Installing Jedi Academy in WineX 3.1

September 23, 2003 -- by A.T. Hun

If you read this site with any regularity, you know that I am a big Star Wars fan and a fan of the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series of games. If you are interested, you can read my review of Jedi Outcast. When I heard that LucasArts had asked Raven to create a follow-up to that game, I was thrilled. However, now I'm using Linux full-time. If I want to play the game, it has to work with Transgaming's WineX.

As an aside, I don't care to get into whether or not WineX is good for Linux gaming. My choice is very pragmatic. I want to play Jedi Academy without reinstalling Windows. It's either WineX or nothing. I'd obviously much prefer a native client, but the chance of that happening is slim and none and slim just left town. But I digress . . .

I feared the worst when I heard that Jedi Academy was going to be a DirectX 9.0a game, since WineX doesn't support that yet. Thankfully, I was able to get the demo to run by running the jasp.exe executable directly, instead of going through the launcher. It seemed clear that the full game should work fine too. Someone even posted on the Transgaming forums that they were able to install the game and play it, but you needed a nocd crack. I wanted to install it without resorting to cracks. I succeeded.

This HOWTO assumes that you have a fully functioning copy of WineX. This may or may not work with the CVS version, since I don't know how much of the InstallShield code has been put into that version. I'm using the WineX package for Slackware 9.0.

The main problem to work around is that when you switch CDs during installation, the game does not "let go" of the CD, so you can't unmount it to eject the first disc and insert the second one. To get it to install, you will need enough hard drive space to copy both CDs to it, plus enough /tmp space and disc space to install the game itself.

Basically, you have to copy the contents of both CDs to the directory where WineX expects your CD to be mounted. On my system, it is /mnt/cdrom. I have a second drive (a CD-RW/DVD-ROM) mounted at /mnt/burner. I used that drive to copy everything to /mnt/cdrom. Note: you will need to be root to copy anything directly to /mnt/cdrom.

If you don't have a second drive, you can create a new mountpoint (such as /mnt/cdrom1) and update your /etc/fstab file to point to the new mountpoint. Then copy both CDs to /mnt/cdrom.

After that, run /mnt/cdrom/JediAcademy.exe and choose the first option to install the game. Choose a Custom setup. At the end of the installation uncheck the box so that DirectX 9.0a isn't installed. That would hose up your WineX installation something fierce. Installation took quite a while on my box, so pack a lunch.

Once the game is done installing, delete everything in /mnt/cdrom. If you had to change your /etc/fstab file, change it back now. Mount the first CD. Go to the GameData directory wherever you installed the game. Use WineX to run either jasp.exe (single player) or jamp.exe (multiplayer) directly. If you try to run through the launcher, it will complain that DirectX 9.0a isn't installed. Those two executables run fine all on their own.

After that, all that is left is some lightsaber-swinging action! Enjoy!