Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am revisiting a very old topic from a few days short of two years ago. Spoiler alert: I don’t have a full solution for running SimCoaster (aka Theme Park Inc.), but I might have a clue or two. With that depressing ending out of the way, let’s get started!
Sim Coaster is a special game to me for the nostalgia factor. Read any write up by a well-read reviewer, and he’ll say it was a meh sequel when there was a better competing game on the market. Love for this game is so rare, I’ve even been referred to myself while researching how to get it to work, see hyperlink in opening paragraph.
Wine is not an emulator, nor is it a toxic beverage in this context; it is a compatibility layer. It looks at Windows executables’ logic, makes its best guess at what the equivalent logic in the local Linux or Mac operating system, and runs those instructions. Windows’ long legacy means it has an almost unfathomable library of software, so there are a mind boggling amount of settings to ensure maximum compatibility with as much of it as possible.
Lutris is a tool primarily used for playing games on Linux. It provides a nice graphical interface that configures and launches a number of “runners,” weather they be compatibility layers like Wine, or emulators like MAME, DOSBOX, or Dolphin. I don’t even recognize most of them, but I doubt anyone uses everything on a regular basis outside development — if that. The community can contribute installers for other people to use, but if your game doesn’t have one, you can still configure it manually.
From what I can tell, the Sim Coaster (sometimes spelled without the space: SimCoaster) installer for Windows has always been very stable in Wine; I’ve never had a problem with the installer. The WineHQ page on the game says the full game should be stable as of Wine 2.5. (For reference, I would have to go out of my way to find a version older than Wine 4.0.) I have it on credible authority that once a program gets full compatibility status, it usually doesn’t get worse.
Yet that’s where I have been for years here. I’ll update my progress, but I feel like I’ve been poking at a wall for loose bricks here, only to find one with the next wall behind it.
My biggest development was getting into the Lutris community’s Discord server. Linux is expansive to the point no one person can know everything, and the more focused of a community you can find for help, the more effective any help you find will generally be.
My second development was learning about the inner workings of Wine. Windows programs expect a certain file structure, so Wine creates a directory at ~/.wine called a Wine prefix –sometimes called a “Wine bottle”– to contain this file structure. In this Wine bottle, it provides free and open source equivalents to libraries Windows programs commonly expect, among other things to fool its programs into believing they’re running on an actual Microsoft Windows operating system.
I eventually made some tangible progress when I successfully created a 32 bit Wine bottle. While most programs can be made to work in 64 bit bottles, a few like Sim Coaster, just crash without much interesting to say to the debug log accessed by launching Lutris with lutris -d (Not just the one launched from the GUI). For all my trouble, I ended up with a text box titled A debugger has been detected saying Unload the debugger and try again.
And here are some miscellaneous clues I hope people like me might find useful:
1. 64 bit Wine bottles can only go back as far as XP, while 32 bit go back to Windows 2.
2. Sim Coaster only gives me its debugger error box when it’s trying to run in Win98 or ME, but not 2000 or XP.
3. It’s been suggested I may be bumping into DRM here. I have the CD, and Wine has that mapped to drive I (as in indigo).
Future things to try are getting the development version of Wine and making a bug report based on that. By the time I try this project again, I’m likely going to be trying on a distro friendlier to gaming. I’ve been interested in learning Arch, and I hear Manjaro is a good trade off for my needs. I’d just like to finish a project or two before learning another major Linux branch.
Final Question: What game from your past do you wish you could play again?