How to run GTA 3 with Wine

This how-to will walk you through installing Grand Theft Auto 3 on Ubuntu Dapper with Wine version 0.9.9.

This how-to is the result of many hours spent dealing with wine-cvs, the latest stable wine, and the 'standard' wine that Dapper provides in the repositories. I HAD to use the version dapper provides because the newer version wouldn't let me install the game (it crashed), and the cvs version simply did not work.

This is a long process. First, get a Windows machine and install GTA 3 on it. Next go and download the patch to upgrade the game to version 1.1.

Click here to download the patch!

Now, insert the second CD into your drive and open it with windows explorer. Navigate to the 'audio' folder and copy everything that is inside it to C:/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII/audio/

As you know, wine doesn't have any form of copy protection support built in, so in order to play we need a game 'fix' or 'crack' to disable this copy protection. If this how-to were for Windows machines, then I'd be in trouble, but this is so we can play on Linux. You need to find a decent no-cd crack, but I did the job for you.

Click here to download the no-cd crack!

Unzip the crack. Inside you'll find an unrar_me.rar file. Unrar it (I assume you know how to use WinRar). Now you've got two files: gta3.exe and a text file; ignore the text file. Go to C:/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII/ and rename gta3.exe (the one in that directory) to gta3.bak. Now copy the cracked gta3.exe to the game directory. Double click it to play, this will create some files and compress the textures for that particular computer. Complete the first mission.

That was the easy part, but now we need the game on Linux. Go to your Linux computer and install wine.

sudo apt-get install wine

This should install wine 0.9.9, the version you need to run the game. Once wine is installed open up a terminal and type winecfg to run wine's configuration utility.

On the Applications tab leave everything as it is, move on to the Graphics tab. In it check the boxes for "Enable desktop double buffering", "Allow the window manager to control the windows", "Emulate a virtual desktop" (set it to 800x600), and "Allow Pixel Shader". On the Direct3D section, set the Vertrex Shader Support to "hardware".

Now move on to the Audio tab. Uncheck any boxes that are checked, then check the box for "ALSA Driver". On the DirectSound section set the Hardware Acceleration to "Emulation" and check the box for "Driver Emulation". After doing this you're finished with wine's setup.

Get your GTA 3 disks out and insert the first CD into your drive (in your Linux computer). Ubuntu will auto-mount it for you in /media/cdrom0, so open up a terminal and change to that directory. Once there type wine Setup.exe to install the game, it should install just fine.

Phew, alright, the game is installed, but you must patch it to version 1.1. Get the patch and save it in /home/your-user-name/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII. Now change into that directory and run the patch with wine gta3patch.exe.

Ok, now get the crack and do the same you did on the windows machine to apply it. Then try and play with wine gta3.exe (while on the game's install directory). You may notice that when the game is compressing the textures, the game will crash, and you won't be able to play it at all.

This is where our Windows instalation comes in. Go to your Windows machine and be ready to burn some cd's or a dvd. You need to transfer ALL of the files installed on the Windows machine to your Linux machine. The files I'm talking about are all the ones in C:/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII/, so its better to just copy the whole GTAIII directory.

Once you've got the files on some cd's, dvd, or external hard drive go to your Linux machine and rename the GTAIII folder in home/your-user-name/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII to GTA3.

Then do:

mkdir /home/your-user-name/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII

After that you must copy everything in you cd's, dvd, or external hard drive to that directory.

Now go to /home/your-user-name/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTAIII (the directory where you pasted all files from the windows instalation in) and play with wine gta3.exe.

The game should launch and all should be good. Congratulations!!!

Now that the game is running you can do

rm -rvf /home/your-user-name/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Rockstar Games/GTA3

to get rid of those extra files.

Known problems:

• The mouse on the menus doesn't work, you must use the keyboard arrows.
• Sound 'lags' a bit, but it doesn't bother at all, its just a second behind of what happens on screen.

Good luck!!