warcraft3 without crack - bnet

[ribx]

if someone is interessted:

i managed to run wc3 without a crack just by changeing one single option:

you have to set the option

"windows" = "win2k"

i think the reson is that "win98" supports only cd names up to 11 letters. the "WARCRAFT III" cd has 12 letters as you can see.
but you have to make second entry in the cdrom section, if you didnt do that:

"device" = "/dev/hdX"

while hdX stands for you CDROM drive! this will make wine to read out the name of the cd. you can uncommend the "label" option because it is ignored if a device is set.
my config lines looks like that:

[Drive D]
"Path" = "/mnt/cdrom/"
"Type" = "cdrom"
#"Label" = "Warcraft III"
"Filesystem" = "win95"
"Device" = "/dev/hdc"

note that this is an very easy way to enter the battlenet

[ivan300]

im a little confused. you want s to make 2 cdroms ?

[ribx]

no you dont need a second cd-rom.. you have to add raw access on the cdrom drive. you can do so with adding the line
"device" = "/dev/hdX"
to your cdrom section

i got this information out of the man pages.. read them for more information
or check out the forums on http://www.winehq.org

[Dracnor]

This is a very good find. Now it is much easier to log on to battle.net. Thanks

[whiskeypriest]

So I noticed we were dangerously close to going 48 hours without a post about WarCraft III and Wine; can't allow that to happen, can we?

Basically, this is about my third attempt at running a game under Wine in as many years. All have resulted in “Hell with it, I'll play it under Windows” and a resolution to check back in a few months. WC3 is one of the final holdouts on my Windows partition, which I'd like to ditch by year's end. Here's my progress thus far:

• Emerged app-emulation/wine-20041019.
  
  
• Emerged winesetuptk-0.6.0b-r3; ran same as user.
  
  
• Edited ~/.wine/config to reflect the specifications found in the above thread (e.g. “Windows” = “win2k” and so on).
  
  
• Mounted WC3 disc, ran...

  Code:

  $ wine autoplay.exe

  
  ...from the appropriate directory. Pretty installation screen comes up, sound is there, all looks good. Skipped DX installation, everything else went off without a hitch; exited installer without starting game.

• Without patching, I shifted to the WC3 directory and ran...

  Code:

  $ wine War3.exe -- -opengl

  
  ...which yields this error message:

  Code:

  /usr/bin/wine: line 55:  9107 Trace/breakpoint trap   WINEDEBUG=-all "$RUNWINE" "$@"

  
  If I run...

  Code:

  $ wine Warcraft\ III.exe -- -opengl

  
  ...I get the WC3 splash screen (briefly) then this dialogue pops up:

  Code:

  Please verify that your WarCraft III disc is in your CD-ROM drive, then click on 'Retry'.

  
  

So what gives? Why isn't the WC3 disc being detected?

Here's my (abbreviated) ~/.wine/config file:

[discomfitor]

It seems like each version of wine is highly selective about various things (such as actually working at all...). I'm currently running Warcraft 3 (Frozen Throne) with the 20040914 version using a nocd crack. I DO own the game and I CAN get on battle.net.

The only reason I would switch to not using a nocd crack would be if I decided I actually wanted to tie up a cdrom drive with a cd that isn't actually necessary. Which I don't. I spent way too long trying to get the cd detection working, and eventually realized that it wasn't even completely wine's fault that it didn't work. It's partly the kernel as well. With version 2.6.6 of the kernel, I could run it with the cd in the drive (no crack needed). Anything other than that failed. There were no other things changed between tests of this.

That's why I believe it to be better to give up on things like this. If you can get it to work, great. But if it takes more than a few minutes of tinkering to get the cd detection to work then don't bother. It isn't worth your time when you could just grab a nocd crack that does the same thing but faster. You aren't costing Blizzard any money if you bought the game, so any moral qualms you have with the idea of a crack are groundless.
_________________
There is no substitute for experience.
Imperfection indicates a lack of effort.

