Sins of a Solar Empire is a real-time space strategy and the first chapter in an epic science fiction saga. The independent Trader Worlds must unite and form the Trader Emergency Coalition to defend themselves against the return of their exiled brethren, "The Advent" and the arrival of the desperate remnants of the ancient Vasari Empire. Explore and conquer nearby planets and distant solar systems by applying brute force, cunning strategy, elegant diplomacy, economic mastery, and researched technology. The gameplay features seamless transition between epic strategy and tactical combat modes.

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Blog RSS Feed Report abuse Latest News: Getting SINS to work on wine -- the real way.

3 comments by masternerdguy on May 25th, 2009 digg this super bookmark


Many people have wanted to run Sins of a Solar Empire on Linux for a while, but the process of getting most games to work with wine is.....not elegant. So, here is a step by step guide to getting it to work guaranteed.

Step 1: Install the Latest WINE release.
Every increment of wine has a lot of changes, not always good ones, but in this case you want them. Get wine 1.9 or better. You can do this from winehq.org or from your distro's package manager.

Step 2: Initial Winecfg
Go to a terminal and run winecfg . Set the version of windows to XP and then move to audio. After a brief bit of 30 second lag, you will see a list of drivers and some other options. I selected ALSA as the only sound driver (this might vary depending on your setup, but just use test sound to see if it works). Set hardware accel to full, driver emulation off, sample rate 48000 and bits per sample to 16. Then go to graphics. Make sure vertex shader support is hardware.

Step 3: Installation the weird way
WINE and Sins hate each other. The sins installer will refuse to copy any data. So, we can get around the installer from this helpful hint from winehq.

Mount the DVD and go to your CD within a terminal using the cd command. On most systems this is /media/SINS.

cd into data/OFFLINE/CA21F9C0 .

Run this code monster:
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/
cp C430389C/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Particle
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Galaxy
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/String
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/GameInfo
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Movie
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Window
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Mesh
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/SDPlugins
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/xml
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/TextureAnimations
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/PipelineEffect
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/AppData
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Textures
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Font
mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Sound
cp 1FDC88E4/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Particle/
cp 28CF98BB/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Galaxy/
cp 2CC87497/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/String/
cp 3D54D676/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/GameInfo/
cp 53B3C1D/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Movie/
cp 5F0FBBFF/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Window/
cp 68589853/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Mesh/
cp 7456C179/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/SDPlugins/
cp 8D566B9B/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/xml/
cp 997EE87D/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/TextureAnimations/
cp BC19F89B/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/PipelineEffect/
cp D7102C86/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/AppData/
cp F56C52C/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Textures/
cp F683113B/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Font/
cp FCBFEF1/* ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Sins\ of\ a\ Solar\ Empire/Sound/

Step 4: Regediting
Run regedit. This opens up an editor for the wine registry. Go to HKEY CURRENT USER then to Software then to wine.

Make a new key called Direct3D. Open it. Add a new String called VideoMemorySize and set it to the graphics card vram. For example, it would be 512 on my system.

Make a new key called DirectDrawRenderer and set it to opengl.

Export the registry (complete) to ~/.wine/user.reg .

Step 5: DLLs
SINS wants Faultrep.dll badly. Google and download it from somewhere. Get it into ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32. Then run winecfg and go to libraries. Add a new ovveride for faultrep and edit it to native, builtin.

Step 6: Launching
CD into ~/.wine/drive_c/program*files/sins* and use wine Sins*exe to run.

If you get errors....and game doesn't work or crashes....
Then you are in for an ultra tedious 10 minutes. You need to add all these ovverides.

