Guild Wars on Wine

From Guild Wars Wiki

Warning: Running Guild Wars on a non-Windows operating system, or with any other computer which does not meet the system requirements, is completely unsupported by ArenaNet and NCSoft.

Wine provides a win32 api implementation for operating systems not made by Microsoft and can be used to run Guild Wars on such systems. The following guide has been written with Linux in mind.

CrossOver is commercial version of Wine with official support of Guild Wars on Linux and MacOS using intel cpu.

Cedega, a DirectX optimized commercial wine fork, supports Guild Wars. For more information about Guild Wars on cedega you can visit their wiki.

[edit] Installation steps

[edit] Get wine

First, we'll need to download and install Wine on your system, if it isn't already there. Most modern Linux distributions come with their own package management system, making the installation of Wine a breeze. Here are some distribution-specific instructions:

distribution	process
Ubuntu	Wine from Ubuntu
Debian	Wine from Debian
Fedora Core	Wine from Fedora
Gentoo Linux	Wine from Gentoo
SourceMage Gnu/Linux	Wine from SourceMage
Source code	Wine from source

Note that the official distribution package may often be outdated (the current Wine version is 1.1.8). In these cases, first check to see if you can find up-to-date packages for your system (one good place to start is the official Wine page). Alternatively, you can install Wine from source.

[edit] Get Guild Wars

Open a terminal window and download the Guild Wars installation program:

wget http://www.guildwars.com/downloads/gwsetup.zip
unzip gwsetup.zip

Then run gwsetup:

wine GwSetup.exe

Proceed with the installation, which will download the basic GW data.

[edit] Running Guild Wars

To run Guild Wars after the installation, simply type this command from a terminal window:

wine "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"

You can use your system's menu editor to add a shortcut to the above command, so you don't have to manually run it from a terminal every time.

In case you experience problems when running Guild Wars, you may want to try tweaking with the configuration of Gw.exe or Wine.

[edit] Extra configuration

The process above will in the majority of cases land you with a working Guild Wars installation. However, for those systems where this doesn't happen, or where you are unsatisfied with the performance and want to try tinkering with the settings to get a better game experience, the following instructions may help.

[edit] Tuning wine

Start winecfg and, if your hardware supports it, configure the following options.

In the Graphics tab Allow Pixel Shader and set Vertex Shader Support to Hardware. Also it is highly recommended that Allow the window manager to control the window be disabled, this will prevent common desktop hotkey to activate during play. (eg: Switch desktop, cycle window, ...)

In the Audio tab enable the driver that support your audio hardware, ALSA Driver will work in most installation. The following audio options are recommended, Hardware Acceleration select Emulation and make sure Driver Emulation is checked.

[edit] Configuring Gw.exe

The Wine implementation of Microsoft DirectX9 can be lacking. If that is the case, try running Gw.exe with the flags -dx8 -noshaders. You can also change the Windows version Wine emulates in the Wine Configuration panel. Several people have better luck getting it to work in Windows 98 mode than others. However this mode causes a massive number of graphics anomalies since the Eye of the North updates. It is possible to force Guild Wars to run in a window instead of fullscreen; this can be useful if you run into problems. To do this the flag -windowed is added to the gw.exe command. We will use this until we are satisfied with the results.

Also because Wine will generate a lot of debugging output when running, this can slow the game, environment variable WINEDEBUG will be set to -all (minus all) to prevent any debug output on the console.

WINEDEBUG=-all wine "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -windowed

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Guild Wars installation and execution
Guild Wars on Wine • Guild Wars on CrossOver