Running FFVII in WINE (Linux)

[sithlord48]

hey every one i got ff7 working  via wine on kubuntu (8.10-10.10) and it should also apply to other gnu/linux distros. getting ff7 to work with wine requires some 3rd party patches that will be provided, via an external links, and you will NEED a retail copy of the disks to play on your computer!
Why make this ??
FF7 is an awesome Game and IMHO one of (if not the) best rpg's of all time and i am very happy to be able to help everyone get it working with wine so we can all play it again(and maybe for the first time), and since this requires some extra work, i have created a guide so that all of us who bought this game for the pc (and some of us even after already having it for the psx.). can finally use the game with linux,(maybe even mac os via darwine).

Getting FF7 To Work In Wine on Kubuntu 9.04

Before We Get Started You Will Need to have a few things installed and some ff7 tools gathered
Things you will need, and where to get them
1.A copy of Final Fantasy 7 For The PC.

I am not sure if you can find it on a store shelf any more, but I would look on ebay if you don't have a copy. You will need these disks not only to install but also to play the game.
2.Wine installed. On your machine
   You don't need to worry about configuring wine much yet (other then mapping your cdrom as D:\ ). But just install it from the wine repo
info on how to install wine can be found here . Find your distro and follow the instructions to install wine on your machine (kubuntu users use ubuntu instructions)
I current have wine 1.1.27 installed at time of writing

3.Winetools , a helper script.(included with newer wine versions)
   You will need wine tools to install some of the dependencies of FF7 and for dependencies for some of the patches you NEED to apply (also for optional stuff) You can get winetools from here extract the archive and place winetools in your /home folder.

4.A Few Extra Items..
FF7 will need these in order to run on linux, a HUGE thanks to everyone in these and other ff7 projects.
 FF7 1.02 Update (Link removed; domain was sniped and replaced with spam. ~Covarr)
    aali's open gl Driver

THE INSTALL PROCESS

Step 1: Pre Install Setup.
INSTALL YOUR VIDEO CARD DRIVERS! , this process depends greatly on your video card, some of you may have no drivers to install basicly if you can run glxgears you can play ff7
Open konsole and cd ~/
run

Code: [Select]

sh winetricksthis will open a gui you will need to install by selecting and clicking ok the following (one at a time is good in case of errors try again)
   corefonts
   directx9
   ffdshow (use defaults and allow for all programs when asked for video and audio)
   vcrun2008
   mfc42 (unsure of this as a requirement try with out it first install if needed, please comment)
   I might have missed a few vcrun2005 comes to mind.

Step 2: Install FF7
pop in you install cd and install as normal uncheck run ff7 config after install when prompted.

Step 3: Post Install Modding for Wine Compatibility
 this step is VERY  easy install aali's driver by coping the contents of the archive he provieds to your ff7 install dir, then running his moded ff7config.exe
you may also want to check out the ff7_opengl.cfg  file to set your res and a few other options. You do not have to make any changes to the cfg if you don't want to.

Step 5: life sucks with out background music. Here we have two choices!

***New version of aali's driver support background music in ogg format . see here for music****
1.NATIVE MIDI. (timidy is useful if you want this consult your distros docs for info on setting it up)
1a.Open up ff7config.exe and set your midi device to timidy port0 (there are quite a few if 0 don't work try others)
1b.then set the midi mode to yamaha XG midi (cause it sounds better)
1c.press the test button.
2.USING FF7MUSIC
be warned this can be buggy!
2a, go grab covarrs installer and be sure to use ogg as your output since it seams to work better with wine. (the newer installer does this by default.)

Step 6: Getting the wine sound to work (if it didn't the first time)
Open  the wine config tool
a. click the audio tab
check off alsa and test sound. If it works hit apply and ok if not try other sound output until you get one that works.

Step 7:  Run the game!

   Put disk one in you cd drive
for midi bkround music users : run ff7.exe
for  ff7music users run ficedula/ff7music.exe
and click run ff7 , if all goes well it should start up …
you may have to fiddle with settings to get ff7music to work  (covarrs installer , has helped this alot!)
Using this set up I can get ff7 to play so far perfectly! ,very few times the bkmusic will stop for a few seconds here and there but will start backup. Also very few times the screen will go black (had a sleep timer on my display , oops.)

