1154
Everything seems to be humming along fine, for the most part. Linux continues to be… different. I still haven’t found a program that is anything like as good as Winamp/Wacup, which is sad.
But mostly, I’ve been playing games to distract myself from the horrors of the world.
So far, this has been exclusively in DOSBox (not Staging - that was a deadend) and it’s been mostly fine (apart from perpetually forgetting to open File Mangler first to force Linux to mount the drives containing the games) but there are a couple of games that need Windows, so Wine is next.
I had a very small go at trying Wine, downloading it from the Software Manager, but it was quite daunting (i.e. utterly unintuitive to me) so I scurried back to DOS games.
So today I’m following this:
https://techyorker.com/how-to-install-wine-on-linux-mint-a-step-by-step-guide-for-beginners/
https://archive.ph/d1gq2
Lots of Terminal commands, which I suppose I should get used to. I’m feeling pessimistic because the last time I followed lots of Terminal commands (see May 2024…) it did not go well.
Gotta admit: I’m being rather lazy and copypasting the longer commands.
I’m not, thankfully, the first person to face the first problem I encountered:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/984844/e-unable-to-locate-package-winehq-stable
https://archive.ph/puxyF
Substituting “wine” instead of “winehq” is important for later steps too.
So far, I’ve successfully reached the Wine configuration window, which is all the time I have now, but it’s promising!
1955
Still not quite back at the computer, but just thought I should add the names of the games I want to play, in case I search this ramble later:
UFO: Enemy Unknown
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
Literally days of life thrown away (but not nearly as many as I've chucked at Civilization…)
Best not to think about it!
Stretch goal that’s just occurred to me, and seems obvious when I reread this entry: will Winamp run in Wine…? That’d be a dream!
2059
HOLY ZARKING POO; I just ran a Windows program in Linux! It was almost convenient, and it almost completely worked.
This got me some of the way:
https://suay.site/?p=1853
https://archive.ph/H7XXw
Wine creates a little pocket of Windows in /home/bananaworld/.wine/ with a C: drive and everything. Oh, such sweet nostalgia.
Then I used a Terminal command to install Wacup!!
wine /home/bananaworld/Downloads/wacup.exe
(I renamed the installation file from Wacupblahblahblahversionblahblah to something simpler)
I can’t use the same trick to run the program because spaces mean something in the Terminal, so running a command with a space in (between “Program” and “Files”) just confuzzles Linux:
wine /home/bananaworld/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/WACUP/wacup.exe
wine: failed to open "/home/bananaworld/.wine/drive_c/Program": c0000135
At the moment, Wine is missing from the the Linux context menu, so I followed the instructions on that page a little further, and to the letter… and whaddya know? It worked!
2223
Ok, I may be getting a little ahead of myself here, but shizzle is getting rizzle: I just installed and ran Memory Map. This is a monumental moment. I have an ancient Lenovo (but still badged “IBM”) T60 (which has previously featured in these pages as a comic book reader) running Windows 7 that I keep around for the sole purpose of running Memory Map (well, ok, and for reading comic books). The reason for that was that MM won’t run in Windows 10, so to have it running in an emulator (sorry, not an emulator, but I don’t fully understand how Wine works) is incredible.
But that’s enough for today. Such amazing successes!
(Though it won’t last…)