[whiskeypriest]

I never mentioned any moral qualms with using a crack; I simply stated that I'd prefer not to use one unless absolutely necessary. If that's the only option available to me, I consider it fair use of the game I purchased and will continue to sleep soundly at night. Regardless, I can understand your sentiment and have no wish to spend the next few weeks working on this.

That said, I've gotten over the detection hurdle only to encounter another one:

[discomfitor]

Try using the 20040914 version of wine. I have problems with the October version myself.
_________________
There is no substitute for experience.
Imperfection indicates a lack of effort.

[whiskeypriest]

So, progress (of a sort).

First off, I googled the bulk of that error message; the result led me back to WineHQ and their article on running WC3. While wading through the detection nonsense, I’d apparently forgotten to do something about the movies (which I had read about before and promptly forgotten, it seems)…need to start taking better notes. So I renamed the Movies directory, launched the game off the command line again, and was rewarded with a message about a missing key and instructions to reinstall the game.

After nuking ~/.wine/ from orbit for the sixteenth time in two days, reconfiguring/reinstalling the whole mess, patching WC3 current, and making sure it skipped the introductory movie (see here)…and it worked.

Sort of.

The game fired up just fine; I could play both SP (only tried custom games) and on Battle.net without issue. Game play itself was somewhat dodgy: sound latency was horrible after about sixty seconds, and many of the textures were missing (e.g. no animated character portraits, no “ghost images” while placing potential buildings) but the game was far from unplayable. Since ALSA seems to be persnickety (had to reset my mixer levels going from 2.6.8-r10 to 2.6.9-r1, and the same was true in reverse) on its first boot, I decided to cycle the machine in hopes of ironing out the sound issue.

This was apparently a mistake. After the reboot, I got the same message about a missing key and instructions to reinstall the game. This was where I left it last night, using gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.8-r10 and wine-20041019. I’ll do another wash-rinse-repeat this evening, but in the meantime, are you getting wine-20040914 from Portage? Perhaps I’ve missed something, but the only versions I had available to me last night were 20040716 and 20041019…

Thanks for your help, by the way.

[discomfitor]

You can find a 20040914 ebuild on bugzilla if you look, or you can just bump the 20041019 down to 20040914 and remove any version specific things in the ebuild. Make sure you don't use the alsa driver for wine, because it doesn't work. At all.
_________________
There is no substitute for experience.
Imperfection indicates a lack of effort.

[whiskeypriest]

I'll see what I can do with it tonight...and yeah, I've been sticking with the oss driver in Wine after one ugly experiment with winealsa.drv.

Will post the results once I've had a chance to suss things out. Thanks again.

[whiskeypriest]

Got it. Mostly.

Took me a bit to find a working ebuild for 20040914, so for posterity’s sake let me say that I used this one (making the corrections the author mentioned in his successive comment).

After that, rebuilding the whole mess (as above) was textbook. The game starts with no problems, plays relatively smoothly, and the sound issues I’d experienced before were not in evidence this time around. Game plays SP (custom games) and MP (Battle.net was no problem). Game performance was replicable through multiple reboots. The SP campaign seems to be inaccessible, but that’s no loss so far as I’m concerned. TeamSpeak must be started before the game, but again, that’s hardly a major problem.

I did notice a couple things I’d like to correct (if possible). First, the mouse cursor won’t stay within the confines of the game window, which is highly annoying. I do have "DXGrab" = "Y" in my configuration; is there anything else that needs to be done with this?

Second (and probably corollary to the first) is that I don’t believe I’m issuing the -opengl option correctly. For the game to run, I issue:

[ConVicTioN]

One command to get war3 working with cdrom. I have no problems at all with war3 winx/cedega
Before you mount cdrom.

[discomfitor]

To get opengl mode running correctly, you should do exactly what you've been doing:

[whiskeypriest]

ConVicTioN:

I'm not using any TransGaming products, nor is the CD detection an issue for me at this time; regardless, thanks for the tip. Perhaps I'll have a look at that sometime in the future...