ENJOY!

NOTE: if you have kubuntu 10.10, and you have tried to fix the sound effects but still can't get them to work(but ff7 music does) then you will have to install a pulseaudio enabled version of wine please use google to search for winepulse and you should find the proper PPA easily. Or you can remove pulseaudio (my perfered way to fix)

for more info on tool and mod compatibility (or to provide some) please see this thread
ff7 related  tools and mods with wine



- I've split this out into its own topic, and stickied. It seemed to deserve the attention. - Bosola

Bosola you have broken links in other threads please correct the link in the thread you split this from *KM's first post. (then remove this and above note plz )

[ShoeUnited]

I would like to note that wine's current version (1.3.32) has removed the drop down list of compatible drivers.   What the poster above pushed is now a bit outdated and you may need to look into modifying your config while WINE is preparing its Vista audio support.  Supposedly this will include automatic recognition of all sound drivers and pass on information to whatever is running.  Including pulseaudio, which the *buntu user has by default.  As of right now, there is no pulseaudio support.  But if you wish to setup for OSS or dmix wine's wiki has more detailed information here:  http://wiki.jswindle.com/index.php/Wine_Config_File#Configuring_Sound  Additionally, your distro may have wine-pulse.

I suggest you do not test to see if the game will run until you install aali's openGL mod.  Wine generates too many errors trying to run this with DX9 and can end zombie-ing the process.

If you are having issues with this game running off of the disc, try using CDemu for easier mounting/unmounting of the disc as the same device.

I'd like to thank the above which added a little bit of sanity to my *Nixy ways.

[sithlord48]

while wine does not currectly offically support pulseaudio i have had it working just fine with pulse. i do however remove pulseaudio from my systems and instead let it revert to ALSA ,on *buntu basicly pulse is just running on top as alsa. that prolly why wine audio seams to work fine with pulse, but it should be noted that timitdy doesn't work currently with pulse so midi sound might be out for those uses.

[ShoeUnited]

That is mostly correct.  What you did do is get it mostly working with alsa.  With the pulseaudio-alsa libraries what happens usually is that pulse audio passes the information over to alsa instead of running it itself. 

Unfortunately from my experience, pulse and alsa can either fight over who gets control of the audio or they may cooperate.  Sometimes I'll get pulse to punch in the occasional midi while alsa is running the ogg files.  Sometimes pulse having been run recently on another program can cause alsa not to want to load the audio controller giving a directsound error and causing FF7 to crash. 

I bring up the issue of pulse not working due to a failure in recent alsa to always work with HDMI audio out.  As it stands, this hasn't addressed OSS as a viable option.   But with the recent version of wine (1.3.32) there is no longer a dropdown box.  Therefore, I left the link to the setup guide and clarification on how wine handles audio for other users who may have problems.  I hadn't tried getting midi up and running yet (just letting pulse attempt/fail where it could while I updated various game files).  So, I'll take a look later and see if/what is needed to get things to be kosher.

Also to note: if you have removed (uninstalled) pulseaudio then you aren't running it anymore.  You're just running alsa.  Unless what you meant is that you stopped the server/process and let alsa run on its own since pulse will auto-load with other preset applications (flashplugin seems to make it restart).  Pulse's entire purpose is to act as a unified driver for working with alsa, pulse, oss, and esd.

[sithlord48]

yes im quite aware of how pulse/alsa works. and yes the guide does need to be updated. ill get around to that at some point when i have some time to re write it from scratch.cause u know things like having to fetch wintricks and winetricks whole layout have changes, aside from the new audio system that will mostly configure itself.  im also using wine 1.3.32 and i am aware of the audio changes. i can't speak for HDMI as i don't use it. aside from its susposed to be a general guide. cause there are lots of small variations  between distros,and im guessing the user is not completely clueless as to how to use their distro..

[norikoteiko]

Better run is with Cedega.

