Toying around with dual-boot...

[Grognot]

Got a larger drive in the laptop, and took advantage of the extra space to put a second OS (Gentoo Linux) on it.

For what it's worth, with wine-0.9.49, I can 'install' EiA (at least, it doesn't complain, and it seems to unpack everything) and the 1.01beta patch also happily unpacks. The Wine registry seems to have appropriate entries rather similar to the bona-fide Windows XP registry.

What I can't actually do yet is run the game. :p

(/usr/bin/wine EiANW.exe by itself fails -- it seems it won't properly read the serial numbers unless I do
/usr/bin/wine C:\\Matrix Games\\Empires\ in\ Arms\\EiANW.exe

where C: actually maps to a local directory -- ~/.wine/drive_c
)

Oddly, what it's complaining about (through a dialog box) is a 'missing .exe', even after some fiddling with PATH. I wouldn't have been entirely surprised to find it breaking due to some unimplemented DirectX call or about permissions (not running it as root), but an .exe ?

Anybody else geeky enough to have fiddled with this? :p

(Since I kept my XP install, this is merely a convenience for saving re-boots, and for experimenting with Wine. I can still play even if it's completely incompatible with Wine for some fundamental reason.)