So I’m very new to linux gaming. I swapped like last month and I’ve really been enjoying how well everything I’ve tried on Steam just works these days.
But I was looking to try something a little more advanced next. I saw that there’s a HD “remaster” mod for Freelancer (which is abandonware now, so easy to find for free online). As it’s one of my all time favorite games, and I haven’t played it in like 20 years, I thought it might be fun to check it out again.
I saw that it is on lutris and tried installing it that way. The installation goes fine but after it’s done, the lutris installer just hangs with “return code 256”. Googling it didn’t provide me any useful info other than one guy saying just to install it directly with an empty WINE prefix. I have no idea how to do that and it sounds like it might be more of a pain in the ass than I want to deal with.
But I thought I’d just post here and see if anyone else has tried this and gotten it to work. I can always dual boot back into Windows but I’d rather not do that ever again if I can avoid it. For the record, I’m on Pop!_OS.
Freelancer’s installer has had some issues with Linux in the past, it actually uses a couple of really odd side effects of Windows API calls as part of its functionality - which has caused issues on actual Windows as well for some people.
If you’re using Lutris, my suggestion is to use the add new game button in the interface - the plus in the top-left, and choose “Install a Windows game from an executable”, then you’ll get a perfectly clean prefix for that part.
And I’m also going to take the opportunity to add a link to Librelancer, an open-source remake of the Freelancer engine which has been going on for a while, not quite yet to the point where it can play the campaign though.
The real trick is figuring out how to install the HD executable into the same prefix after that. From what I gather, vanilla Freelancer doesn’t work in linux well because of dx8.
Have you installed Wine? I mean not in Lutris, but actual Wine in Pop!_OS. Then you can just double click the setup.exe like you’re in windows, install it where you want and then add it to lutris by adding a game manually.
That’s my prefered way of installing any windows program an most of the time it works.
Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, when I double click setup.exe, it opens ProtonTricks, rather than install anything. I tried running it through the terminal window directly and it looked like it installed but when I tried to run it afterwards I got errors like it couldn’t find the files.
I dunno, I will probably just end up dual booting. This is EXACTLY the kind of experience that kept me from linux for the last couple decades. I am positive with enough effort I could get it working. I just don’t want to put in that kind of effort; I don’t want a new hobby.
Fortunately, when I’m not trying to install a 20-year old game made for the wrong operating system, things DO just work. :-D
Hm, you can “open exe in wine prefix” or something like this from within lutris, maybe that will work
