Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWI9-t1qtHA
DOS & Windows Big Box Gaming On Linux Went Much Better Than I Expected
Introduction
We already know that Bazzite Linux is great for modern day Steam games. But how will it handle my physical big box DOS and Windows collection? Turns out it’s better than even I expected.
Script
Like many modern day PC gamers, I grew up in the 90s and the early 2000s playing big box DOS and Windows games just like these - and in fact, in my case, it was these very games that you see right here because this is but a small subset of the PC games that I’ve been collecting over the past…
…30 years, I guess - and as someone who is still very much a part of that world, I recently checked out a Linux distribution called Bazzite, which builds on Valve’s work with the Steam Deck and Steam OS, and I was very, very impressed with it indeed - particularly its support for modern day Windows games under Steam.
If you cast your mind back to that video - and it was only a week ago, so hopefully you’ll remember - you will no doubt recall me taking a look at a launcher called Lutris, which adds support for these older DOS and Windows games, particularly ones distributed by platforms like GOG.
But as someone who’s been collecting these games for quite a long time now, surely I shouldn’t be expected to have to buy them all yet again on a new platform just to play them on my current day hardware?
It turns out I don’t, and it’s even easier than you might think - so I’m going to start with one of my favorite games of all time: Deus Ex, which also happens to be celebrating its 25th anniversary this month - and we’ll see where we go from there.
So here we are with my beloved and admittedly rather tatty original boxed copy of Deus Ex - I have owned this for 25 years and it has evidently been through the wars in that time, but hey, it’s one of the greatest games of all time, so I’m sure we can forgive it for its physical condition - and as mentioned, that is entirely my fault. Oh look, the jewel case is also broken as well! Wonderful!
But of course, the problem that we have here is that this is the Atari VCS - it doesn’t have an optical drive - there’s nowhere to actually shove the disc. Horrible oversight there by Atari, but thankfully there is a solution.
So I actually bought this a while back for another project that ended up not happening. It’s an Apple USB SuperDrive. It’s a DVD with a CD burner built in, I think - and I have previously tested this on this system, and there is a very small problem with this, but we can also overcome that hurdle and it is a problem that is specific to the Apple SuperDrive, thanks to Apple and their wonderful decision making, of course - so let me plug this in - and this drive doesn’t actually work on anything other than a MacBook Air because Apple have locked down the firmware - so it expects a very specific sequence of commands from the MacBook Air to unlock it.
But, this being Linux, of course, we can send low level commands over the SCSI bus or whatever - over the USB - to the drive to unlock it - and somebody on the internet worked that out a while ago so…
…there we go. That’s not a Linux thing, it’s not a Bazzite thing, it’s an Apple thing. But yeah, that one command does solve that problem.
Now with our working optical drive and our disc in hand, let’s just shove this into the slot.
A few short seconds later this pops up, no problems at all- it has recognized the drive so we’ll just mount and open that in Dolphin - which is KDE’S file browser - so as we can see, we’ve got all of the files here and this is a Windows executable of course - so we can’t just run this straight off, we need to run it through some kind of wrapper - and as we briefly touched on in the previous video, of course we have Lutris, so let’s just click through…
…and of course, last time around we were specifically interested in games from GOG, but I did mention that there was a lot more that this launcher could do - and as we can see, we do have Deus Ex in the list and indeed top of the list, we have the original CD-ROM version. So, it includes Direct3D 9, 10, and OpenGL renderers - and there are lots of other versions here as well, which I should probably also mention - and the cool thing about these is that if you want to install the Community Update or the GMDX mod - both excellent mods for the original game - you can actually do all of that through Lutris and it’s all kind of fully scripted as well, and all handled by the installer.
But I am a collector, as mentioned, and I’m interested in that authentic original experience so I’m going to go for the top option here - and just click through whatever the defaults are - and yes - so we’ve got a few different patches here: this top one, I believe, I seem to remember installing this back in the day, the 1.112 patch or whatever it is, I think that fixes some bugs and things so we definitely want that, and the others are just the renderers for DirectX and OpenGL so I’m going to leave those enabled as well, evidently Lutris knows what it’s doing so I’m just going to install those.
So here we go. Look at this: “Insert your Deus Ex CD-ROM. Lutris is looking for a mounted disc drive or image containing the following file or folder.” Shall we try to Auto Detect?
Oh!
I can hear the drive spinning! Look at this! Oh my goodness. This is the actual original installer exactly as it was if you ran it from the disc under Windows - so yeah, it’s detected that drive straight away, no problems at all. The disc has spun up, it’s launched the installer, we’ll just go through and just agree to all of this stuff - we’ll install everything.
