Pharaoh (1999)
The city builder from Ancient Egypt.
The city builder from Ancient Egypt.
This post is part of a series featuring old Windows games playable on Linux using Wine. If you are new to Wine, check my Intro To Running Wine Games post for help getting started.
One of the great city builder games from the past, by Impressions Games.
I will do a separate post someday about Caesar III (which can be played natively on Linux w/ the Augustus engine).
Things to know about this game for the modern era is that there are two open source efforts to port the game:
So in the meantime, I’m going to try and play the original.
To install this on Wine, you’ll need the game Pharaoh and the expansion Cleopatra.
You’ll also need a few additional files:
So you’ll install the patch and then prepare to implement a modern widescreen fix.
Find your installed Pharaoh.exe file and rename it to Pharaoh_ORIGINAL.exe. Then find a widescreen replacement file in the zip you extracted.
(I actually built these fixes myself on my Windows machine using this Pharaoh Resizer tool. There are other widescreen fixes out there but this Pharaoh Resizer app has the best results.)
If you launched the game right now, you’d hear music but only see a black screen.
The secret sauce to finally get this working is to add ddraw.dll to your “Override DLLs” setting in Bottles, and then drop the ddraw.dll from CNC-DDraw into the game directory.
To get the resolution change to take effect, you’ll have to:
Then the game will glitch into the widescreen resolution patch you had implemented.
Arch - 32-bit
Runner - sys-wine-9.0
DXVK - dxvk-1.10
VKD3D - proton-2.6
Discrete - ON
Gamescope - ON
Dependencies - none
Overrides - ddraw.dll