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.
Run it through proton. Import into steam from add non-steam program, or lutris
I do it all the time. Just add it to steam as a non steam app and select the proton version you want to use. It will run just fine.
EDIT: If you need to install first, just add the installer as a non steam program, run it, install normally and then chang the path of the exe and the working folder to those of the installed game
then chang the path of the exe and the working folder to those of the installed game
I feel the need to underline this part because removing the setup.exe entry and the adding the installed exe doesn’t work. The entire virtual drive gets deleted when removing setup.exe. This makes the procedure a bit more complicated than it should be but it’s needed when it has to go through Steam because of Steam Deck Game Mode.
How does steam deals with installing on a different HD than system’s one? That’s the only issue I have had with WINE and I had to unpack in Windows.
You can also run them using the correct Proton prefix directly.
ProtonTricks can help make this a lot easier and more graphical.
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
I recently got fitgirl’s Cyberpunk 2077 repack working on Artix Linux with Lutris by following this guide:
It doesn’t take into account you also need to use GEProton as well (for Cyberpunk at least), but its easy enough to install GEProton via ProtonUp, and then just configuring the game to use GEProton in the settings via lutris.
I got mangohud working as well, that was relatively simple.
I also noticed that I needed to install and setup dxvk as an overlay for Vulkan.
Yeah, it was a lot of setup and you need plenty of hard drive space as both the repack and the installed game are huge (have double the space available listed on the repack site).
I have the game on Steam, but wanted to know how to do this, and it was not as bad as I thought it would be.
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.
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.