Did this tutorial work for you?


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brionac

Alolan Fox
UPDATE! - Check out this quick post first!

2020 Editorial Note: So you dumped Windows 7 out of necessity, and Windows 10 sucks? Well, here's something that I have used back in 2018. It's out of date, but the idea to run the game via Wine is still possible. So here's the guide, and I'll get around to running this game in Linux again someday.


All right, it took me awhile to get this tutorial to work for me, and I honestly began running Linux in January 2018. The bad news is that I'm a newbie at everything that is all about using Linux, but cheers to me for keeping up with my New Year's Resolution in installing a Linux distro (distribution). Let's see if I can stay on this treadmill a bit longer before I look over someone's shoulder in the cafeteria running Windows at the gym's cafe. In all seriousness though, I will warn you that if you run into a strange technical issue that isn't discussed in this tutorial, then I probably have no idea how to fix it. You have been warned.

Anyways, back to the topic, so I'm going to give you the good news now. I can play this game on Linux, but how did I do this? More importantly, how can others do the same? Well, look below at this outline:

1. I got the hardware to at least run Linux Mint 18.3 on my computer.
2. I installed Wine 3.0 and it's other packages like Mono and Gecko, and I learned how to use it to install the game and configure the settings from online.exe in Wine to not close immediately after pressing START GAME.
3. I plugged in my PS3 controller and opened up the game after that to make sure the controller works. In the lobby, I configured the gamepad and played smoothly.

So let's do this one big step at at time:

1. Do you even lift? No, I mean can you even install Linux? I won't go over that here since I got that working by pressing next mindlessly on Linux Mint 18.3. Just go to linuxmint.com to get started. I won't dwell on using other Linux distro's since I'm guessing that you are new to using Linux too. Otherwise, you're way ahead of me with Arch Linux, Fedora, etc. and definitely don't need help in this big step. The last item I need to mention is can you even see what's on the screen? You might need help with that. I didn't have a problem since I was using an NVIDIA graphics card. At this point, I should mention that Linux Mint can be installed on most computers, unless you're in the minority. If the hardware is the problem, congratulations; you know that you need to ask a local Linux ninja where to get the right computer for the job. Just watch out when you go on a store that promises you that you can run Linux on their computers; they're overpriced. Believe me when I tell you that that last sentence is worth a lot more than the rest in this big step to getting on Ephinea with Linux.

2. All right, you installed a Linux distro and managed to get all your updates downloaded and installed! Hopefully it's Linux Mint 18.3 because that's all I know how to run going forward in the next big step, step 2, in this tutorial. Don't use any application or package manager that comes with your Linux distro to install Wine because it won't be version 3, unless somebody's finally managed to update the package manager you're using. Why? because the winehq.org download page said so! By the way, click on Ubuntu when you're looking for the download because Mint is included in the installation instructions, but this is the part where you really need to not skip steps. I took a step before the first step on their download page by making sure I had the 32-bit architecture, i386, enabled by checking before I decided if it was worth adding in the first place.

Paste and press enter line-by-line in the terminal the following to check if you even have that architecture enabled yourself:

dpkg --print-architecture
dpkg --print-foreign-architectures

Most of you might read "amd64", which is for 64-bit systems, on the first command line's output while others may not get "i386" on the second command line's output. If you don't have i386 from any of them, then you can start from the beginning of their download page as if I didn't bother to help you check, unlike me where I already checked and skipped that first step myself. If you have a slightly different result, then you might not be running your computer on a 64-bit system anyways since you probably know the difference between a 32-bit and 64-bit system too. Wine should be able to run on 32-bit systems well anyways, unless there's a 64-bit system requirement for a program that you like to run on Wine, which is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

The next part is critical since I messed this up. Paste and press enter line-by-line in the terminal the following instead of what you see in the next step:

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key
sudo apt-key add Release.key
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ xenial main'

The last command is special because I ignored the input specifically for Linux Mint 18.x line in the download page like a fool. Follow the rest of the steps, which instruct you to paste and enter the update command and to paste and enter the command for the stable branch of Wine since I don't like to consider any of us developers or stagers looking for trouble for no reason.

