World of Warcraft under WINE

This howto will explain how to run world of warcraft under WINE.

As of wine 0.9.25 it is no longer required to patch wine

To run wow under wine, you need a few things

• Wine 0.9.25 or later
• msvcp60.dll (MD5: 6050bcc1b23f3df7a1876cbdcbac8232)
• mfc42.dll (MD5: 7e4d1b552ee1dfa859ba9033b3670590)

copy msvcp60.dll and mfc42.dll to the following path:

~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

When you run the wow launcher, it will need the gecko parts to “emulate” mshtml, simply press okay when it tells you this, and it will be automagically downloaded and installed

We must now setup wine, this is easily done through wine’s configuration gui, simply run the command winecfg. and follow these steps:

1. In the Applications tab change Windows version to “Windows XP”
2. In the Graphics tab:
   1. Enable Pixel Shaders
   2. Set Vertex Shader to Hardware
   3. Enable Allow the window manager to control the windows
3. In the Audio tab set to OSS output (Option, but reported to be best)

Now for the game.. it should be noted that you do NOT need to install wow again if you already have an installed version on a windows partition or computer, simply make the World of Warcraft directory available, and run the game from there through wine. however, if you do not, you will need to install.

Because linux does not allow for unmounting while there are file locks, you will have to copy the wow installation files from the cd’s into your harddrive somewhere, and install from there, just insert one cd at a time, copy all files. and run the installer with wine on the copied files.

Note: as mentioned before, wine may ask you if you wish to download a gecko component, say yes

To get the most out of wow, you will need to add a few options to wow’s configuration file, to enable opengl rendering, and tweak sound.

Open World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf and add the following to the end:

SET gxApi "opengl"
SET SoundOutputSystem "1"
SET SoundBufferSize "100"

Also, you can improve performance radically by disabling the GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object opengl extension, this can be done this way:

1. Open wine regedit
2. Browse to HKCU\Software\Wine
3. Create key “OpenGL”
4. Inside the newly created OpenGL Key, add Stringpair called “DisabledExtensions” and add value “GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object”

if you run in windowed mode (be it via wine “emulation”, or enabled ingame), and tab out, or run fullscreen, and tab out/change virtual desktop, while you had another key pressed in, that key will continue to be pressed, even after you tab into the game, the solution is to press the key again. this is particularly important with ctrl + tab, which commonly changes desktop, as its then control thats pressed continuously, and then keypresses naturally wont have the desired effect :) this is caused by WoW apparently only responding to key events, and not key states.