“Setup is ready to install Deus Ex. The destination folder is C:\DeusEx.” Let’s just click on that.
…okay, so that took a surprisingly long time to install - I guess I’d forgotten just how slow these old CDs and things are but we did get there in the end, no problems whatsoever - and I’m not going to launch this immediately because I suspect that Lutris needs to install those patches and things before we can do anything, although I’m not sure - do you need to run the game first…? You know what, I’m just going to click on Finish and let this finish doing whatever it’s doing.
Ah, “About to install the multiplayer patch for Deus Ex”, so we’ll go through that - again, that’s the original Windows installer for that so that’s cool to see.
“This program will update your copy of Deus Ex.” Yes, I remember this from back in the day - this is the official update patch - so we’ll just run through this…
“Installation completed!” How interesting - so let’s close this because, huh, there it is listed under “Windows” - We’ve got the icon there as well. We also have a desktop shortcut here, although it doesn’t seem to have set an actual icon for that, but I’m sure we can do that a bit later on. Let’s try launching this through the official Lutris launcher and see how we get on.
Direct3D Support or Software Rendering - we’ll just go with Direct3D.
“Deus Ex has detected the following Direct3D compatible video card: ATI Radeon HD 5600 series.” Okay, I guess we’ll go with that - so we’ve got high quality, high detail, standard video resolution. Okay.
“You can change these options from the game’s preferences window later.”
Is that music absolutely iconic or what? My goodness - and it’s just launched straight into it - so yeah, we’ll click on “New Game”.
“Training Mission - before starting a new game for the first time we suggest running through the training mission.” No, we don’t want to do the training mission, I’ve played Deus Ex plenty of times before.
We’ll go for Hard difficulty.
JC Denton - and of course we need to decide how we want to spend our initial skill points - so yeah, I think, swimming, of course, the most important skill in the game. Let’s put all of our points into that. Wonderful!
“Start game.”
[Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week. I have already discussed the matter with the senator.]
[I take it he was agreeable?]
[He didn’t really have a choice.]
[Has he been infected?]
[Oh, yes. Most certainly when I mentioned that we could put him on the priority list for the Ambrosia vaccine, he was so willing it was almost pathetic.]
[This plague - the rioting is intensifying to the point where we may not be able to contain it.]
[Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they’ll beg us to save them.]
Look at this! It’s Deus Ex, running absolutely smoothly under Linux.
[I repeat, find Paul.]
[Paul, I thought you were in Hong Kong.]
[Welcome to the coalition.]
[Didn’t think you’d have a choice. What’s going on?]
Yada yada yada…
[NSF everywhere, JC. Your orders are to shoot on sight. A UNATCO informant on the north dock can get you inside the statue. Look for a bum. Identify yourself with the phrase “iron and copper.”]
[If you want to make a covert approach, remember the academy stealth course. Stay out of their field of view. Walk slowly to stay quiet and crouch behind cover. Or if you have to get your hands dirty, remember that a headshot is a lethal takedown.]
[This power box must have been damaged in the raid. Don’t cross through the arcs. I’m also picking up an EMP field here. If you’re not careful it’ll suck away your bioelectrical energy.]
[Let’s get the hell out of here.]
What a shame. Anyway, before I get too sucked into Deus Ex, I think we will leave it there for now.
No issues whatsoever as you saw: launching the game completely seamless, played the cut scenes and everything perfectly fine, and after a good few minutes of running around Liberty Island shooting terrorists and stuff I don’t have a single complaint about this - it’s completely flawless. Runs absolutely great so that is very cool indeed. But I am definitely going to get sucked into this if I spend any more time with it and I have a video to make - so I’m going to park that for now. Definitely going to come back to this one when I’ve got some downtime in the studio. Let’s move on to the next one.
Off to a flying start, I hope you’ll agree - and for my next game there is something a little bit different that I wanted to try - and it’s a racing game - and not only is it a racing game, it’s a Microsoft game, a first party Microsoft Studios game: Midtown Madness. I had hours and hours of fun with this back in the day. I think it actually came bundled with one of the PCs that we bought as a family at some point, and then later on I picked up the big box version of this so I’ve just grabbed this off the shelf. It’s a CD game again, so we’ll just pop this into the drive…
…and again, we’ve got the drive here, we can just see everything loading up. We’ve got some fonts on here as well. What’s this - Comic Sans!? Midtown Madness came with Comic Sans on the disc. Okay. There you go. Anyway yeah, we’ll just ignore that, that’s not really relevant - and we’ll just search for the installer again under Lutris - and as we can see, we’ve got the three games there: We’ve got Midtown Madness and two and three as well. I think three was released- yeah, it was, on the original Xbox, I remember playing that one as well. But we’ll just go through - so of course this is the CD release, there’s no information here at all, so hopefully it’s going to work.
