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.
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.
Lutris, Bottles, …
I should’ve asked the question earlier. Thank you so much!
I just switched over to using heroic launcher from lutris, its prettier and a smoother setup IMO. I have had issues as well installing some games from fitgirl, the install always failed. However they would install on windows just fine. So I did that then copied over the install files to my Linux hard drive and setup them up in heroic launcher.
I’ve only had to do this with 3 games from fitgirl, maybe I’m missing something but I could not get these 3 games to install on linux. This is why I keep a hard drive with windows installed on it :)
I’ve been using heroic game launcher. Easier then Lutris and bottles.
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.
Jc141 on 1337x is nice. Their collection is limited to games above 85% rating on steam.
I’ve tried all the ways, and Bottles was the easiest by far. Make a bottle for games from the high seas, using bottles’ preset for games. Once created change the wine from Soda to whatever you want or just use Soda.
Then inside the bottle look for install dependencies and grab things like vc redist, and dot net. Once that’s done under the bottles’ UI choice “Run Executable” and chose the .exe for the game’s installer. If it doesn’t work as expected, click the cog/gear and select the checkbox for “Run in Terminal” to see where it goes wrong and search online for what fix is needed.
The only time I had to troubleshoot with terminal, was for a mspatcha.dll problem. It was an easy fix: the bottle has a Legacy Wine Tools > Configuration > Libraries, where I found mspatcha listed, then changed it to “Native then Built in.”
Hope that helps.
Lutris.
Does Lutris require some special setup?
Using fitgirl repacks are a bit hit and miss for me. But if they don’t work, Lutris doesn’t help.
Running the installer with wine first and then adding the game exe as a non-steam game and running it with proton works for me.
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
Bottles. It’s the best click and play experience imo. Select the gaming preset and use wine-ge or proton-ge as the runner (default is soda which is not really good) and you are good to go.
Sometimes the installers don’t work correctly on proton-get so use system installed wine and you are good to go.
Run it through proton. Import into steam from add non-steam program, or lutris
I can run pirated steam games on steam? that doesnt sound right.
If you add a steam game it will delete or invalid portions of the repack depending on where you got it from. I had to unzip the game again and try in lutris. DBZ sparking 0
Steam has DRM for Steam games. You can add any other game to Steam and ask Steam to attach Proton to it.
Steam.
You can also run them using the correct Proton prefix directly.
ProtonTricks can help make this a lot easier and more graphical.
A lot of repack installers won’t work in Linux, not even with proton. Use the original scene release instead if you can.
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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.