Anyways, the next part is to get a test exe file to see if Wine really works! Go to 7-zip.org and download any version of the exe file for installing the 7zip program. Opening that file should automatically open it up using Wine. Hopefully you get Wine to get its noggin joggin' to install Mono and Gecko for you in the process of installing 7-zip; in that case, agree to install them right then and there now. I ignored Wine's recommendations right before installing those two things while running Wine since I was glad to even have the chance to get those extra packages added to Wine. By the way, Mono and Gecko aren't really applications to run, but they're actually backend-like programs that act like virtual backbones for other programs to run well, like the online.exe really needs to have Gecko installed since I was prompted to install Gecko while Wine was going to open online.exe for me.

Back to the 7zip installer exe file: Make sure that you are able to actually install that since it's just like installing it on Windows. If you did this correctly, you should click the LInux Mint Menu button at the bottom left of your screen to see that Wine now has it's own menu where you can now open the 7-Zip File Manager. If you clicked that and 7-zip opens up without crashing, you're getting good at this tutorial. Next, it's time to create a shortcut to be able to configure Wine directly so that you can have full control of it. For some reason, you don't have the shortcut made after Wine is installed, but you can still add it through this method. So here's a short detour.

Right-click the Linux Mint Menu, click Configure, switch from Panel to Menu by clicking Menu, click "Open the menu editor", and click on any application menu that you want. I chose the Wine Applications Menu because it's Wine of course. You're almost done. Now select the box, New Item so that another window opens. Name it Wine 3, type winecfg in the Command text field, and type Wine Configuration in the Comment text field. If you want, you can spend a few minutes looking for any icon you want, but that's not really important right now. Don't check the box for "Launch in Terminal?" and press Okay. Finally, you can open the Wine application itself, so do it now as if you're opening 7-zip earlier. Now leave it opened with the Applications tab open because here come the next half of this big step in this tutorial: Installing and configuring PSOBB Ephinea!

After downloading the game's exe file for installing this game, open it up in Wine and run the installation where you can find the folder easily, like in C:\Program Files\EphineaPSO since you will need to copy this later in adding a shortcut instead of right now. To find the folder where you just installed this game, you must right click anywhere inside of the Linux Mint file explorer to check "Show Hidden Files" so that you can find the hidden Wine folder .wine folder in the path /home/.wine/drive_c/.../ and so on. Now you know where all of the Windows files go in Wine, the C drive called drive_c. Now go back to viewing your Applications tab on the Wine window you opened up earlier to set a Windows Version of psobb.exe and online.exe just in case you have to change it. I decided to put both of them in Windows XP. I'm not sure if that's a big deal, but I just left it like that. Now you can confirm whatever version of Windows you want, by clicking OK to close Wine. If all went smoothly, you should be able to run the game, but you have to set up the shortcut first to open it up from the Linux Mint Menu. I'll paste similar instructions from earlier below now.

Right-click the Linux Mint Menu, click Configure, switch from Panel to Menu by clicking Menu, click "Open the menu editor", and click on any application menu that you want. I chose the Games Applications Menu because it's a game of course. You're almost done. Now select the box, New Item so that another window opens. Name it PSOBB Ephinea, type

wine start 'C:\Program Files\EphineaPSO\online.exe'

in the Command textfield with the caveat that you have to verify where online.exe actually is located, and type

Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst Ephinea Server

in the Comment text field. If you want, you can spend a few minutes looking for any icon you want, so if you know where you installed the game in the C drive, then open up the teamflag folder and paste the default team flag that comes installed as the icon. Don't check the box for "Launch in Terminal?" and press Okay. Finally, you can open online.exe if you pasted the command correctly.

If nothing happened when you created the shortcut in the Games Applications Menu, then you need to make sure that you either move the folder around to fit the path that I wrote earlier, or you need to edit the command to have the correct path where you installed the folder. This is as difficult as I think it gets, but that's just my opinion. Otherwise, congratulations and have fun with the settings to make sure that your graphics card can run the game because I had to switch to either really small or really big screen resolutions that didn't force psobb.exe to immediately close right after pressing START GAME in online.exe then.

3. Finally the easiest part: Setting up your controller. I just plugged in a PS3 controller that lit up the first player light, opened online.exe to open psobb.exe, and configured my gamepad settings in the lobby. If you are using an Xbox controller, you might have to look up how to set that up with some package without my assistance, but if you have a PS3 controller that responds well after being plugged in to your computer like I have, then that's it. You're done, so play the game already.

