The officially official Devuan Forum!

askfor

Member

Registered: 2024-12-19

Posts: 14  

Running older games

I'd like to run some older Windows games on Excalibur 64 bit. Wine is the obvious option. Most of the games are 32-bit, some are 64-bit. For now, I have proprietary NVidia drivers working fine. I guess I am going to need some 32-bit libs.

I have installation media for all the games, not planning to download them from Steam.

What advice can you give me before I start ?

rations

Member

Registered: 2025-11-06

Posts: 82  

Re: Running older games

I've had luck with winehq-staging and winetricks from their github repo. This is the nvidia driver version I've got 610.43.02 Instead of making different wine prefixes for a game that does not work. I use steams add a non steam game and try different proton versions.

---

You will own nothing and be depressed
SOURCEFORGE rations

Calamity

Member

Registered: 2021-10-23

Posts: 76  

Website

Re: Running older games

Hi! Unfortunately I cannot help with the Nvidia side of things, but regarding Wine:

Yes, you will absolutely need to add 32-bit architecture before installing Wine and its dependencies if you want to run Win32 games/programs:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386

After installing Wine, do not launch winecfg or Windows applications straight away. Instead, create your own 32-bit prefix that will be your default $WINEPREFIX (it's probably more convenient as many old games are Win32 applications).

$ WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine winecfg

Now create a separate 64-bit prefix for your Win64 games:

$ WINEARCH=win64 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine64 winecfg

Since this second prefix is not the default, you will need to define it via the WINEPREFIX variable every time you need to use it. It should look like this:

$ WINEPREFIX=~/.wine64 wine game64.exe

Note that while you can use 64-bit prefix for 32-bit applications, with earlier versions of Wine - including Wine 10 that is in the Excalibur repositories - you will run into many bugs. So it's highly recommended to keep a separate 32-bit prefix and use it as default (any prefix in ~/.wine folder is always considered to be the default).

Another option is to enable WineHQ repositories and install a newer version of Wine. These have added proper WoW64 support, which means the 32-bit stuff is no longer needed and everything can be run in the default 64-bit prefix. I have not tested this personally but I imagine it should work fine.

From general experience, games from the early-mid 2000s (think American McGee's Alice, Deus Ex, Rune, ZanZarah, No One Lives Forever, The Punisher, FlatOut 1 and 2...) run great in Wine. Especially true of 3D titles if you got the driver support sorted out. I found that some 2D games and programs actually run worse.

Regarding drivers - I play on Intel, so it was an easy ride for me. For Nvidia I wish you lots of luck, since you got the driver working I think there should be no issues.

See these threads for some Wine-specific tips and tricks:

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7676
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7685

I recommend reading the Wine manual and FAQ pages to get familiar with Wine registry, DLL overrides and uninstaller. It should be pretty straightforward, but feel free to ask for any advice. Winetricks is now in the repositories and is useful in certain specific cases. It's probably not as necessary if you opt for Wine 11+.

As I also don't use Steam, I recommend installing Lutris to manage your game collection (but not to install your games, see this post). You may also want to install gamemode, disable screensavers, display power management, Spectre mitigation (in GRUB) and increase ulimit if you haven't done so already.

Oh, and you may also find the bchunk and iat tools very handy when working with disk images.

Last edited by Calamity (Today 16:14:26)

---

Re-examine all that you have been told. Dismiss that which insults your soul.  - Walt Whitman
Dump shampoo and hair dye
Global Skywatch・Subliminal Manipulation