dsound package should be installed, which will help the BZ sound effects greatly.

Stick the BZ disk in..it mounts as BZONE..so..



The usual BZ setup screen will come up (albeit a little on the slow side). Install it fully into the default directory and with hardware acceleration enabled. Quit when done.

As normal we need to patch to 1.4..so..



then adapt render.cfg



I enable (remove semi-colon) HiRes and MipMaps and change TripleBuffer to 1. You may want to enable large assets and / or SplitZBuffer, depending (the installation for large assets is identical to that on windows). Leave ZBuffer disabled!

Save and close.

Rename that annoying anims folder...



Go to Wine Config and set things up for windowed play..


Under 'Applications' tab, Add application and browse to the .wine/Program Files/Activision/Battlezone directory and select bzone.exe. Highlight bzone.exe in application settings and put the windows version as Windows 98. Go to the 'Graphics' tab and 'Emulate a virtual desktop' for a sensible windowed size appropriate for your screen - 1024x768 is fine for me (I have a 1680x1050 max resolution monitor). Tick 'Allow window manager to decorate the windows' and 'Allow window manager to control the windows'. Untick 'Allow DX apps to stop the mouse leaving their window'. Press OK.

Load up Nvidia Settings and enable VSync to cap FPS in-game:



Go to 'OpenGL Settings' and tick 'Sync to VBlank'. You may want to untick after finishing up with BZ if it makes any difference to other OpenGL apps / games. FPS in BZ will now be capped to the monitor's refresh rate (like 60-80).

Start up BZ..



Before doing anything, remember to go to graphic options and change the resolution to 1024x768 (or whatever you set the virtual window in Wine Config at)..remember max is 1280x1024 for BZ. For me, exiting after this and restarting works...and you should be able to play BZ Single player in a window!



Next up..fullscreen, MP etc etc

have you tested 1.5?

Not yet...I was going to finish the HowTo for base 1.4..then do TRO then do 1.5 last as it's likely to change muchly. Will cross post to ubuntuforums.org and BZU. Do you use linux? If so..have you tried 1.5 yet..and have you managed to overcome the music / mixed-mode CD problem?

Edit: OK just tried 1.5..it's so much better that I'll rewrite the above once I've had a play...still would like to know how to sort the mixed-mode CD prob =/

Ahh.. I have tried this more than a year ago at this point. I've got some old topics about it somewhere.

Long story short- BZ will work with Cider or CrossOverGames

TRO DOES WORK IF YOU MOUNT THE DISK!! =D

There are a few bugs though- The radar and unit identifiers look like blocks, the Installer gives you an error on installation so you have to use a premade windows installed BZ, and the "rushing" sound that plays when you are high enough in the air is very loud, and lasts a long time.

I know this is for OS X, but Cider and Wine are the same thing, just on different OS's.

CodeName: Unix

I remember it well (look at the date of the first post on this thread). I've got BZ and TRO working now under wine - 1.5 is pretty much perfect, just lacks the CD Audio. 1.4 is playable in SP and MP..but has some HUD and screen res issues (can't do widescreen or more than 1280x1024) - same with TRO. You can get rid of that annoying sound by installing winetricks (not sure how you do it on a mac) and then downloading 'dsound'.

The main annoyance is the CD Audio not being there and the ridiculous amount of tweaking you have to do (my entry on the WineHQ is 10 items long!). I've dealt with mounting issues with Wine (basically made a cue/bin file from the original BZ and TRO CDs) and mounted them within Wine and then altered the DOSDrive listing so that the mounted CD look-a-like is the D: drive...and it will STILL only do the sound effects. It may be issues with multi-mode CDs within Wine..or it may be issues with how Wine deals with CD Audio through the Ubuntu soundsystem...but f*** it, I'm going to work it out!

Who knows.. If we get a cider license, we could start uploading battlezone Mac builds.