Anyways, I included a poll to give you all an idea of how many players are engaging this tutorial. Maybe someone is already on LInux adding their input, like a Yes or No response to my poll with a reply. I guess nobody runs this game on a BSD distro, but that'll be for another year on my time if I like running BSD that is.
 
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Excellent tutorial.
I am compelled to point out a few things, having run this game on Linux myself.
For performance reasons:
On Client: I've disabled advance effects and set it to "low performance" mode.
On Wine: winetricks glsl=disabled seems to really help with the frame rate (using a NVidia card)
The difference is remarkable, and I'd suggest anyone with frame rate issues try these (have you had similar experiences?)
A word of warning: In my current setup, Lua plugins do not work.
Any case YMMV
 
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Oh wow, I took a long time to notice that the lua plugins can't work through wine. It's a real shame too since I don't even get an error message like other players had in the PSOBB Addon Plugin thread. I prepared the software and checked if the addons didn't activate with my folder setup by throwing it in a USB and running on a Windows PC. I got it to work on Windows just fine; I suppose wine is not loading something that an actual Windows machine runs with that 2015 Visual C++ Redistributable (x86) 14.0.24123 pack.

It's sad because I tried to pull a trick through winetricks (vcrun2015) in an attempt to add that visual c++ pack properly since I couldn't use the exe from Microsoft correctly. In short, the exe itself fails to add visual c++'s package, but winetricks jams it in for you.

I almost gave up on wine, but I came across this exe called PSOBB Reader. Future Edit from the current year 2020: the links for the exe for PSOBB Reader no longer work, so I attached a zip file of it in this post. At least one can save text files with character items without using the lua plugins to this day. The other program that I added to my list is the Item Maker since I play in Sandbox mode anyways. Before I forget, wine can also run Magatama, a mag feeding calculator.

Before I leave anybody hanging, I used winetricks to jam in .NET 4.6 (dotnet46) to have Item Maker and PSOBB Reader work since Solybum mentioned .NET as a requirement to run some of his tools.

Anyways, now's a good time to cast my vote for this thread since I can do the same stuff like I used to do on Windows now.

Cheers!

Lastly, if you're having an issue with using winetricks, just download it from here, and then run it by double clicking the downloaded file at usr/local/bin or type sh '/usr/local/bin/winetricks' in the terminal after pasting all this from the github page under the manual installation instructions:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
chmod +x winetricks
sudo mv winetricks /usr/local/bin


You can use that as a shortcut right after downloading and installing it for convenience like I mentioned in the original post above.

Next you should see a window open up asking: What do you want to do?" Choose 'Select the default wineprefix', then choose 'Install a Windows DLL or component'. Now's the time to acknowledge the appearance of the two items that I mentioned earlier called vcrun2015 and dotnet46 on the list. Apply the check marks and press OK. You will see a bunch of error message from the dotnet46 option, but it works because PSOBB Reader and Item Maker should be able to open fine.
 

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The lua stuff works on linux just fine.
I forget if I needed to change anything to make it work, and I don't use it as it made the game run noticably slower.
 
After a month, I finally installed Debian Stretch (Stable) to suit me well, and this guide actually reminded me how to set up wine to play again. One addition that made my experience feel complete was to get one specific shortcut to work that probably would work on any operating system on linux anyways: using an xorg command that mimics the mouse double clicking whatever you want to open.

Magatama was the only program that crashed on initialization when I used a shortcut to open it using the usual "wine start" command. The change I made to the command was xdg-open '/home/<username>/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/EphineaPSO/Magatama Beta 7/Magatama.exe' where you insert your user name in <username>.

Other than that, type winecfg to unmount the Z drive so that you force wine to only run inside of wine's prefix, aka the "C drive" folder it creates to store your windows programs. Once you open up the wine configuration window, click the Drives tab on the top, and click Remove when the Z drive is selected. The Z drive is actually your / directory, so I don't see a good reason to keep the whole system ready for wine to open an exe file one day. It won't stop everybody from planting exe's in the C drive, but it's seems safer this way while you can actually use wine.

Enjoy.
 
On Wine: winetricks glsl=disabled seems to really help with the frame rate (using a NVidia card)
Wew thanks for this tip. It improved my fps by a lot. AMD card btw. Everyone who's getting bad performance should definitely try this setting.
Now I feel really dumb for playing on crappy fps before LOL
 
Hello, I was referenced here to see if i can get answers on how to install the floor reader on my Mac(ios). Currently operating through "wine"

Any help would greatly appreciated!

