Sid Meier's Pirates! Guide

Sid Meier's Pirates is an adventurous action strategy game where you pilot your own ship and crew through the dangerous Carribean waters. Fight against the Spanish, English, French and Dutch and plunder the loot from your victory. Dig up treasure, Attack ports, Romance the Governor's daughter and dual with fierce captains.

Follow my step-by-step guide on installing, configuring and optimizing Sid Meier's Pirates in Linux with PlayOnLinux.

Note: This guide applies to the retail version of Sid Meier's Pirates. Other versions may require additional steps.

Tips & Specs:

To learn more about PlayOnLinux and Wine configuration, see the online manual: PlayOnLinux Explained

Mint 16 32-bit
PlayOnLinux: 4.2.2
Wine: 1.5.18

Installing Wine

Click Tools
Select "Manage Wine Versions"

Look for the Wine Versions: 1.5.18

Select it
Click the arrow pointing to the right

Note: Try using stable Wine 1.8 and 1.8-staging

Click Next

PlayOnLinux will automatically download it

Extracting

Note: PlayOnLinux may also install the compatible version of Gecko also.

Installed

Wine is installed and you can close this window

Setup PlayOnLinux

Launch PlayOnLinux
Click Install

Click "Install a non-listed program"

Click Next

Select "Install a program in a new virtual drive"
Click Next

Name your virtual drive: sidmeierspirates
No spaces
Click Next

Check all three options:

• Use another version of Wine
• Configure Wine
• Install some libraries

Click Next

Select Wine 1.5.18
Click Next

Note: If you are running a 64-bit system, PlayOnLinux will prompt if you want to use a 64-bit or 32-bit virtual drive.
Always select 32-bit virtual drive

Wine Configuration

Applications Tab
Windows Version: Windows 7
Click Apply

Graphics Tab
Check "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows"
Check "Emulate a virtual desktop"
Desktop Size: 1024x768
Click OK

Installing Libraries

Check the following libraries:

• POL_Install_corefonts
• POL_Install_dxfullsetup
• POL_Install_tahoma

Click Next

Note: All libraries will automatically download and install

Installing Sid Meier's Pirates!

Select "Select another file"
Click Next

Click Browse

Navigate to your Sid Meiers Pirates DVD
Select Setup.exe
Click open

Click Next

Click OK

Click Next

Click Yes

Click Yes

Click Next

Desktop icon?
Click No

Installing

Click Finish

PlayOnLinux Shortcut

Select Pirates!.exe
Click Next

Name your shortcut: Sid Meier's Pirates!
Click Next

Select "I don't want to make another shortcut"
Click Next

PlayOnLinux Configure

Back to PlayOnLinux
Click Configure

General Tab
Wine version: 1.5.18
Click the + to download other versions of Wine
Click the arrow to select another version of Wine

Wine Tab
Click Configure Wine

Libraries Tab
Type "ms" into text area
Click the arrow and scroll to msvcp71
Select mscvp71
Click Add

Now msvcp71 is on your list of libraries
Click OK

Back to PlayOnLinux Configure

Display Tab
GLSL Support: disable
Select Video Memory Size
This is the amount of Memory your video card/chip has

Close configure

Launch Sid Meier's Pirates!

Back to PlayOnLinux
Select Sid Meier's Pirates!
Click Run

Note: Clicking Debug will show you output errors and bugs.

Video Settings

Click "Change Your System Options"

Click "Video Settings"

Adjust your resolution to match your Linux desktop
Wine virtual desktop will automatically resize and your game will appear fullscreen

Adjust detail and lighting as needed.
Performance depends on the video card you are using

Rule of Thumb:
High settings = More detail, lower frame rates
Low settings = Less detail, higher frame rates

Conclusion:
I had a hard time getting Sid Meier's Pirates! to appear fullscreen on my system.
Its an older game and doesn't seem to support all widescreen resolutions. I ended up changing my desktop resolution to 1400x1050 then matching in game resolution to 1400x1050
Then the game appeared fullscreen.

I also had issues with performance as well. It didn't matter how high or low the graphics setters were... I found that Wine 1.5.18 performed well enough, but there was still a game lag when sword fighting. Everything else ran well.

Screenshots:

 

Yeah it is some kind of library but can't remember what it was for... to busy to google right now

 

It looks like if we ever figure out how to get msvcp110.dll in the wine prefix then the game might run.

 

Looks like Visual Studio 2012.I used BING to search since Google is in my opinion a bunch of criminals who data mine peoples personal information to use for all kinds of undesirable Purposes. Even children aren’t safe. Google has trillions of dollars in various countries in pending lawsuits against them but they still cause trouble.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=30679

We need a script added to POL install components.

