Heroes of Might and Magic 5 on Linux with Wine!

Friday, 20 June 2008 15:01

Introduction
"Heroes of Might and Magic V is the next installment in the venerable and long-standing Heroes of Might and Magic series... The six towns that will appear in Heroes V are the humans, Haven, the demons, Inferno, the necromancers, Necropolis, the dark elves, Dungeon, the wizards, Academy, and the elves, Sylvan, with the dark elves being the new addition to the series.

The game itself will be beautifully rendered in 3D, another advancement not seen in any other previous Heroes game. It consists of at least 90 different creatures, 14 in each town. A different set of 6 magic schools live up to the name of 'Magic', while the Dynamic Combat System provides a faster option in battles. There are 6 campaigns which, in total, have over 30 missions which further explore the history behind the towns.” Source

Information about this test
Specs:
Linux dist:Ubuntu 8.04
Wine version: Wine 1.0 with 3Dmark patch (shouldn't be necessary for this game)
CPU: Intel E6550 @ 2,333 GHZ
GFX card: Geforce 8800GTS 640MB
RAM: 2 GB DDR2 @ 800 MHZ.

I used a genuine European ”Ubisoft Exclusive” version of this game. I ran the game in a clean wine prefix and I played the game in a virtual desktop!

Installing
Insert the Heroes V disc and direct to it in a terminal. Start installing by typing ”wine Setup.exe”.

Patching

Patch 1.1: Download the 1.1 patch from here.

Direct to the folder you placed the patch executable in (you might have to unpack it depending from which download site you choose. Start patching by typing ”wine patch-name.exe” in a terminal.

Patch 1.2-1.6: After you have installed the 1.1 patch, then you can use the game's auto-updater to patch the game to 1.6 by typing ”wine UpgradeLauncher.exe” in a terminal from the games ”bin” folder.

Settings
VideoMemorySize: HoMM V is a Videomemory hungry game (especially in higher resolutions), so start regedit and create the string value VideoMemorySize in this directory:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER_Software_Wine_Direct3D

And set the value to you videocards memory size (640 in my case).

Playing
Start playing the game by typing ”wine H5_Game.exe” from the games ”bin” folder.

Performance boosters