I recently posted that the original StarCraft is now free. At the time it was not yet possible to run StarCraft on Linux with Wine directly. But I was following the progress of the bug that did not allow it to work and the results of the Wine application database, and it was resolved. There is already a relatively simple way to play StarCraft on GNU / Linux with Wine:
Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on various POSIX operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and BSD. Rather than simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on the fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to integrate applications cleanly onto your desktop.
The current stable version of Wine is 2.0.1. But the bug was fixed in Wine Staging (2.8), the testing branch with bug fixes and functionalities that have not been integrated into the development branch. Its installation is quite simple, they offer repositories for Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and macOS. Obviously in ArchLinux it is also available via AUR.
On Debian I added the repository, updated apt, and installed winehq-staging. Wine Staging can coexist with other versions of Wine, you can read more about its use on the wiki. In my case I had uninstalled Wine when I saw that it did not work with StarCraft, but I removed the .wine directory from my home just in case when installing wine-staging. The package installs Wine Staging in / opt / wine-staging, so to execute it we must use / opt / wine-staging / bin / wine or add the path to our path.
Installing StarCraft Once wine-staging is installed, we can download the classic StarCraft installation file from the official site. We execute it with wine staging:
$ / opt / wine-staging / bin / wine StarCraft-Setup.exe
And we are going to see the familiar installation screen. It may take a while because you have to download all the files. Upon completion, the StarCraft directory occupies about 3.6GB.
After this process, we see a “Launch StarCraft” button. If all went well, by pressing it we will be able to enjoy this real-time strategy classic on our GNU / Linux system legally and for free. Includes the original and the StarCraft: Brood War expansion.
We can also run the game from the installation directory:
$ / opt / wine-staging / bin / wine ~ / .wine / drive_c / Program Files (x86 ) / StarCraft / StarCraft Launcher.exe
Obviously it is much more practical to add these things to the path, create shortcuts and so on.
When running StarCraft I traveled back in time (although it wasn’t LONG ago that we played StarCraft and WarCraft III on LAN with DM, DiegoTHX, and other friends), and even re-watched the presentation animation.
- StarCraft Intro
- StarCraft Home
- StarCraft Campaigns
- StarCraft Gameplay
- StarCraft – Terrans
- StarCraft Terran Campaign
- StarCraft Terran Campaign
Everything works perfect, I even met the mythical Battle.net that I had never been able to run on Linux before:
StarCraft Battle.net
What remains for me is to see if I play for a while to become familiar again, and convince some more friends to install it and meet on LAN. The Battle.net thing looks interesting, but I don’t know if I’m up to playing around and not being humiliated. If someone wants to add me as a friend and play a friendly game, my username is (surprise!) Picandocodigo.
Now let’s wait for StarCraft: Remastered to come out, and see how long it takes Wine to make it work properly for our systems. It would be interesting if they gave the same treatment to WarCraft III and its Frozen Throne expansion. It would be great to be able to play them again with HD graphics!