"d3d8"="builtin"
"d3d9"="builtin"
"d3dim"="native"
"d3drm"="native"
"d3dx8"="native"
"d3dxof"="native"
"dciman32"="native"
"ddrawex"="native"
"devenum"="native"
"dinput"="builtin"
"dinput8"="builtin"
"dmband"="native"
"dmcompos"="native"
"dmime"="native"
"dmloader"="native"
"dmscript\"="native"
"dmstyle"="native"
"dmsynth"="native"
"dmusic"="native"
"dmusic32"="native"
"dnsapi"="native"
"dplay"="native"
"dplayx"="native"
"dpnaddr"="native"
"dpnet"="native"
"dpnhpast"="native"
"dpnlobby"="native"
"dsound"="builtin"
"dswave"="native"
"dxdiagn"="native"
"mscoree"="native"
"msdmo"="native"
"qcap"="native"
"quartz"="native"
"streamci"="native"

That is courtosy of "The Freelancer Community Site" at Freelancercommunity.net . Please do not ask why this fixes it, I do not understand myself. You MIGHT need to run that tutorial, once again do not ask why.

Finally
Thanks for your interest in linux and wine. For questions and comments email me at masternerdguy@yahoo.com .

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SINS Future Wars - Tactical Simulator - a0.1

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Release Alpha 0.1 of the Sins of a Solar Empire - Future Wars - tactical simulator

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Sins of a Solar Empire - Future Wars - tactical simulator - Version Alpha 0.1 Wallpaper

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Sins: FreeSpace 1 - A conversion project for Sins of a Solar Empire 1.12 (With Update 1) Install instructions included. See release and update info for...

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Jun 17, 2009 Full Version 0 comments

Developer executable files for use in creating mod packs. Updated for Sins 1.17/Entrenchment 1.03.

Map Conversion

Map Conversion

Jun 17, 2009 Mapping Tool 0 comments

Convert maps between Sins versions with this user-created tool. Created by Ross Placing. Requires .Net 2.0; Updated for Sins 1.15/Entrenchment 1.01.

Forge Tools

Forge Tools

Jun 17, 2009 SDK 0 comments

Design your own custom maps & modifications for Sins of a Solar Empire with the the Forge Tools. This package contains tools used by the development team...

Comments  (0 - 10 of 64)
qpac
qpac May 21 2009, 8:25am says:

Please update the Profile.
Developer: Ironclad Games
Publisher: Stardock
Engine: Iron Engine (as mentioned before)
Website: Sinsofasolarempire.com

+1 vote     reply to comment
moosomething
moosomething Jun 10 2009, 2:20am replied:

u should ask INtense! because hes the 1 that made the profile.

+1 vote     reply to comment
qpac
qpac Jun 16 2009, 4:54pm replied:

Thanks for the tip.

+1 vote     reply to comment
Chris122990
Chris122990 May 19 2009, 8:05pm says:

What do you mean the game engine is unknown?

It uses the Iron Engine.

En.wikipedia.org

+1 vote     reply to comment
PromethiusSD7
PromethiusSD7 May 16 2009, 4:08pm says:

Would love a Freelancer mod for this, or a Homeworld mod.

+1 vote     reply to comment
Vuletrox
Vuletrox May 16 2009, 2:03am says:

This game kills time like old rabbits! :D

+1 vote     reply to comment
masternerdguy
masternerdguy May 28 2009, 6:03pm replied:

you kill old rabits :)

+1 vote     reply to comment
Vuletrox
Vuletrox May 31 2009, 10:42pm replied:

maybe...

+1 vote     reply to comment
23-down
23-down Apr 25 2009, 9:14pm says:

Best crossovers would be:

1.Homeworld
2.Space Above and Beyond
3.Andromeda
4.Starlancer\Freelancer
5.Startrek
6.Starwars
7.BSG

+1 vote     reply to comment
timstro59
timstro59 Jun 4 2009, 3:02pm replied:

you forgot stargate.

+1 vote     reply to comment
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Sins of a Solar Empire
Platform
PC
Developer
Ironclad Games
Publisher
Stardock
Engine
Iron Engine
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Official Page
Ironcladgames.com
Release Date
Released Feb 4, 2008
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Theme
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