The newest Cedega is content of the GamTree Linux Developer program.

You can Download it here http://gametreelinux.com/ the only thing is needed is a registration.

If you are running FF7 trough Wine you can install needed Windows DLL´s or DirectX with Winetricks.

[sithlord48]

Better run is with Cedega.

The newest Cedega is content of the GamTree Linux Developer program.

You can Download it here http://gametreelinux.com/ the only thing is needed is a registration.

If you are running FF7 trough Wine you can install needed Windows DLL´s or DirectX with Winetricks.

how can u run better then fullspeed?

[norikoteiko]

how can u run better then fullspeed?

cedega runs in fullspeed and is easier to use for casual user

[Arek]

nori, I would never recommend Cedega to anyone anymore.  If you want an easier time handling wine and its quirks, use PlayOnLinux instead - it does many of the things Cedega does, but is free, and if you want to support wine development, use Crossover (formerly Crossover Games) instead, since it's made by the same folks that make Wine itself, and the proceeds go to supporting the folks who make Wine the great program it is.

Last I checked, Cedega is a far less-supported product based on a very old version of Wine, and its compatibility, frankly, sucked.  Badly  (Heck, Wine now supports .NET 2.0 well enough to run BFE - something I seriously doubt Cedega can claim).  The only thing Cedega can lay claim to is compatibility with certain very obnoxious copy-protection methods used by some games - copy protection methods which are not used in FF7, or many other games for that matter....and even Wine is much better at handling these than it used to be.

--Arek

P.S.  Let it be known that I haven't checked out Cedega in a good while, but my comments above stand.  Cedega cannot benefit from improvements in mainline Wine, since those improvements are released under the GPL and Cedega relies on the older less restrictive licensing wine used to be released under (MIT, iirc, or perhaps the modified BSD license), so any improvements happening to Cedega have to be developed independently of Wine, or at least specifically given to the Cedega folks by the programmers that wrote them.

[syntax error]

It could be that FF VII blocking bugs are already fixed in WINE.

[sithlord48]

wine 1.4 is pretty nice the audio is much easer to set up basicly nothing other then the ff7 config program. as someone noted above the audio panel from wine 1.3+ has changed from the above layout. at some point (hopefully soon) i will recreate the how to using an updated wine and linux distro.

[quequotion]

Having a linux only system, I was very happy to discover about three years ago that FF7 was functional in WINE after a series of hacks and configuration changes.

Since I've been using linux for years, command line hacks and text file configurations have become commonplace for me.

Imagine my surprise when I install FF7 in wine1.5.... and it practically works out of the box.

OUT OF THE BOX... (practically)

If you are a wizard, by which I mean someone who can compile wine from git and configure alsa drivers from regedit, read no further.


"Practically", meaning that:
1. Aali's OpenGL driver must be considered absolutely necessary to run the program on any kind of modern computer anyway.
2. MIDI is a nightmare all it's own, but considerably more manageable these days than it used to be.

In fact, I didn't even try running the game without Aali's driver. That test should be done, eventually.
FF7's MIDI audio was the most troublesome aspect of the game for me, but that has a lot to do with my particular hardware.

You could read the rest of my post, or you could read just what I had to to here.

I have an emu10k1, SoundBlaster Audigy Live! 5.1.
This is a cheap 5.1 surround card with an onboard MIDI synthesizer.
Using a software synthesizer, like timidity++, is probably much easier!

I had installed WINE from a launchpad PPA (in ubuntu obviously).
For political(?) reasons, the Ubuntu WINE Team PPA is distributing wine with an unofficial pusleaudio driver by default.
I really shouldn't get into it here, but suffice to say the wine devs aren't quite ready to face the inevitability of pulseaudio support.

The winepulse.drv audio driver does not support any kind of MIDI ouptut as far as I can tell.
This is a problem with Pulseaudio, not the driver itself.
There may be ways around this, but I spent 48 hours searching for any kind of documentation or bug reports or anything and came up empty-handed.

Pulseaudio does not support midi, but it can output midi audio from an ALSA source.
You will have to use winealsa.drv for the time being.