And am computer ignorant to a certain lvl so i dont if i was referenced here to tell me the only way to install the floor reader is through linix?... ><
 
Hello, I was referenced here to see if i can get answers on how to install the floor reader on my Mac(ios). Currently operating through "wine"

Any help would greatly appreciated!

And am computer ignorant to a certain lvl so i dont if i was referenced here to tell me the only way to install the floor reader is through linix?... ><
Linux* is another operating system (like Windows and MacOs). If wine works for MacOs I doubt it that only Linux would support the dropreader. You might also just want to dual boot windows since that is way easier than install everything through wine. If you like tweaking however then it is a whole other story of course.
 
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Linux* is another operating system (like Windows and MacOs). If wine works for MacOs I doubt it that only Linux would support the dropreader. You might also just want to dual boot windows since that is way easier then install everything through wine. If you like tweaking however then it is a whole other story of course.

Ok, so is it possible to run Floor/drop reader on Wine (mac ios)? if so how do i do install it?
 
Ok, so is it possible to run Floor/drop reader on Wine (mac ios)? if so how do i do install it?
It should but I have no idea how. Ask ToasterMage since he seems to know how. Wine should work about the same for both Linux and MacOs.
 
Just got PSO running great through Wine. Was wondering if anyone else has an issue getting the option.exe to run though. Can't seem to launch it manually or though the Ephinea Launcher.

Currently can't adjust frame skip and have the game save ID and Password due to this.

Edit: Should mention I'm running Wine with PSO on the current Ubuntu LTS.
 
Tip: use Gallium Nine for a big performance boost if you're using Mesa. You need to use d3d8to9 or something and override d3d8.dll and d3d9.dll (for example the ENB mod provides both of these).

Also tried using d9vk but couldn't get it to work. Anyone else have experience with using it?
 
Checking in. Game installed fine with wine 3.7 in opensuse 15.1
Was having some performance issues in the way of low framerate and serious slowdown
Tried running with Proton 4.11 through steam but no improvement and seemingly no way to use dxvk.
Setting fog effect to pixel fog seemed to seriously improve things. Game is running great ever since :)
 
I am currently fighting with getting PSOBB to run on my linux machine (AMD Phenom II X4). Recently "upgraded" to a GTX 660 as i thought my old Radeon HD6870 was the bottle neck but no dramatic boost.

I am experiencing slowdown in lobby with 7+ people, on pioneer 2 and whenever lots of enemies are on the screen. Advanced settings turned off, pixel fog on (emulated fog makes non difference). Resolution and / or detail levels make no difference. Turning off GLSL in wine helped to improve the initial experience though.

Now i stumbled accross DXVK which enables DirectX 9 games to use the new Vulkan GPU API. PSOBB is DirectX 8 though. So i spend a lot of time making it work with dxwrapper to bring it on DirectX 9 level. Also go to wine config / libraries and set d3d8 and d3d9 to native.

When i turn on DXVK in Lutris i see immediate changes (good and bad).

Good: the game runs WAY smoother with ALL effects enabled (including advanced effects)
Bad: everything is too dark (you will notice tjhe dark lobby after seeing the ship select screen)

I see no glithes but the game is just too dark (like the rooms where you need to find the light switches).

Which means the game remains unplayable for me :(

I am using lutris, wine 5.7 and DXVK 1.6 (1.7 will crash immediately and won't start)

also tried reshade, which works in wine for me though its still dark.

Without DXVK this problem does not occur so i doubt is caused by d3d8to9
 

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It have no issue without Vulkan ?
Seeing the screenshots I would not be surprise it is a translation issue with Vulkan, and/or the GPU driver misinterpreting some instructions.

I will try DXVK on Mac to see.
 
Isn't that "dark lobby" stuff an issue that was in older versions of wine (that affected other games too?)
@Eidolon would know better tho
 
Hi Guys,

iam on the latest wine. Even upgraded to 5.9-Staging and DXVK last night but no avail :(

If there is any knowledge about the dark lobby issue i'd really appreciate any information :)

Without Vulkan this issue is not present
 
Well, with those GPU I doubt you need Vulkan to run this game full speed even throught Wine.

Can you clarify what you did about this: "So i spend a lot of time making it work with dxwrapper to bring it on DirectX 9 level. "
Because converting DX8 to 9 can also be source cause imo.
 
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