We’ll just click through… “Select setup.exe on the game disc.” Let’s just find that.
It is also going to download a couple of updates - I’m not quite sure what they are, but we will allow it to do that - just let it do its thing.
“Insert or mount the game disc.” - I’m pretty sure we’ve already just done that, but, okay.
Ha! Wow - Look at this funky turn of the century era installer from Microsoft. We’ll just go through, just click next, next, next, next, next, in that way that you do, yep, accept that… Product identification… Accept that…
Look at this - Comic Sans in the actual installer! Wonderful stuff.
“Destination folder does not exist, do you want to create it?” Yes.
Space available, yada, yada, yada. We’ll go for the Complete Installation. What on earth is going on here? This is very much a product of its time, isn’t it?
“Do you want setup to add a shortcut to Midtown Madness to your desktop?” I’ll say yes. Okay - so again, rather than clicking on Play, it’s generally advised to exit from these installers so Lutris can continue to do its thing in the background. Just running those setup scripts.
“Your DirectPlay components are old. Would you like to update them to version 6.1A?”
I’ll say yes to that. Okay. Apparently that’s done something.
“Midtown Madness XP Compatibility Patch.” Yes. We’ll just run through this…
“Installation completed.” Wonderful. Oh, I see - so it has created that- I think that’s the one that the installer created and then Lutris has created its own shortcut. But that’s fine - and we’ve got the box art showing up here as well, but what I’m going to do is launch this from the desktop shortcut. Why not?
“This will start the program Midtown Madness.”
Oh, yes - so it’s just the first time you launch it - and make this little orange thing go away. Let’s continue and see if this works.
“Click OK to have Midtown Madness detect the presence of a hardware accelerator card.” OK, this may take a few seconds. Whatever.
Haha! Wow, this brings back memories, this menu scream. Let’s have a quick race just to check that everything’s working OK. We’ve got that Ford Mustang GT. Of course, these are dropdown menus- New Beetle, the City Bus, I remember that being hours of fun, of course you have to play through and unlock that.
I notice we’ve got this dgVoodoo overlay thing in the bottom corner - so I guess this is using that as a wrapper.
What are the controls? Oh, it’s set to use the mouse!? Okay. That’s not how I would’ve played it back in the day but that’s fine…
…oh no, that’s just silly. Okay, let’s quit back to the main menu.
A-ha! Game Pad.
[It’s high noon in the windy city. Get ready to head downtown for a showdown.]
Oh, yes. Look at that!
[…telling me that you were setting new land speed records on the magnificent mile today. I gotta tell you, there was some great racing and a wild…]
Absolutely wonderful, no issues at all there, really - other than the mouse, which is understandably terrible, but not the fault of Bazzite Linux or indeed Lutris - and the game pad - plugged it in, restarted the game, and it just worked, no complaints there at all.
So a first person shooter and a racing game so far and as you’ve seen, completely seamless, it all just works great - so I thought I’d go for something a little bit different again for my next game - and this is something you should be very familiar with: it’s Tomb Raider. Of course, it’s a classic. Let’s get this one installed and see how this works.
…and we actually have quite a few options here, a very well supported game, which is great to see - so we’ve got the Steam version and you can install OpenLara, which is a modern day source port. We’ve got the Steam version with TombATI. We’ve got a few other options: we’ve got the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation version - I’m not even covering console games in this video, but yeah, we have the original CD here so we have two options for this: one looks like it’s just the plain vanilla original CD running under DOSBox, and the other version that looks like it’s a kind of enhanced version with HD textures and all of that stuff, TombATI, and this runs under WINE - so evidently this is Windows- I tell you what, as the previous two games have been Windows games running under WINE, let’s try DOSBox.
We will have that authentic unmodified experience - so again, auto detect the..
…oh, surely that isn’t it, is it?
Right, so, evidently something has gone wrong there. That’s our first failure of the day. That’s not brilliant, is it? Right. Let’s go back - and let’s try this second option, so this is WINE with that TombATI HD textures pack and everything else - so “You’ll need the CD only one time during install.” - it’s got controller support, multi-language support. We’ll try this again.
