StarCraft in Linux

Warning: This information applies to StarCraft 1, is extremely old, and may be totally useless.

StarCraft itself is extremely playable under wine in Linux. Single player works flawlessly and all the cut scenes look just as good as they do in Windows.

I’m not going to tell you how to get it working, because it’s already been done:

There are a few notes I’d like to make in addition to the above (this information is quite possibly out of date):

  1. If you can play StarCraft fine, but your character is not saved, it’s probably because you do not have permission to write to the StarCraft dir. I had this problem because StarCraft was installed on my windows partition, and my Linux user didn’t have write permission to that directory. My solution was to just copy over the entire StarCraft directory into my home directory.
  2. If your screen scrolls right or down when you move your mouse to the edge, it’s probably because StarCraft has changed your X windows resolution, and X windows thinks you want to pan over to the right or down. I solved this by writting a one line script that starts StarCraft in its own X session. I put this in ~/bin/starcraft, “xinit /usr/bin/wine /home/mark/Starcraft/starcraft.exe — :2 -xf86config XF86Config-starcraft” For this to work, root has to create an XF86Config-starcraft file with 640×480 as the only available resolution. So as root, copy /etc/X11/XF86Config to /etc/X11/XF86Config-starcraft, then edit that file and take out all resolutions except 640×480. It’s also probably a good idea to set the default color depth to 16.
  3. If you get the StarCraft message that says to make sure your CD is in the drive, then make sure you’ve mounted the CD, and that you’ve set up wine so it can read from your CD-ROM drive correctly.
  4. Windowed StarCraft is also cool, just edit your wine config file so programs open in a window, and don’t use the one line script above.
  5. For IPX to work in 2.4.x kernels, you only need “The IPX protocol” and not “IPX: Full internal IPX network” (I couldn’t get it to work when I had “IPX: Full internal IPX network” checked).

Problems: battle.net still does not display correctly. Double-clicking also doesn’t work anywhere for me, which seems weird.