How to run/install a game repacked for windows on Linux? Is it possible?
Please avoid discussing piracy in this community. It is too much of a legal issue and isn’t Linux related.
Sorry.
All good
Wine via Lutris or bottles.
Install bottles from flatpak.
Press “run executable” and run the installer, installing in a folder like ~/games for easy finding
If you’re lucky the game now appears in bottles and you can run it, otherwise add a shortcut (button in bottles) pointing to the game’s exe.
If you need controller support, from bottles click “more” on the game and add it to steam (restart steam for it to show up) and launch the game from steam and it will take care of the controller mapping and you even get the nice remapping features.
I haven’t used bottles yet. How does it handle c++ redists?
edit: as in, do you have to install them first? Can you add them afterward if the game doesn’t launch without them?
Bottles provides some installers but for example with fitgirl repacks I heavily recommend letting the fitgirl installer install redists.
Another option is to manually download your redist and run it through the same “run executable” as before. Bottles is a program for managing several “wine bottles” (get it?) And a single bottle is like a single windows install (in real terms, this is what a “wine prefix” is), so a program installed in a bottle is a program that is visible to other programs in that bottle. For example, if you install Titanfall in bottles, you can then use the third-party Titanfall modded launchers as you would do on windows.
Some desktop programs (dnspy is the one that caused me problems personally) can be incompatible with the bottles setting, so for these programs specifically you should create a new bottle with the settings that work. Most of the time, this involves disabling DXVK for that bottle.
Thank you for the details! That sounds much more flexible and takes out some of the guesswork. I’ll give it a try on a new install.
You can add a non-steam game if it is “installed” (read extracted), then in steam select to use compatibility mode in settings for the game. That will run it with proton and has a very high sucess rate. So far think i came across 2 that did not work. One of the civ games and another. Ironically both i actually bought rather than pirate, but if you install a game via wine, you can add it via steam. Actually i do this with a bunch of legally bought games as its an easy way to manage a library.
Yes. You may need to install it in a VM first (or a Windows dual boot partition) then move the files into the linux host system. Fitgirl installers usually report not enough memory for me, even though there’s 32GB available and the installer option to limit to 2GB is turned on.
edit: once it’s on there, I usually have success with Heroic, just when adding the game to the library, you have to use the “install first” option in the game settings window to install any needed visual c++ runtime, before pointing it to the game exe and saving. I haven’t found a way to add it afterward.
Fitgirl installers gave me huge trouble too in the past, but once the files are extracted, it all works perfectly.
Yeah, at this point I just install them from the Windows side, then add them to the linux side, so if there’s some problem I can switch back and forth.
