Galactic Battlegrounds Saga on Linux

Some tinkering is needed to get it running, but nothing too difficult, no mods required

Vanilla Wine

This section assumes that you've installed Steam for Windows in Wine, and installed SW Galactic Battlegrounds within that.

Steam starts steamapps/common/STAR WARS - Galactic Battlegrounds Saga/Game/player.exe, which is a launcher for the game. It doesn't work.

The real game comes in two variants: Battlegrounds.exe is the basic game, and battlegrounds_x1.exe is the basic game plus the clone campaigns. You need to remove player.exe and substitute it with one of these (for example mv player.exe player.exe.old; ln -s battlegrounds_x1.exe player.exe). Unfortunately, we are not finished.

Battlegrounds.exe doesn't let you play the campaigns, complaining about a missing CD. The solution is to run winecfg, on the Drives tab add a new drive, in the advanced options set type to CD-ROM, and point it to any directory.

battlegrounds_x1.exe will not start due to some problem with win32.dll in the game's directory. The solution is to replace the win32.dll with win32.win7.dll.

Proton

This section assumes that you've installed Steam for Linux.

To install SW Galactic Battlegrounds you need to open its properties window, select the Compatibility tab, and enable Proton for this game. Choose a recent Proton version, and close this window. Now Steam allows installing the game.

Steam starts steamapps/common/STAR WARS - Galactic Battlegrounds Saga/Game/player.exe, which is a launcher for the game. It doesn't work.

The real game comes in two variants: Battlegrounds.exe is the basic game, and battlegrounds_x1.exe is the basic game plus the clone campaigns. You need to remove player.exe and substitute it with one of these (for example mv player.exe player.exe.old; ln -s battlegrounds_x1.exe player.exe). Unfortunately, we are not finished.

The issue that affects both variants is that Proton runs the game in fullscreen, and the whole screen is shifted a bit, so you don't click on the thing directly under the mouse pointer. The solution is to set Proton to emulate a virtual desktop, and run the game fullscreen within that desktop. There are several ways of doing this.

→ If you have a 64bit version of Wine installed on your system, you can run WINEPREFIX=~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/356500/pfx winecfg, and on the Graphics tab enable the virtual desktop.

→ If you have protontricks installed, you can use it to run winecfg in any game's Proton context. The easiest way is probably protontricks --gui and navigate the GUI.

→ If you don't want to install protontricks and its huge pile of dependencies, you can run Proton directly from the command line. A minimal commandline for Proton 8.0 that does the trick is:

STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/356500/pfx STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH=~/.steam/steam ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Proton\ 8.0/proton waitforexitandrun winecfg.exe

Note that this doesn't activate the Steam Runtime container and the other stuff Steam normally uses for compatibility and exception handling, so it's not a good idea to run games like this.

→ If you don't want to do any of the above, you can also edit the Proton configuration directly. Open ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/356500/pfx/user.reg in your favorite editor, and add the following at the end:

[Software\\Wine\\Explorer] 1649369789
#time=1d84acd21520bf8
"Desktop"="Default"

[Software\\Wine\\Explorer\\Desktops] 1649369789
#time=1d84acd215207d4
"Default"="1280x1024"

Battlegrounds.exe doesn't let you play the campaigns, complaining about a missing CD. The solution is to run winecfg, on the Drives tab add a new drive, in the advanced options set type to CD-ROM, and point it to any directory. You can run winecfg via protontricks or the commandline method explained above.

battlegrounds_x1.exe will run without any tweaks (win32.dll installed for Proton is different from the one installed by the Windows Steam client, I didn't investigate further).

Epilogue

Guide icon is from https://ar.pinterest.com/pin/583286589220103292/

Enjoy the game, and may the force be with you!

[Vaper1987]

Proton
This section assumes that you've installed Steam for Linux.
as the steam client enabled proton by default you don't need to do anything other the click "install"


Steam starts steamapps/common/STAR WARS - Galactic Battlegrounds Saga/Game/player.exe, which is a launcher for the game. It doesn't work.

The real game comes in two variants: Battlegrounds.exe is the basic game, and battlegrounds_x1.exe is the basic game plus the clone campaigns.

You need to remove player.exe and substitute it with one of these (for example mv player.exe player.exe.old; ln -s battlegrounds_x1.exe player.exe).

Once complete go back to steam and simply click play and you will be able to use the game as if you are on windows :)

Tested on Zorin OS/Cachy OS/ Linux Mint.