The best way to get there is with winetricks:

Code: [Select]

winetricks sound=alsa.
This allowed me to run FF7Config.exe and the game itself, which require a MIDI device of some kind.

Unfortunately, winealsa is no longer offering a pulseaudio output pathway by default in winecfg.
It will setup audio to use the sound card through alsa directly? in which PCM sounds terrible for reasons beyond my understanding.

It is necessary to set up a pulseudio pathway manually in regedit, winecfg, and FF7Config.
See my post in the ubuntu forums for an idea of what to do.

[Skillmon @R+]

The change to alsa worked for me (only for FFVII), but the game is asking for CD 1, 2 or 3 to be insert, even if CD 1 is inside the drive. So I still can't run it (but sound works fine in FF7config). Another problem is, that when I want to try MIDI in the FF7config there are no sounds and the program freezes. This issue is just in the MIDI section.

Since I changed the driver to ALSA in WINE the sounds of Diablo 2 are crappy, anybody who knows a solution?


I'm using WINE 1.5.5 in Ubuntu 12.04
During installation the command sh winetricks didn't work!

corefonts
   directx9
   ffdshow (use defaults and allow for all programs when asked for video and audio)
   vcrun2008
   mfc4

those weren't inside of my winetricks
glxgears was no problem!

please help me! I'm very new to Ubuntu

Skillmon

[rufioik708]

I had the same issue with the CD thing. I had to do two things to fix it. Make sure the path to my CD mount point was in winecfg (the auto detect worked fine for me). When that didn't work, I remembered having the issue when I first played FF7 for pc, and had to run regedit to change the location that the game looked for the CD (I hope to never actually have so many drives that I need a Z:\). The key is in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Square Soft, Inc.\Final Fantasy VII. Hope it helps.

[quequotion]

The change to alsa worked for me (only for FFVII), but the game is asking for CD 1, 2 or 3 to be insert, even if CD 1 is inside the drive. So I still can't run it (but sound works fine in FF7config). Another problem is, that when I want to try MIDI in the FF7config there are no sounds and the program freezes. This issue is just in the MIDI section.

Since I changed the driver to ALSA in WINE the sounds of Diablo 2 are crappy, anybody who knows a solution?


I'm using WINE 1.5.5 in Ubuntu 12.04
During installation the command sh winetricks didn't work!those weren't inside of my winetricks
glxgears was no problem!

please help me! I'm very new to Ubuntu

Skillmon

I have good news for you:

First, MIDI has been fixed in winepulse!
This means anyone installing FF7 in a clean install of wine 1.5 (from the wine team ppa) will have no extra work to do other than installing Aali's OpenGL driver.

For those of you who took my advice before:
You can use regedit to revert HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Drivers string value Audio to pulse.

Second: CDEmu

I converted all of my FF7 cds into ISO images, and use this utility to mount and swap them.

This tool is different from others in that it actually works.

There are features of cds, like certain types of copy protection, that cannot be provided by simply mounting an image to a folder.
CDEmu works by not simply mounting the images to a folder and providing the files, but emulating a disk drive and a cd inserted into it.

Strangely, very few of the many guides I've seen around for mounting images in Linux acknowledge this.

[scix]

I converted all of my FF7 cds into ISO images, and use this utility to mount and swap them.

This tool is different from others in that it actually works.

There are features of cds, like certain types of copy protection, that cannot be provided by simply mounting an image to a folder.
CDEmu works by not simply mounting the images to a folder and providing the files, but emulating a disk drive and a cd inserted into it.

Strangely, very few of the many guides I've seen around for mounting images in Linux acknowledge this.

Just thought I'd note that if you use Kranmer's DLL you only need to make one disc image for one disc, and don't need to do any disc swapping.

[Covarr]

Wizard, I removed your post. If a link has gone bad, we don't need to relink it.

Sithlord48, I've edited the FF7 Universe link out of your first post. I might look around to see if 1.02 has been rehosted anywhere else, but for now that link is bad.

[Aurora]

Information about getting 7th Heaven 2.0 to work in Wine can be found in the relevant forum topic here.