Best way to store .exe files for Wine on FatDog Live Medium?

[Neo_78]

I have a couple of older Windows-based strategy games that ship as .exe installers (roughly 500 MB each), which should work in Wine, for instance wine example.exe. The FatDog repository seems to offer Wine in multiple versions.

I am wondering what is the best way to prepare a FatDog Live medium (DVD or USB) that incorporates those .exe files and runs them in memory. I don't care much about the save games and do not plan to install FatDog on a hard drive. So basically when you boot from the live medium, the .exe files are already present and the game can be temporarily installed until next boot. Not sure if that idea is possible.

Has anyone tried to get Steam via Proton working on FatDog?

Thanks for your feedback!

[jamesbond]

The FatDog repository seems to offer Wine in multiple versions.

Multiple wine versions because different games requires different versions of Wine.
Wine packages are available as standard packages (which you can install from gslapt) or as SFS (which you can install from SFSManager).

I am wondering what is the best way to prepare a FatDog Live medium (DVD or USB) that incorporates those .exe files and runs them in memory. I don't care much about the save games and do not plan to install FatDog on a hard drive. So basically when you boot from the live medium, the .exe files are already present and the game can be temporarily installed until next boot. Not sure if that idea is possible.

Possible. How big your USB? I don't recommend DVD - at 4.7GB, it's too small (uncompressed wine easily takes 500MB, and that's before installing it's own data files). If you only have one version of wine, that's probably OK; but if you require different wine versions for different game, that space grows up very quickly.

This is how I do it. Others may suggest a different way.

0. Make sure you load 32-bit compat lib. Fatdog's wine packages are multilib and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit, but most games requires 32-bit wine, especially older ones. Newer ones tend not to work anyway, so we can just ignore that bit (Seriously, I have also run one or two 64-bit games, that works okay so far, but 64-bit support is still considered experimental I think. At least the last time I looked at it.)

1. I use wine.sfs; so I load the correct version of the wine.sfs for the game I want to play.
2. Create an image-directory for the sandbox. Do it in an external partition (don't do it anywhere under /, do it in /mnt/sdxxx e.g. /mnt/sdb1/play/bazooka.
3. I copy the game.exe (installer) to that directory (so now it resides in /mnt/sdb1/play/bazooka/game.exe)
4. I run rw-sandbox.sh pointing to that directory: rw-sandbox.sh /mnt/sdb1/play/bazooka
5. Inside the sandbox, I run winecfg to initialise wine.
6. Once done, I run winetricks to install the appropriate libraries.
7. Once done, I launch the game installer, by running wine /game.exe
8. Once done installing, I run winefile to open the file manager, and find the installed.exe, and then launch it from there. You can also run winecmd and find the installed.exe yourself if you're brave
9. If everything works, you can delete the game installer.exe from /mnt/sdb1/play/bazooka/game.exe
10. When done playing, just leave the sandbox. All your previous settings, save games, etc are saved in that image-directory.
11. Next time you want to play, just do step 1, 4, and 8.

Q&A
Q1. Why use sandbox and not install wine directly and then remaster?
A1. So you can have multiple (probably different) wine settings (and perhaps wine itself) for different games.

Q2. I don't want to use wine.sfs, what can I do?
A2. Download the wine packages (don't install it, download only), and then install it to your image-directory, like this: ROOT=/mnt/sdb1/play/bazooka installpkg /path/to/wine-package.txz
This way, you can have different versions of wine in different image-directory.
Of course, if you can live with only one wine version, just install it directly to the system and remaster.

Has anyone tried to get Steam via Proton working on FatDog?

Not me, and this is why: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/5042 (among many other reasons).

And then consider other builds:
- wine-ge: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine ... m/releases
- wine-lutris: https://github.com/lutris/wine/releases
- wine-tkg: https://github.com/Frogging-Family/wine ... t/releases (probably won't work as it requires glibc 2.33 while Fatdog has 2.27)
- and many others.
I haven't tried any of them, so I don't know if they work or not. If you do test them, please report back for the benefit of others.

EDITED for typo and clarity.

[Neo_78]

Thanks for your detailed guide @jamesbond Will try this with a USB flash drive.

[Neo_78]

A couple of questions to clarify your instructions @jamesbond:

- Let's say I have 5 different .exe game installers, can I create a small partition for each game directly on the USB drive (64 GB), for instance with gparted? Which format would each partition need to be?

- If the PC has a different Linux OS installed on a hard drive, is there a way to ensure that this hard drive / OS cannot be accessed or mounted when FatDog64 is booted from USB without having to physically detach the hard drive?