Again it’s downloading all the relevant patches and stuff automatically, which is great to see.
“Please insert Tomb Raider 1 CD” - again. Auto Detect… The drive’s actually spinning up this time, which is a good start.
“English interface and audio cut scenes.” We’ve got loads of different languages supported here so we’ll just go with English.
“Installation completed.”
Wonderful - so that’s the broken DOS version we’ve just installed.
We’ll go into to the Windows version here. I’ll just click on Play.
“Select Game to launch.” Wow. This is very professional: “Tomb Raider,” “Tomb Raider 1: Unfinished Business,” “Configure TombATI HD textures,” “Do not ask again.”
I’ll tell you what - we’ll just run the game.
We have the opening cut scene playing flawlessly there - I don’t need to watch all of that.
What resolution is this running in? This looks super sharp.
Pretty sure you’re not supposed to shoot bats…
…I think they’re endangered.
Anyway, as always, I’m not very good at games, but, running flawlessly, once again, really cool to see.
But of course we also have some unfinished business here with this DOS version, and I’ve just been doing some poking around - and if we go in and actually configure this under Lutris, we can see there is an option under one of these - here we go, “Exit DOSBox with the game,” which I have just disabled so if we actually launch this now, we can see that it is mounting the CD as drive D:, and it’s trying to obviously run the game, but the game’s not been installed - so I think if we just go into D:, this should run the installer from the CD.
Yes - and this is the DOS version, so we’ll just install it there - “Sound card set up,” “Auto Detect.” Apparently it’s emulating a SoundBlaster 16, so that’s fine. We’ll test that.
[Right, let’s go adventuring.]
Excellent - and Continue… Save settings…
…and we’ll just click Play again…
…yeah, so for some reason that Lutris auto installation script does all come configured correctly for the DOS version, but you actually need to run through the installer yourself. Also, there’s no noCD crack installed with this as there are with many of these games so you do actually need the CD in the drive to play - in fact, it’s streaming all of this from the CD. But it does prove that it works so perhaps a little bit of an extra hurdle to jump through with DOSBox, but I guess that’s the same running stuff under DOSBox in Windows as well - so it is what it is.
…and finally something ever so slightly different for our next game today - and it is the classic that is Theme Hospital. Now there’s a reason that I wanted to show this game to you specifically because if we go in and follow our usual process here - so I’ll search for “Theme Hospital” - it’s on the list, but if we click on it, we can see here that there is no option for the original CD.
So we can install it from GOG - and there are some options here to add some modern day enhancements and things to it - but the original CD version isn’t listed. But that’s okay - so let’s cancel that and I’ll show you what I mean.
Now, I think this should work - so if we go up to the + button yet again, but this time we’re going to go for “Install a Windows game from an executable”.
So I’ll type in the game name: Theme Hospital - installer preset - so we have various different versions of Windows here. Does this support 3DFX? I don’t think it does so we’ll just go for a vanilla Windows 98 install. We’ll just use the system locale here, which of course should be British English, I would’ve thought.
Click on Install. WINE setup file… Install… installation directory… Continue… “Select the setup file.” Go to our CD now - setup.exe. Here we go!
Okay. This is all looking very promising indeed.
“Would you like to install DirectX now?” I’m going to say no.
I’ll go for a full install.
“Theme Hospital has been successfully installed. You can launch theme hospital from the Windows Start Menu.” Wonderful!
“Installation completed,” right, we’ll just check if it’s in the list. Here it is - and it’s picked up the artwork for it as well. That’s quite interesting - so just click on Play.
“This game has no executable set.” Right, of course - because it was manually installed - so we need to go into “Configure… Executable”. There we go - so Theme Hospital. It has taken us to the correct place, which is great - and I believe if we go into Program Files… Bullfrog… Hospital.exe. There we go. I’m going to leave all of this stuff on whatever the defaults are. Save that. Let’s try this again.
Nope!
Ah, “WINEARCH set to win64 but Theme hospital is a 32-bit installation.” Okay, in which case, “Game Options, Prefix Architecture, 32-bit.” Pretty sure I selected 32-bit. But anyway, did that just apply to the installer? Not the game itself?
Is it really that easy?
Now, of course I will say I did select that Windows 98 32-bit option during the install - so it probably should have saved that and applied it to the actual game itself as well. But the good thing is we do have access to those logs, so I could actually debug that relatively easily.
But here it is, Theme Hospital running from my original CD from back in the day. This hasn’t been fired up for a very long time indeed - so, yeah. Very cool to see.
