Adventures with WINE Part 2

Many modern games require a Web browser for setup, updates, and multiplayer. So, my first priority was to get a working Web browser. WINE comes with its own Internet Explorer replacement which is based on Gecko and nominally works, but it doesn't have all of the features of MSIE. Importantly, many apps embed Internet Explorer as a component for menu rendering and Internet I/O, so having a working form of IE is important.

Using WINE you can, in fact, install the real Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft and run it under Linux. It doesn't work perfectly, but it works well enough to host the plugins you need to launch games. Windows Firefox, on the other hand, does seem to work perfectly. It works exactly as usual, even installing and running plugins from the Web. Still, it's important to get IE up and running because some applications might stubbornly embed IE in Firefox(!!) simply for the sake of browser-portability. So you STILL need a working IE, and installing MSIE 8 using WINE's "winetricks" script is probably the best way to do it.

So, now I have two working Windows-based Web browsers running under Linux, and this is pretty good. However, the next problem I notice is that SSL is broken in IE. SSL is critical for games because the portal utilities, or whatever they're called, need the cryptographic layer for licensing and authentication. You can get around this problem, again, thanks to winetricks, which automates a large number of WINE tasks, many of which revolve around automatically downloading and installing "native" Windows components.

I found that tinkering with native versions of various Internet-related libraries allowed me to get SSL working in IE: wintrust, secur32, crypt32. The native Windows versions represent a complete implementation in contrast to the WINE versions, and so they work better. They aren't included by default because they are owned by Microsoft, but nothing is to prevent the user from obtaining them from Microsoft.

I want to start out with something basic, so I decide to try out Battlefield Heroes. I use Firefox to navigate to the game's Website and it happily downloads and installs all of the necessary plugins and applets. The game downloads and updates itself. This is getting exciting. It launches, it runs, and the framerate is good despite a few console warnings about unrecognized shader definitions. So now, it's time for the moment of truth: multiplayer. And guess what else? It works. For all of about three seconds, at which point the server ejects me for a PunkBuster failure. And so begins the next chapter.