| | | Of Swat 3 and WINE | | | For many years it was assumed that SWAT3 was unable to function in WINE, despite seeing the odd screenshot and hearing the odd tale of a person getting it to work, It still remained elusive due to a lack of instructions.
What is WINE?
WINE is free and open source implementation of Windows, allowing you to run Windows applications from 3.1 to Windows 8 on other platforms such as Linux, OSX, *BSD and others. It has been in development for over 15 years and recently has started to become increasingly usable.
How I got it working?
Well you need a platform that has WINE, you need to install WINE from your package manager, ports or from source. I'm using WINE 1.4.1 on Linux Mint 14. WINE can be kind of fickle, sometimes version changes break things, so if it isn't working you should try that version. Next you need to find something called Winetricks. Winetricks is a script that is able to install core components like DirectX, and set them up for WINE, which otherwise would be a very time consuming and tedious process.
You need to run Winetricks and click Select the default wineprefix, install a windows DLL or component, Then select the packages cmd, comctl32, comctl32ocx, comdlg32ocx, crypt32, d3dx9, d3dx9_26-42, dirac, dotnet11, dotnet11sp1, icodecs, i3codecx, mfc42, msasn1, msvcirt, vcrun2008, vcrun6, vcrun6sp6, and click OK. It will then install all this stuff from the internet and properly.
Next you need to get the Gog copy of Swat 3, copy the Sierra folder to the drive_c folder under the wine directory, it must be in that folder or the game will fail to start due to it being unable to find the the files under it's built in PATH variables.
Next you should configure Wine to run in a Window, otherwise it could hang and block you from doing anything else, you do this by running winecfg, going to the graphics tab and selecting emulate a virtual desktop.
It should be ready at this point, the only thing that does not work is the videos and that is because of the lack of proper video codecs, you have to run swat3.exe with the argument -nointro or it will give you the DDERR unsupported error. Other then that it should now work, I tested it myself, the levels I sampled worked 100% suspects, sound, scripting, lighting, etc.
Enjoy.
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