 

It appears that its part of Visual C 2010 not 2012
Guess you could always try it the windows way....
vcrdist_x86.exe

I recommend starting over at this point because you already installed vcrun2010 and they might conflict

 

I thought of trying to install that already. I thought that might be a problem since its not a POL script. If I start over it will be the 5th time that I start over. I thought POL was supposed to easily run Windows games on Linux. This one seems to be very difficult to get running.

 

I'll be honest, its not easy to install any games when you do manual installation all by yourself. I have spent hours installing games like Crysis over and over again. Trying different versions of Wine, different libraries and different configurations. It can be very frustrating.
90% of the time the game eventually runs and this is why I started doing guides. Why should everyone else get stuck with scripts that don't work and have to try repeating all the steps I have done. I try to put it all together for you in a way that runs the game.

Ace Patrol seems to be in the 10% of games that have a hard time running. What really sucks, is the debug isn't telling us very much.

So its your call. There is a chance it might fix the problem or it might not. I've had to scrap some games because they just don't run at all.

 

By the way, I was reading your output again and the font errors are because of xactengine and xaudio.
I know there is an xact package you can install and xaudio is there as well... I think.

I recommend doing a manuall installation this time and use the packages we have talked about. Make sure to turn off GLSL in PlayOnLinux configure and do the typical Steam -no-dwrite and turn off overlay.
Then post the debug again at PlayOnLinux.

 

I found xact but their doesn't seem to be a script for installing xaudio. Some of them have such small names that its hard to tell what they are.

 

wine 1.7.14 was released on Friday but POL dosn't have it yet. Acorrding to Alexandre Julliard's email it has more More VisualBasic interfaces in MSXML.

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35645 Maybe wine fixed it. At least we know they know about it.

 

wine 1.7.14 was released on Friday but POL dosn't have it yet. Acorrding to Alexandre Julliard's email it has more More VisualBasic interfaces in MSXML.

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35645 Maybe wine fixed it. At least we know they know about it.

I tried all in your list except for crt as I could not find that in the POL install components list. It still doesn’t run and wine still says 'Unimplemented function msvcp110.dll.'

Oops, I looked in the wrong place. When I run the game using wine 1.7.14 I get 'Unable to find a version of the run time to run this application.'

 

I will try another reinstall later using the new wine version. Now its time for some Skyrim.

 

Ah yes! After 90 hours, I decided to take a break from Skyrim and move on to Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. One day I will go back and play it again.

 

I have 58 mods and something appears to be breaking the game. I had to disable several modes just to get the menu to work. For some reason when I start a new game the town takes so long to open the gate that the patching seems to break preventing the game from working properly. The horses pull the carts straight into the house which gets the game stuck! I suspect I just need to figure out which mods to disable. My laptop can only do directx9c but is a multimedia pc so it does better than your average laptop. It doesn’t help that the FPS looks to be about 1 or two FPS! I will try tweaking the graphics to see if I can improve that.

BTW: check this out Bugzila Bug 35645:

"> Anastasius Focht 2014-03-12 05:33:21 CDT
Hello folks,

use the following link so you can check Wine source by yourself each time a new Wine version is released:

http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/blob/HEAD:/dlls/msvcp110/msvcp110.spec#l3894

--- snip ---
3894 @ stub _Xtime_get_ticks
--- snip ---

'stub' on _Xtime_get_ticks() -> it's not implemented.

There is no need to re-confirm every release.
Maybe revisit every half year or so ;-)

Regards

It seems Sid Meier's Ace Patrol and games like it will not work in wine until they get around to implementing this.

 

Holy Moses! Wow, 58 Mods! I was playing Vanilla

 

Ace Patrol actually looks like a cool game! I finally took a look at it. Its not exactly a Skyrim or Borderlands 2 AAA title... so you would think it could run in Wine...
Its only $5 on Steam right now

 

Holy Moses! Wow, 58 Mods! I was playing Vanilla

All via the Steam Work Shop.

 

Ace Patrol actually looks like a cool game! I finally took a look at it. Its not exactly a Skyrim or Borderlands 2 AAA title... so you would think it could run in Wine...
Its only $5 on Steam right now

I got it via the Humble Bundle late last month for $25.00 with several other games including Sid Meier's Railroads Civ 5 complete, Civ 4 complete, Civ3, ect...

 

Yeah, I remember seeing that.
What also sucks is you can't test it in older versions of Wine because of Steam. Any Wine 1.7.8 or older (Except stable 1.6.2) do not work with Steam. Crashes every time.
If you had the retail version, there is a chance it might work with older Wine versions like Pirates does.
Thanks Steam!

 

Yep Steam really messed up on wine versions below 1.7.8 and they also messed up the Steam overlay. You'd think they would have fixed this by now.