Installing WA on Linux

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This tutorial (and a required file related to this tutorial) is provided by madewokherd. Feedback or requests for help should be directed at this thread on the Team17 Forum.

WARNING: These instructions are rather out-of-date. People wanting to use Worms Armageddon on wine right now should probably use Play Worms Armageddon on Linux - otherwise, you should wait for 3.6.30.0 which will have much improved wine support and a new set of these instructions.

Notes and issues

• In full screen mode, minimization does not work properly, either in the menus or in-game. Also, the game seems to leave some visual artifacts behind when quitting (ctrl+alt+f1 followed by ctrl+alt+f7 should fix that by forcing the screen to redraw).
• In virtual desktop (windowed) mode, the front-end stops responding to input after completing some games; closing the window seems to be safe in this case. It seems to happen when a dialog pops up after the game.
• Sometimes the sound glitches after finishing a game. Just be ready to unplug your speakers for now.
• Versions of wine 0.9.32 and newer have a bug that makes changing the resolution in the options screen ineffective. The only way to set the resolution on these versions is to edit the registry directly. See this bug report for information.
• With wine 0.9.42, virtual desktop mode is unusable, but fullscreen mode is fine.

1. Getting Wine

You should have Wine version 0.9.13 or newer installed before starting this process. You can check wine's version by typing

wine --version

If it looks like a date, then it's way too old. If you don't have wine, or it's older than 0.9.13, you should get a newer version. See this site for help with that.

2. Setting up for Wine

Run winecfg, select the Drives tab. Select your cd drive. If it's not there, add it (on a modern Linux distro, you should be able to use /media/cdrom).

Click the Advanced button, and make sure your cd-rom drive's type is set to "CD-ROM".

You may also want to configure your sound here. People seem to recommend OSS, but I've personally had better luck with ALSA. No one really uses the other drivers. You should probably start with OSS and then try ALSA if the sound doesn't work right.

3. Installing/Patching/Updating WA

Warning: DO NOT INSTALL WA AS ROOT. Not only is running Wine as root a bad idea, installing WA as root will not work. So don't try it.

First, open a terminal, and go to the the directory where your cdrom drive is mounted (may differ on your system):

cd /media/cdrom/

Run the installer on the cd:

wine install/install.exe

Use the installer to install the program as you would on Windows. Remember the directory where you installed it. If it asks you to reboot or install directx, say no.

Now go back to somewhere where you can create files:

cd

Download the WA updater:

wget http://worms.thecybershadow.net/files/WA_update-3.8.1_Beta_Installer.exe

Run the updater:

wine WA_update-3.8.1_Beta_Installer.exe

Don't try to run WA; it won't work just yet. Move on to the next step.

4. Installing a modified ddraw.dll

This is why you can't run WA in the normal way. Wine has a bug that prevents it from running WA properly. The bug hasn't been fixed yet, but there is a hack you can use to make it run. To install it, go to the directory where you installed WA:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/MicroProse/Worms\ Armageddon/

(directory may differ depending on CD publisher)

download the archive with ddraw.dll in it:

wget http://wahelp.worms2d.info/files/wa_ddraw.tar.bz2 (for users of Wine 0.9.15 and below)

wget http://madewokherd.nfshost.com/worms/wa_ddraw-0.9.XX.tar.bz2 (replace XX with your Wine version)

madewokherd has stopped updating ddraw.dll for new Wine versions. Instead, he recommends to: grab the patch attached to wine bug 2082, apply the wined3d part, build wine (if someone wants to precompile them, wined3d.dll can presumably be dropped in like ddraw was, but the wined3d api changes often), set DirectDrawRenderer to "gdi"

extract it:

tar -xvjf wa_ddraw.tar.bz2

and move ddraw.dll to the WA directory:

mv ddraw/ddraw.dll .

5. Running WA

To run WA, go to the directory where you installed it:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/MicroProse/Worms\ Armageddon/

and type the following command:

wine wa.exe /NOINTRO

or (to run WA in a window):

wine explorer /desktop=wa,640x480 wa.exe /NOINTRO

See also

• Play Worms Armageddon on Linux