[yanom]

Does anyone know how to get Civ IV and the Civ IV: Beyond the Sword expansion to work on Linux? They are "Games for Windows".

[i92guboj]

Originally Posted by yanom

Does anyone know how to get Civ IV and the Civ IV: Beyond the Sword expansion to work on Linux? They are "Games for Windows".

Install wine in your distribution. Use wine to install your game and then run it using wine as well. Then, if it doesn't work on a first try, go to the Wine database, search for "civilization iv" and read around there.

I don't have the game myself so I can't tell you about any peculiarities.

Wine AppDB - Search results

[yanom]

Use wine to install your game

How do I do that exactly? I'm not very familiar with Wine.

[i92guboj]

Originally Posted by yanom

How do I do that exactly? I'm not very familiar with Wine.

First you need to install wine. How that is done depends on your distribution. It's very common software, so, once you know how to use the package manager for your distro, locating wine and installing it should be a child's play. If you run into trouble with that, let us know which distro are you using so we can help better.

Once wine is installed, you just put the game cd into your tray, close it, mount the drive (it doesn't matter if you do this step graphically or via command line). Once the disk is mounted you will see the contents of the cdrom. There's will be many files, the .exe ones are the programs. So, look for something called setup.exe, install.exe, autorun.exe or whatever it's called.

Now, you need to run it using wine, for this, I advice you to use a terminal emulator. Some distros can run windows exes with a single click on nautilus or konqueror over the exe file, but I don't advise that.

So, open your terminal, cd /mnt/cdrom or wherever your cdrom is mounted (if in doubt, run "mount" to see the list of mounted devices and the mount points). Once you are into that dir, with a simple ls you will see all the files (exe included). Now, all you need to do is to run "wine progname.exe", change progname by setup or whatever the install program is.

And it should work, if it fails, then I'd start looking at the wine database, because, possibly, your problem has been suffered by someone else around there, and maybe you can find help.

By looking at the database, I see that Civilization IV has right now gold status. This basically means that for the most part, the game should just work without any big trouble.

Wine AppDB - Sid Meier's Civilization IV

After the game is installed, the files will reside in ~/.wine/drive_c/.... I think that sometimes wine can create desktop links, depending on your desktop... But I can't tell you since I don't use any of the major desktop environments.

[JVincent08]

Once you've installed the game with wine, you'll also need to update the game to 1.61 before it works right, acording to wine's AppDB (VERY good source of information to see if a game will work before you spend all week trying to figure out why you're getting errors). After you patch it, it seems it'll run ok. I have the game installed now, but I haven't patched it yet so it doesn't work for me. I'll download the patch soon and let you know how it goes.

EDIT: You'll also need to patch the game with a crack. I don't know if we're allowed to discuss such topics here so I'll leave it at that for now.

[yanom]

After you patch it, it seems it'll run ok

How do I patch it? Also, I have the Civ IV: Beyond the Sword. Will I be able to play it?

[yanom]

Also, I have a Windows computer also if I will need that.

The license aggreement states that I cannot

Reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise modify the Software, in whole or in part;

However, this seems contradictory, because it says in the instruction book that modding is encouraged, even if it's done with source code and not the built-in map editor (I've tried that thing. It stinks.). I don't know what this means, I'm not a lawyer.

[yanom]

If I can find some way that it's legal (I think it is), please tell me how to do the crack.

[JVincent08]

How do I patch it? Also, I have the Civ IV: Beyond the Sword. Will I be able to play it?

Have you looked at the Wine AppDB link i92guboj gave you? Users post how-to's there that will help you. CivIV 1.61 and 1.74 both have Gold ratings (which is good) as does Beyond the Sword version 3.13. Click on the one that you're interested in for more information on what works, what doesn't, and how to get the game to run. You can also post comments there and ask people for help if you can't get it to work, but only post after you've tried the how-to's.

Also, I have a Windows computer also if I will need that.

You will need a couple of native DLL files (d3dx9_26.dll and msxml3.dll) which you can either download from the net or copy them from your Windows installation. See the how-to's for more details.

The license aggreement states that I cannot

Quote:
Reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise modify the Software, in whole or in part;
However, this seems contradictory, because it says in the instruction book that modding is encouraged, even if it's done with source code and not the built-in map editor (I've tried that thing. It stinks.). I don't know what this means, I'm not a lawyer.

Reverse engineer, decompile, and disassemble all essentially mean the same thing -- decompiling the exe's binary code into a human readable format so that you can alter the way it works. The modding that the manual speaks of is legal because when you mod the game, you're actually just adding more features to the game, you're not changing the existing files in any way.

If I can find some way that it's legal (I think it is), please tell me how to do the crack.

As far as I know, USING a crack on a game that you legally purchased isn't illegal. But most cracks are made by decompiling the exe and changing it, which is forbidden by Civ IV's license agreement. So, I think, the making of the crack is illegal, but the use of one that's already been made isn't. Again, I'm not sure, I doubt anyone really is. As far as telling you "how to do the crack", as I said in my earlier post, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to discuss that on this forum. Again, read the how-to's on Wine's AppDB for more info.