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:

 

That would be nice, but I have a feeling us WinSteamers using Wine are at the bottom of their list. So we are at the mercy of Wine Devs.

 

Steam did not mess up anything. Native Linux Steam works as it should, and Windows Steam works as it should on Windows. This is a bug in Wine, which was fixed with 1.7.8.

 

It still has the Steam Overlay bug.

 

The overlay bug is still a wine issue, as it works perfectly in native Windows. You can't call it a bug with Steam when it runs as it should on the intended platform. It does suck for us Linux gamers, but don't forget that everything we do in wine is completely unsupported.

 

Yes but since Steam is trying to get gaming company’s to make more Linux games and port more games to Linux then I think they have a realisability to try to to cooperate with wine. I know their a business but since they decided to be one of the leading supporters of Linux then I think they should put a reasonable effort in leading the industry in doing things the right way,

 

We are really at the mercy of Wine devs because these games were never meant to run in Linux. That fact that most of them do is pretty awesome, but client DRM programs like Steam will always make changes and updates to provide the best experience for their users and Wine is probably not included in that.

So I will continue to wait for Wine to fix the overlay problem if they can. Since Steam is closed source software, who knows if it will ever get fixed.

For now I'm staying away from Steam guides because if something else breaks I have to post another "work around"

 

OK booman.

 

Steam is trying to get gaming companies to make more Linux games and port games to Linux, that means native Linux games just as Valve is doing themselves. You can't expect developers to care if their software run in wine, it is a completely unsupported platfrom. If a developer want their software to run in Linux, they will make a Linux version. That is the right way to do it.

Wine is an attempt to allow windows software to run on Linux, but any problems with running software in wine is not a fault of the game developer. This is because wine is not yet a perfect compatibility layer between Windows and Linux, and it probably never will be perfect.

However, the Wine devs are really aiming for a perfect compatibility layer, so in time more and more software should run with less and less issues. And updates should become less of a problem. I am optimistic that given time, I'll have almost all my windows games running very well.

 

Hello. Can you help me. I am running mint qiana and I have original cd of smp. (well it's actually 2 cds). I followed all of the steps on this tutorial till I got to the setup.exe part. I choose it press next and then it just says please wait. But it didn't do anything for a long time. Do you perhaps know what is wrong?

 

Yes, the best thing you can do is create a folder on the desktop called: Sid Meiers Pirates, then copy all of the files from both CD's to the folder.
Then do the install from that folder.
Instead of selecting the CD, you would just click browse and find the setup.exe

 

Thx for the help, but I don't think this will get me anywhere. I have downloaded everything from the 1st CD, but the 2nd one just says empty. I have tried running it from the directory of 1st CD with the other one in the computer but it still doesn't work. I am willing to try more if you have some suggestions.

 

I have seen this bug before. Try this:

• Eject the CD ROM by right clicking the icon on the desktop
• Enter CD 2
• Wait for the icon to appear
• Open CD 2
• Copy all data to same folder on your Desktop

I've had this problem many times. If you just press the button on the CD ROM to open the drive, Linux won't unmount it. So when you put in the next CD it won't see anything.

 

Ok now that works but when I tried to copy files I had to merge or replace some files. I don't know if that is what is wrong but I still have the same problem.

 

I would say "merge all" and "replace all"
Its really hard to tell which files are needed and which aren't.
If the installer has a problem, just copy the data again off the CD's
I've had success and failure either way.
Normally files like autorun are on both disks. So we don't care if its there at all.

 

This was the first forum that hit when I was trying to get the Pirates! working on my Linux machine. Even though this is an old thread perhaps this post will help someone else to safe some time.

I had a lot of problems with the installation and then some problems with start and graphics.

System specs:
- Ubuntu 19.04
- PlayOnLinux 4.3.4
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 580
- Sid Meiers Pirates! (Version that contains two CDs)
- Wine version used 4.14

Steps to working version:
*** Installation did not succeed from CDs. Installation did not ask for the second disk but always just failed in the middle because files were not found.
1. Copy content of first CD to some directory like ~/cdroms/pirates
2. Copy only next items from the second CD:
- "Disk2A~1.cab" - file
- "program files" - whole directory with content
3. Start a new "clean" installation and install the libraries suggested in the original instructions:
- POL_Install_corefonts
- POL_Install_dxfullsetup
- POL_Install_tahoma
4. I did not change any of the default settings in the wine configuration
*** Copy protection was not able to identify the disc but fortunately it has been removed in 1.02 patch. ***
5. After the installation is ready download the 1.02 patch:
https://support.2k.com/hc/en-us/articles/201333793-Downloading-patch-and-what-does-it-change-
6. Put the extracted patch to the some place where it can be easily started by using wine command prompt.
7. Install the patch.
*** Default "Off-Screen rendering mode" did not work and game was showing an empty screen. ***
8. Change the Display configuration of Pirates! and set the Off-Screen rendering mode to backbuffer.
8. After this I changed the game resolution 1600x1200 and restarted the game. There are no wide screen resolutions available but this was enough to me as the game was fully working.
*** I saw one crash after hours of game play so it seems to be quite stable. I did not have time to check yet what went wrong. ***

 

Awesome! Thank you for posting your steps for runnning Sid Meiers Pirates!
I can't believe someone else still owns the Retail version!
I've been thinking of purchasing the GOG version and doing a new guide.