Starcraft

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StarCraft
Full Title: StarCraft
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Released: N/A
Operating System: Windows 95, 98, or NT 4.0
Genre(s): RTS
Multiplayer: Yes
System Requirements: Pentium 90 MHz, Windows 95, 98, or NT 4.0, 16 MB RAM, DirectX-compatible SVGA video card, Microsoft-compatible mouse, 2x CD-ROM drive (4x for cinematics)
Recommended System Spec: N/A
Buy It Now: Here


Contents

Preface

This HOWTO will show you gamers out there how to play Starcraft online.

From Wikipedia

StarCraft (SC) is a real-time strategy computer game produced by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998. The game is similar to Blizzard's previous hit Warcraft II, but has a science fiction setting. The game was heavily edited during the development process to steer the game away from being simply "Warcraft in Space", and eventually the entire game engine had to be gutted and redeveloped to allow the developers to actually achieve the results they were after. The main storyline of the game revolves around a war between three galactic species: the Protoss (a race of humanoid religious warriors), the Zerg (insect-like aliens who share a hive mind) and the Terrans (human colonists from Earth). It was initially released for Windows, later for Macintosh and the N64.

Needed Items

  • The Starcraft CD
  • An internet connection
  • A working CD key
  • Wine

Installation

First, insert the Starcraft CD and make sure it's mounted. Most modern distros will mount it for you automatically when you insert it, and I'll assume that if yours doesn't, then you probably know how to mount CDs manually.

From there, installation is pretty simple;

Installing StarCraft 

cd $PATH_TO_STARCRAFT_CD
wine setup.exe

If you're not sure what the path to your starcraft CD is, some common ones you can try are "/cdrom", "/mnt/cdrom", "/mount/cdrom", or "/media/cdrom". If none of these work, check your distro's manual or your /etc/fstab file.

Install The Patch

Using the 1.12B patch 

cd ~
w get http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/blizzard/starcraft/patches/PC/SC-112b.exe
wine SC-112b.exe

[Dec 05] For new patchs (current version 1.13e - 20051214) check blizzard.com

Using the Broodwar 1.13F patch 

cd ~
w get http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/broodwar/patches/PC/BW-113f.exe
wine BW-113f.exe

Play

Playing the game 

cd ~/.wine/fake_windows/Program Files/Starcraft/
wine starcraft.exe

Depending on which kernel you're using, it may help speed things up to run wine at different nice values. If things are moving sluggishly, try "nice -n 19 wine starcraft.exe". Alternatively, if you're kernel includes the ck patchset, try installing schedtool and running "schedtool -I -e wine starcraft.exe".

Another great performance tip is to run Starcraft at as low a bit depth as possible. Because the x.org xserver lacks the ability to switch bit depths on the fly, many people accidently run Starcraft at 24 bit depth. This slows things down drastically because the game was designed to run with 8 bit color, so wine has to scale every pixel up to 24 bits for every frame. Unfortunately, running the game in 8 bit color doesn't seem to work, or not for me anyway. Your mileage may vary, so give it a try at 8bpp if you want. However, switching from 24bpp to 16bpp still gives a huge performance gain, so it's definitely worth trying.

Enjoy!

Problems

Some people have problems running Battle.net. A black screen will appear, and the fonts won't display properly. Single-player games run perfectly fine. Apparently WineX has had some success. Essentially the problem appears to be the use of GDI and DirectX, which Wine optimizes away.

Running on FreeBSD
The game does not [start] completely smoothly. The video is choppy. For example, when you move the cursor, it will move smoothly for about 2 seconds and there will be a slight "pulse" or a "pause" in movement for maybe a fraction of a second, and then the mouse will move normally again. Another 2 or so seconds, another pulse, etc. However, the sound does not skip. When going into an actual game, it seems to clear up and no longer stutters. Wine Archives

Sound

  • [July 05] A user reported difficulties with sound. He then tried changing the registry key: Software\Wine\AppDefaults\[insert name for starcraft.exe here]\DirectSound but with with no result. He forced ds_hw_accel to 3 in setup_dsound_options, and got sound. However, the sound gets bad soon :( Wine Archive

llbra [Dec 05]: From my experience, SC and BW can be installed and run fast (enable Full Hardware acelleration mode), but sounds doesn't seems to work well and don't worth the try.

Links

Wine Links


External Links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.jswindle.com/index.php/Starcraft"
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