Ha! “Welcome to your first hospital.”
Oh, the mouse is… Not working great.
[A little longer than a few minutes later.]
Okay, so I’ll be the first to admit that that was completely and utterly unplayable - and I have spent a few minutes fiddling with things, trying to improve the situation, and I haven’t managed to get it working very well at all so I’ve given up on that. Our first kind of major failure of this video, I guess, and I have very fairly represented everything in this video, I will say: there’s been no kind of trickery or any kind of fiddling going on in the background that I haven’t been transparent about, but I wanted to try to troubleshoot this a bit so I thought I would come to the Lutris website because of course it’s a game that is very well supported via GOG and you know, various other installers, so it was a bit puzzling as to why it wouldn’t work, and I think we have a bit of a clue here: so the officially supported GOG version actually runs under DOSBox - so this is running the DOS version of the game under DOSBox if you do it via the GOG installer - and if you want to run it under WINE as I was, it’s actually bundling CorsixTH with it, which is a modern day source port of Theme Hospital.
So, evidently that Windows version of Theme Hospital from back in the day is not supported very well at all under WINE itself. It looks like there’s also a Linux native port of CorsixTH as well so I could jump through some hoops and install CorsixTH and get the game running that way, but like I say, I wanted this to be a fair representation of my experience trying to run my original big box games - so that is that, and I think we’ll put that one down to a failure. But if you really want to play the game under Linux using Lutris, there are a few officially supported options that you can try out.
Anyway, moving on from that, of course, there’s one thing left to do with our little selection of games here that we’ve got installed today, and that’s to go through and just create a Steam shortcut. “Create Steam shortcut” - I know this one doesn’t quite work properly, but I’ll probably fiddle with it a bit more and hopefully get it working.
Go through, “Create Steam shortcut.” - actually, you know what, I will “Delete Steam shortcut.” - I’ll do the Windows version of Tomb Raider because that was nice and high resolution with the controller support and everything - so we’ll create the Steam shortcut to that- ah, and of course it pops up with this menu, so I’ll just go “Don’t ask again,” just so it runs that.
…and Wacky Wheels, of course, I already did in the previous video and showed off and being Bazzite of course with that Gaming Mode or the Steam Big Picture Mode with this all being based on Steam OS, just return to Gaming Mode…
…and of course, this is a games console, so we’ll just grab our controller here as always, and go through to our Steam library - so these are the games that I used to- or at least demoed some of them in the previous video - to demo Bazzite on this machine, on the Atari VCS. But if I just tab across to “Non-Steam”, there you go: we have all of those games listed as added via Lutris, and you can launch them and play them completely seamlessly through Steam.
So there we have it: some classic PC big box DOS and Windows gaming under modern day Linux courtesy of Bazzite and Lutris - and as we’ve seen in this video provided the game that you want to play has an officially supported installation script under Lutris, that process is going to be pretty much completely and utterly painless and it’s just going to work - and I must say I was very pleasantly surprised by that indeed - and if there is a specific game that you are interested in and you want to know if it’s going to work before getting all of this stuff installed and set up, you can go to the excellent Lutris website and you can search for that game, and they have the entire database on there: you can see the various different versions that are supported and the various different ways of getting those installed.
As we’ve also seen, there are options to install things that aren’t on the list, and they are perhaps going to be a little bit more fiddly - there’s going to be a bit more configuration involved but I will say that the tools provided by Lutris are some of the best that I’ve seen on that front - so it’s still probably going to be your best chance at getting this kind of stuff working under Linux - and of course, those installation scripts provided by Lutris are all submitted by the community, so if you do manage to get something working that isn’t already on the list, you can perhaps submit that back to Lutris and help out anyone else in your situation trying to get that specific game working.
It’s all sharing and caring, giving back to the community, that’s what we love about Linux. But anyway, that’s all I have for you for this video - so big thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon and Ko-Fi and my YouTube channel members, they get videos a little bit early and also ad-free - and of course a big thank you to you for watching.
If you enjoyed the video, don’t forget to give it a thumbs up and perhaps even subscribe to the channel as well. That’s all I’ve got for you for this one, so I’ll hopefully see you in the next one.
Original Video Links
Support The Channel:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ctrlaltrees
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ctrlaltrees
Become a Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe7aGwKsc40TYqDJfjggeKg/join
Episode Links:
Bazzite: https://bazzite.gg
Bazzite Installation Guide: https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/Installation_Guide
Lutris: https://lutris.net
If you liked this video please consider subscribing to ctrl.alt.rees on YouTube!
