TrackMania Nations Forever works

[ion]

Whoa. TrackMania Nations Forever seems to be installable and playable in the native Linux version of Steam. It launches it under Wine – it worked with a fresh/deleted .wine tree, nothing needs to be installed in there in advance – and even the overlay works.

I have wine 1.5.16-0ubuntu1 from the ubuntu-wine PPA.

TrackMania Nations Forever: http://store.steampowered.com/app/11020/
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/9hueX.png

[Rain Shinobi]

You're absolutely right, I just tried it :D

Overlay wouldnt let me type anything in chat (just space and letter keys wouldnt work) but everything else including screenshots worked flawlessly.

[RobbieThe1st [Linux]]

So, what, just install and play(provided you've got Wine installed)?

[Rain Shinobi]

Yep Robbie :P

[RobbieThe1st [Linux]]

Downloading now. Just because of this. We'll see tomorrow when it's done. :D

[RobbieThe1st [Linux]]

Hm, downloaded quicker than I expected. Tested it. First test - failed; checked the console, it couldn't run the exe.
Seems to run it as 'native', you need to enable binfmt_misc support for exe files. Check this post for details: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wine#Using_Wine_as_an_interpreter_for_Win16.2FWin32_binaries
After I did that... Pressed start and hey, the game came up! Amazing! Graphics were a bit chunky, and no AA, but it played plenty responsively.

[chicken stuffing]

Nup you don't even need wine, I just navigated to the store page you got and clicked install and it came with the install pop up and had to wait a bit. For some reason the install window or some steam windows become not clickable, might be because I have dual monitor. Usually have to lose focus on the window a couple of times and it becomes clickable again.

But yeah sidetracked, it works without wine, currently downloading.

[RobbieThe1st [Linux]]

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work without wine - Steam launches the EXE as on Windows, but the kernel can figure out that it's a Windows excecutable and run it. Without that bit, it /will not/ work - I tried.
...And the fact that I got a wine popup wanting me to install Mono when I clicked on the start game link is kind of a giveaway.

[chicken stuffing]

kk, yeah doesn't work. downloads dlls and exes. double click to play doesn't attempt to start.

[ion]

Ah, I forgot about binfmt. It runs the exe directly indeed. I hope this working isn’t just a side effect of some bug that’s going to get fixed. It would be nice to be able to run Windows versions of games that lack Linux ports directly from the native client.

[Rain Shinobi]

if it is a bug, it works pretty damn well :P

[nieknooijens]

Originally posted by Rain Ninja:

if it is a bug, it works pretty damn well :P

it's not a bug! it's a feature!

[ThOR27]

It would be nice, if you were able to install any windows game on linux machine and make it runs under wine. But those game shouldn't be listed as linux friendly or linux compatible, and when you did that it would be interesting if you have a big warning message saying "You are trying to run a windows game on linux and may not work correctly"

[shatsky]

BTW, systemd has a special systemd-binfmt.service which stores configuration in /etc/binfmt.d/

echo ":DOSWin:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:">/etc/binfmt.d/wine.conf

[Max Otto von S]

It is a bug
http://cdr.thebronasium.com/app/11020 this app has no "ValidOSList" - so it can be downloaded and launched from any OS (I think from freebsd too, if Valve will put steam to ports in future) But the binary format is PE WIN32, so binfmt is workaround.

[shatsky]

But how does the integration with Steam overlay work?