What’s the best way to play pirated windows games on Linux?
Ever since I’ve migrated I stuck to emulation for game piracy cause it was pretty simple. Ive been trying to run some repacked games but I can’t get them to install properly.
I don’t see many people talk about this probably because most game pirates use windows if I had to guess.
Edit: i fixed my problem, yesterday When running the fitgirl installer it would only show me two drives ,c and z, which were my home and root folder respectively. I wanted to install my game to a bigger drive, but couldn’t find the option to and assumed it was a problem with wine or the installer. A few hours ago I searched for a bit and found out I can add a drive to wine via winecfg -> Drives -> add drives. I ran the Installer again and this time it saw my bigger 1tb drive and everything went smoothly from there, ran The installer, added the game on steam, ran the game, all good.
Either Bottles or Lutris. Lutris is the popular way, but the Bottles fans swear by it. Either one will get you going, and neither one is usually difficult. There is the occasional game or app that is a little bitch though.
Lutris, Bottles, …
Im not an expert at all but can i know what actually goes wrong? I usually just type wine gameinstaller.exe and it does its job, then i add the executable to nonsteam games. Just curious
Yesterday When running the fitgirl installer it would only show me two drives ,c and z, which were my home and root folder respectively. I wanted to install my game to a bigger drive, but couldn’t find the option to and assumed it was a problem with wine or the installer. A few hours ago I searched for a bit and found out I can add a drive to wine via winecfg -> Drives -> add drives. I ran the Installer again and this time it saw my bigger 1tb drive and everything went smoothly from there, ra. The installer, added the game on steam, ran the game, all good.
Maybe I’ll add this to the post in case anyone wants to know.
Sweet 😎 thx for the update might come in handy
I should’ve asked the question earlier. Thank you so much!
Not related to the post, just a horror story that happened to me recently.
My friend forced me to download Lethal Company repack from a very very shady looking website. Not even a tracker, some random hole. So I put the file into my torrent software, downloaded, fired up wine to install it, all’s good. Game installed properly. Turn it on, it works just fine… Close the game for a sec to get obs up and running, turn the game back up. It errors out. Huh? Try to check out game files… the entire fucking wine prefix directory was nuked. Like… it just wasn’t fucking there 💀💀
Be careful pirating shit even on linux and don’t give in to your normie friends whims, instead help them to get stuff from a respectable tracker.
Others mentioned good sources.
I like to install in Lutris.
If the game is not a Steam exclusive, you can get some help from Lutris-scripts, and if the game is a bit older, maybe even winehq appdb. Otherwise, ProtonDB (if the game doesn’t run but the recent reviews say to just hit play, look for older reviews).
Most of the time, the issue will be .NET or vcrun (Majorgeeks AIO is easier than winetricks IMO)
Barely had issues wich FG yet. She even has instructions for Linux. Limit to 2GB RAM works almost always.
I had one game where I had to use the Lutris 7.2 runner and I had a diyferent game where a feature would only work with Proton.
Newer Codex cracks don’t work.
I’ve been using heroic game launcher. Easier then Lutris and bottles.
Jc141 on 1337x is nice. Their collection is limited to games above 85% rating on steam.
I’ve just used wine or wine ge. Some games don’t work as well as others. If you want better compatibility adding games to steam or lutris might help if you can use proton
I’ve tried all the ways, and Bottles was the easiest by far. Make a bottle for games from the high seas, using bottles’ preset for games. Once created change the wine from Soda to whatever you want or just use Soda.
Then inside the bottle look for install dependencies and grab things like vc redist, and dot net. Once that’s done under the bottles’ UI choice “Run Executable” and chose the .exe for the game’s installer. If it doesn’t work as expected, click the cog/gear and select the checkbox for “Run in Terminal” to see where it goes wrong and search online for what fix is needed.
The only time I had to troubleshoot with terminal, was for a mspatcha.dll problem. It was an easy fix: the bottle has a Legacy Wine Tools > Configuration > Libraries, where I found mspatcha listed, then changed it to “Native then Built in.”
Hope that helps.
I just switched over to using heroic launcher from lutris, its prettier and a smoother setup IMO. I have had issues as well installing some games from fitgirl, the install always failed. However they would install on windows just fine. So I did that then copied over the install files to my Linux hard drive and setup them up in heroic launcher.
I’ve only had to do this with 3 games from fitgirl, maybe I’m missing something but I could not get these 3 games to install on linux. This is why I keep a hard drive with windows installed on it :)
Running the installer with wine first and then adding the game exe as a non-steam game and running it with proton works for me.
A lot of repack installers won’t work in Linux, not even with proton. Use the original scene release instead if you can.
deleted by creator
I’ve been installing dodi, elamigos, fitgirl repacks for a while and still have to find one not working. Dunno what repacks are you installing.
I’ve only had issues with fitgirl repacks i think there’s an optimisation they use for low RAM machines that doesn’t play well with proton
i tried many different cyberpunk 2077 repacks from dodi and fitgirl and none would finish installation with wine
Try the jc141 repack. It worked for me. It’s a linux repack so I think their script handles the wine stuff.
apparently his repacks are for arch, fedora and debian unstable. no setup provided for ububtu based, so that’s a nope then.
Yes. You can make it work but it’s just too much work to support it. Gaming needs cutting edge releases.
Check which version wine you are running. It could be the main problem.
Personally Elamigos works for me but not Fitgirl
I’ve tried a number of fitgirl ones and had only around a 50% success rate with them.
Yeah fitgirl doesn’t work well with translation layers. In my experience elamigos works the best out of all repackers.
I wrote step by step instructions for installing windows repacks on linux using Lutris. https://sopuli.xyz/comment/9858101
I install FG Dodi and Gnarly repacks and ElAmigos updates this way. I have only had weird bugs with ~5 that would only unpack in a Windows VM and 2 that needed native Windows (BG3 and Until Dawn) but tbh I have a feeling its an AMD issue not a wine issue
Bottles. It’s the best click and play experience imo. Select the gaming preset and use wine-ge or proton-ge as the runner (default is soda which is not really good) and you are good to go.
Sometimes the installers don’t work correctly on proton-get so use system installed wine and you are good to go.
