BSD & Gaming

UPDATE 11-2010: I recently upgraded to PCBSD 8.1 with a fresh install of all software to include the lastest PBI of WINE. It took more work to get FALLOUT going than it did the last time I set it up so I plan to do a rewrite of this article in the near future. That’s the “Bad News” (more work), however the “Good News” is FO3 seems to play a lot better than it did before – stay tuned for the details!

About this page:

This page is a description of what I had to do to make Fallout work on my specific hardware, so unless you have FreeBSD and an Nvidia card it may not be of much use to you.

I put this together for those who already have BSD, WINE, and Nvidia drivers installed and working properly. This also assumes that you know how to work with WINE’s utilities winecfg and regedit. You should know how to use a terminal window and can execute a script file like winetricks. None of this is rocket science, I just looked at what all the linux folks did to make it work for them. Hell …if an idiot like me can manage it then you can do it too. Take your time, pay attention to the details, and don’t lose your patience.

Information about other hardware/operating systems can be found on WINEHQ’s Fallout 3 page (see links for everything at the bottom of this page).

Details of my system & software for reference:

PCBSD – [FreeBSD v8.0-RELEASE-p2]
WINE ver 1.1.39
Nvida Driver ver 195.22
KDE 4.3.5
Intel Core 2 Duo T7100(1.80GHz)
Nvidia 8700M GT video card

Software and files you will need to have:

Fallout 3 – obviously
Fallout 3 patch v1.7
Wine Tricks script
GFW Live Minimum Installer
msasn1.dll

Basic Directions:

1-Download everything you need (links at bottom of page)
2-Install Fallout, then patch it to 1.7
3-Run the command “winetricks d3dx9″
4-Run the command “winetricks cc580″
5-Run the command “winetricks vcrun2008″
6-Run the command “winetricks dotnet3″
7-Copy the file msasn1.dll to WINE’s system32 folder
8-Run winecfg and set the dll override for msasn1.dll and xlive.dll to native
9-Now you will need to make some registry changes in WINE

WINE Registry Edits:

Make sure these two entries exist, if they don’t then create them.

Direct 3D Entry – make sure all 4 items are correct for your specific card

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
“VideoDescription”=”NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT”
“VideoMemorySize”=”256″
“VideoPciDeviceID”=dword:00000409
“VideoPciVendorID”=dword:000010de

Fallout 3 Entry – change “InstallLocation” to match where you put it

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{974C4B12-4D02-4879-85E0-61C95CC63E9E}]
“DisplayName”=”Fallout 3″
“DisplayVersion”=”1.00.0000″
“InstallDate”=”201010301″
“InstallLocation”=”C:\\games\\fallout3″
“InstallSource”=”d:\\”
“Language”=dword:00000009
“LogFile”=”C:\\Program Files\\InstallShield Installation Information\\{974C4B12-4D02-4879-85E0-61C95CC63E9E}\\setup.ilg”
“LogMode”=dword:00000001
“MajorVersion”=dword:00000001
“MinorVersion”=dword:00000000
“NoModify”=dword:00000001
“NoRemove”=dword:00000000
“NoRepair”=dword:00000001
“ProductGuid”=”{974C4B12-4D02-4879-85E0-61C95CC63E9E}”
“Publisher”=”Bethesda Softworks”
“RegCompany”=”None”
“RegOwner”=”PRIVATE”
“UninstallString”=”RunDll32 C:\\PROGRA~1\\COMMON~1\\INSTAL~1\\PROFES~1\\RunTime\\11\\00\\Intel32\\Ctor.dll,LaunchSetup \”C:\\Program Files\\InstallShield Installation Information\\{974C4B12-4D02-4879-85E0-61C95CC63E9E}\\setup.exe\” -l0x9  -removeonly”
“URLInfoAbout”=”http://fallout.bethsoft.com”
“Version”=dword:01000000

Congrats you made it!! You should now be ready to play Fallout 3!!
If everything is working properly anyway heheheh.

What works in the game?:

I can run the FalloutLauncher.exe application, change whatever settings I need, and play the game. Game menus and graphics all appear to look as they should, menus are a bit slow.

For those of you like me who use MODS, FOMM and FOSE work, and ArchiveInvalidation Invalidator works too. FOMM does show an error popup window  on execution however I just close & ignore it continuing on as though it did not happen . So far the error doesn’t seem to be any real issue, everything appears to work properly despite it showing up.

I have heavily MODDED my game, so far so good.

What does not work?

The only issue seems to be sound,  this is a known bug in WINE. The launcher sound fx work fine, but once you are actually in game the only sound you can hear is canned speech from various NPC’s. All other music/sound effects are dead for the time being. I have no idea when WINE will resolve this.

Details about the sound bug are here - [LINK]

Overall Performance and/or other Problems:

I’ve been tweaking the video settings for my card to get rid of lag in VATS and general game play, but I had to mess around with that under windows too so that’s nothing unusual there.

The mouse pointer is slow and stutters in menus, none of the suggested work arounds I tried made any difference for me. Some suggested changes botched up the mouse controls so I got rid of them. The menu issues are not unplayable, but are they definitely annoying.

The following FALLOUT.INI file setting changes really helps dual core CPU performance:

change bUseThreadedAI=0 to bUseThreadedAI=1
then below it add iNumHWThreads=2

Final thoughts about Fallout 3 using WINE?

Let’s see…everything generally works but sound, 3rd party MOD and utils are a go, gameplay is good so far, and the only other negative is the mouse/menu issue. Not too bad really since this game was never intended for anything other than  MS platforms.

I was never very sure FO3 would ever work using WINE since this was a GFW Live compatible game. Being Mr. Pessimist I thought sure all the MS crap would bork things up so bad it would never run using WINE at all.

That’s about all I can think of for now. I don’t think I forgot anything you need to do.

Hopefully after this you will be scavenging the wastelands soon!!

Reference Material and Download Links:

Tips and Information on WineHQ’s Fallout 3 page – [LINK]
WineTricks Script – [LINK]
DLL download site for msasn1.dll – [LINK]
Minimal Installer GFW Windows Live – [LINK]
Fallout 3 ver 1.7 update patch – [LINK]

The next 3 items are only needed if you want to use various MODS in FO3.

Fallout Script Enhancer – [LINK]
Fallout Mod Manager – [LINK]
ArchiveInvalidation Invalidator! – [LINK]