Hi folks.
I love The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind and ever since I have upgraded to the Crossover Linux 11.3.1 on my PCLinuxOS 2012 KDE4 box I have been trying to get it to run and I finally did.
First of all - I own the Elder Scrolls III Morrowind Gold Edition (Polish version of it).
To install the game I used the tie for The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim just renamed the bottle to The_Elder_Scrolls_III_Morrowind and chose my DVD media as a installer source. Why? Seemed like a good idea. I am pretty sure ordinary XP bottle would work just as well but Skyrim bottle installs couple of extra components:
- Microsoft DirectX Runtime Modern
- DirectX 9
- Microsoft C++ Visual 6.0 Redistributable
- Microsoft C++ Visual 2008 Redistributable
After installing the game started just fine (I had to click "Try Again" tho when asked by Crossover) it went thru the Loading and Initializing steps and froze just before the game "menu". Music was repeating itself in the loop. Tried it couple of times from the Desktop shortcut. Sometimes game would just freeze. Sometimes it would freeze while playing the music in loop. Sometimes it would just crash. After investigation I found this in the terminal:
GThread-WARNING **: GThread system no longer supports custom thread implementations.
wine client error:2a: read: Bad address
wine client error:2a: read: Bad file descriptor
After some research I have opened the "Manage Bottles" configuration and chose the "The_Elder_Scrolls_III_Morrowind". Next I clicked on the "Control Panel". Next I double clicked the "Wine configuration" and waited for the winecfg window to show up. Now I clicked on the "Libraries" tab and I have typed in:
winegstreamer.dll
into the "New override for library" and then I clicked add. The library was added to the list it was highlighted. I clicked "Edit" button and ticked the radio button next to "Disable" and clicked "Ok". It changed the libraries entry on the list to "winegstreamer (disabled)". Then I clicked "Apply" and "Ok" on the winecfg window. Then I have closed the winecfg window and I was back to "Control Panel" on the "Manage Bottles" configuration app. I double clicked "Simulate Reboot".
Then I had to deal with the "Morrowind Launcher" issue and this post by John Pietrzak pushed me into renaming "Morrowind Launcher.exe" to "Morrowind_Launcher.exe" in the game's install folder and that sorted out the problem with game starting instead of launching the "Morrowind Launcher". From there I could add "Bloodmoon" and "Tribunal" data files and setup proper video card options for the game.
Next issue was a performance. My machine is not very powefull. It's a Acer Travelmate 2420 machine. Firs I had to do was to disable "Shaders" in the "Morrowind Launcher" Options. This allowed me to go "outside". Well I could go outside but the speed of rendering graphics was really terrible when the Shaders were enabled and it tool long time to even load exteriors...
Then I have messed around with some registry settings in the regedit editor for the Morrowind bottle and with the entries in the Morrowind.ini file to improve performance even if just a tiny bit. I used these sites as reference:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Linux
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archive/index.php/t-156033.html
http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys
It's a bit of lottery with the registry keys. Sometimes they will help but sometimes they may just crash the game. Take Your time to get it right. I am actually still messing with them and no performance boost so far...
So far that's it. If I will stumble upon something more I will edit this post and add it.
Edit 01: I am trying an empty Win98 bottle to see if I will get better performance - first thing I have noticed is that game crashes before it starts with the
msvcp60.dll
error pointed out in the error details. The solution is to replace this file in the c:\windows\system32\ with a windows version of it. The file exists in the bottle but it's not behaving correctly. Replacing it with windows version will allow the game to start. You will have to perform all the steps mentioned above on top of that.
Regards.
AndrzejL