I’ve been playing a lot of Babo:Invasion recently. It’s a fun little game, and for the $3 or so it cost me on steam the price couldn’t be beat. It’s been great fun on windows, but I’m trying to get my desktop (now codenamed “hera”) up to be my perfect box: Tri boot Windows, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD. One of the neat tricks I have up my sleeve is a simple symlink: ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps is a symlink to /mnt/windows/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps. This is pretty nifty; Worst case scenario, my Linux steaminstall keeps all my steamapps up to date in periods of inactivity. In the best case, for a couple games (like Civ IV), this means I’ve got just one install, but I can play either on ubuntu via Wine or on my windows box with basically zero hassle.

However, Babo is not one of the nice games. Here’s what I’ve done so far to get it to work, and where I am right now: First off, it wanted an initial install, which consisted of a directx update. Obviously, this didn’t install under wine, so I had to fake it out by adding the following key to the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\MIBI\DXMar2009\ “DirectX”=dword:00000001

Once that was done, the application wouldn’t launch. It wanted two dlls: d3dx9_41.dll and xinput1_3.dll; Get those from the windows\system32 directory of a windows box that has it installed, or if you can extract the CAB files they’re in baboinvasion\directx\dxdllreg_x86.cab and APR2007_xinput_x86.cab . Put those in the application directory.

Once that’s done, launch steam and launch babo. This is as far as I’ve gotten; It appears to be working, but it’s got a constant ‘down’ input and a screen flicker; sound is tempermental, meaning it’s worked at least once but I don’t know why it worked that time, and most importantly there’s /huge/ screen flicker; It looks to me to be vsync related. Upgrading to the more recent Wine, it’s no longer got the ‘down’ input, but the other two problems persist.