Darckness:

Thanks again for your assistance. All things considered, I'm going to call this little experiment a success: while starting a new instance of X is a great idea, my ATi card is having none of it. I've read elsewhere that this is an issue with the ATi drivers; it doesn't matter if I attempt to launch the new instance from a console or an existing session, neither function to my satisfaction.

I've (mostly) solved the problem by simply setting ”Desktop” = “N” in my configuration; the mouse cursor will still fly off into my second monitor if I cross that particular edge of the screen, but the other cardinal directions are fine. I'm calling this “good enough” and moving on.

Again, thanks for the help.

[yogipsu]

This is just a "me too" post echoing whiskeypriest's earlier troubles. On the 2.6.8 series, I was able to run War3 fine-- without a cd crack, on BNet fine, and with perfect graphics and sound under ALSA.

As soon as I upgraded 2.6.9, I get this whenever I attempt to run the program (though PokerStars works fine):

[whiskeypriest]

Actually, my "solution" for the CD detection issue was to downgrade from 2.6.9-r1 to 2.6.8-r10. Nothing more, nothing less.

I'll give it another go when the next iteration of gentoo-dev-sources hits Portage, but in the meantime, there's nothing in 2.6.9 that I can't live without.

[yogipsu]

Same. I decided to downgrade to 2.6.8-r10, but it turns out that I'm getting the "Invalid CD Key" error-- but only *after* I install Frozen Throne. It worked fine on RoC.

Suppose I'll just continue to reinstall.

[whiskeypriest]

Can't tell you anything about Frozen Throne, but for what it's worth...

W3:RoC loads flawlessly about half the time; as for the remainder, it seems to require an intricate combination of:

• Mounting and unmounting the media.
  
• Multiple attempts to start the game; the first few either fail without feedback or result in invalid key and/or reinstall messages.
  
• Swinging a dead cat counter-clockwise above my head while typing...

  Code:

  $ echo "My life for Ner'zhul!" >> ~/load.dammit

  
  ...in a separate console, three times in succession.

Best of luck with it...if you find a consistent solution, please post it.

[Xyun]

I'm using cedega and I cant seem to get TFT nor ROC to detect the CDROM even after following the instructions here.

Here are extracts from my cedega config file (I followed my fstab config for the device for my cdrom):

[Cerdan]

Hi Guys,

my experience with wine and Warcraft 3 was that only older versions of wine did actually work with Win2k simulation turned on. I got Warcraft 3 working with ebuilds dated January 2004 and December 2003 without NoCD patch. Later ebuilds from e.g. April 2004 did no longer work for me (it took me hours to find that out, I always thought I was too dumb to get it working )

I guess the developers did some changes on "how wine talks to a cd-rom / dvd-rom" or something like that

I also heard about a safedisc copy protection patch for wine, maybe someone else can help us with that?

Thomas

[Cerdan]

[Cerdan]

I found some more information about the Warcraft 3 Copy Protection issue on the developer's mailing list:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Warcraft 3 will not run without a crack after the following commit:
http://www.winehq.org/hypermail/wine-cvs/2004/03/0093.html

If no one wants to tackle this immediately I'd like to fix it. Any ideas?

Brian G.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thomas

[yogipsu]

Just thought I'd update-- WC3 works fine now in 2.6.8-r10. I don't know why, actually, since it seems that it magically fixed itself.

I sometimes have to install the program twice; it seems that it only works after installing it, rm -r'ing Program Files/Warcraft III, and installing again.

Sometimes during the install I get an error about "desktop.ini" (I think; it's not the standard error that talks about not being able to create desktop links). If that happens, I rm the directory and try again.

There's really no rhyme or reason as far as I can tell, but it works perfectly-- so I'm masking wine and will wait a few rc's for the kernel before trying again.