Touhou on Linux and MacOS X, using Wine or Virtualization

[Momiji]

Note:  This also exists on Touhou Wiki here.

For those of us who run Linux as our only operating system, finding functional alternatives to Windows programs can be pretty hard.  In the case where we need to run Windows programs, the Wine project has been long developing an emulation system that lets us do such a thing.  Basically, it translates Windows functionality into their respective Linux counterparts, so you can still play your Windows games, work in Photoshop, etc. under Linux and, to a certain extent, MacOS X.

Running Touhou games on Wine is hit-or-miss, but is possible.  Here I'll show how Wine works, and how to (attempt to) play Windows Touhou games under Wine.

Before we start, this does require a little familiarity with the shell (or command-line interface).  This Linux guide has a nice introduction to using the shell.

Installing Wine on Linux
Ubuntu and Debian:  See Here
Fedora:  See Here
SuSE:  See Here
Gentoo:  See Here.  I recommend unmasking the git-fetching ebuild.  Adding =app-emulation/wine-9999 ** to /etc/portage/package.keywords should do the trick.  Do emerge -pv wine and check which version it wants to build (it should be app-emulation/wine-9999).  Just be aware, building from Wine's Git repository might not actually work, the code is in constant flux.

Installing Wine on MacOS X using MacPorts
See Here

Using Wine
Wine puts a hidden directory in your home folder, called .wine, which contains a full representation of a Windows folder hierarchy and miscellaneous library and system files.  The .wine folder lives inside your home directory (~/.wine).  Inside is another folder called drive_c, which is your Wine install's C: drive folder.  If you browse inside this folder (~/.wine/drive_c) you'll probably quickly recognize it's contents from a standard Windows install.

Generally, your Linux distribution will have assigned Windows executable to automatically start within Wine, so double-clicking a Windows executable should generally just work.  But if not, you'll have to invoke Wine from your terminal.  This will be somewhat important for running Touhou games properly, but that'll come later.  Anyway, here we'll look inside a program as it's installed within Wine with your terminal, move into it's folder and run it with Wine:

~ $ ls .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/RandomProgram
config.ini  libjpeg.dll  program.exe readme.txt
~ $ cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/RandomProgram
~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/RandomProgram $ wine program.exe

And that should start up your program.

Running Touhou games
Running a Touhou game is done the same way, only you might want to specify your locale while invoking Wine so it starts your game as a Japanese program.  Here's how my Double Spoiler install looks like, and how to run it:

~ $ ls .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/上海アリス幻樂団/ダブルスポイラー
custom.exe  readme.txt  th125.exe  unins000.dat
omake.txt   th125.dat   thbgm.dat  unins000.exe
~ $ cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/上海アリス幻樂団/ダブルスポイラー
~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/上海アリス幻樂団/ダブルスポイラー $ LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8" wine th125.exe

The LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8" part tells Wine to run under the Japanese locale, else it will run under whatever your default Locale is (en_US.UTF-8, en_GB.UTF-8, etc.), and you'll probably experience serious mojibake, although you may only see it in the program window's title.  Also, you should run English patches under the Japanese locale;  at which point your English-patched executable can be run under your default locale.

Using native Windows DLLs
This is pretty much no longer necessary for Touhou games, but it's a way to fix certain missing functionality in Wine you may find with other programs.  Basically, Windows has a lot of available system interface DLLs, and it's a huge order to 100% duplicate all that functionality in Wine.  While the Wine developers are constantly at work improving the coverage of the Windows' API, there's still lots of missing gaps here and there.  One way to temporarily fix a partially-functioning DLL is to replace it with the original file from a Windows install.  Here's the steps to do so; we'll use "d3dx9_36.dll" as an example.  Also note, I have a 32-bit Vista installation mounted at /mnt/vista32.

First off, to copy the file.  Wine's Windows folder is in .wine/drive_c/windows.

~ $ cp /mnt/vista32/Windows/System32/d3dx9_36.dll .wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

This might be all you need for the new DLL to work.  To make sure programs see it, we'll configure it within Wine.  Wine has a configuration utility called winecfg, run it from your terminal and you'll see this:

Click the Libraries tab:

Under "New override for library", type d3dx9_36, and click Add and Apply:

Now you can click OK to exit the utility, or peruse around the other tabs and settings.  One issue with loading native Windows DLLs, they may require original low-level Windows DLLs (i.e. ntdll.dll) that Wine is emulating, and might not work.  These are the core DLLs that Wine is emulating and cannot be replaced with native Windows DLLs, else you'll break your Wine folder.

Wine in MacOS X
Wine works similarly in OS X compared to Linux, only you need to make sure you start X11 beforehand ( Applications > Utilities > X11 ).  One issue that Mac users may encounter is incredibly slow 3D graphics performance;  this is due to Apple's X11 implementation not supporting hardware OpenGL in older versions of OS X (Tiger and below).  If you encounter this, you may want to bite the bullet and upgrade.

Using Parallels and VMWare Fusion (Virtualization)
Another alternative that works very well is to use Parallels Desktop to run the games.

Parallels Desktop version 5.0 runs the main series games very well: All of the Windows danmaku games except for PCB run without slowdown on a MacBook Pro.  PCB appears to suffer from slowdown for unknown reasons. 

Update: Version 1.00a of Ten Desires can be significantly laggy.  Patching to 1.00c resolves all issues and will run the game at 60FPS

It is important to run the games in full screen, and it is better to use the zoom function to bring the game screen to full screen, at least on a MacBook Pro.  Running the games in windowed mode often results in slowdown, and the computer appears to have real difficulties in displaying 640x480 natively (the games will run at 30fps).  You can run them in 720x480 just fine, though.

Activate the zoom function through the "Trackpad" pane in System Preferences, and zoom in by putting the mouse in the middle of the screen and holding control and scrolling up with two fingers.

The fighting games (SWR and Soku) have no slowdown during matches, but DO have a serious delay while loading for the match (close to a minute).  It has been suggested, but not yet confirmed, that placing the games on the virtual C: drive, rather than on the OSX desktop or other location in OSX, may clear this out; Parallels treats the Mac's hard drive as a network drive, which may slow access.  Netplay has yet to be tested for either the fighters or for PoFV. 

If your SWR/Soku display looks strange when run in fullscreen (usually, a bar at the bottom and right of the screen that displays the desktop), set the game to run in Windowed mode, exit out, and restart the game.  Then change it back to fullscreen in the menu.

The PC-98 games can be run through anex86 without difficulty (so yes, emulation within emulation).  There is a PC-98 emulator for OSX, but it has not been updated for several years and does not appear to accept the Touhou games.

The following fan games have been confirmed to run fine under Parallels Desktop 5 using Windows XP on a MacBook Pro:
* Megamari
* Patchcon
* Genius of Sappheiros
* Koumajou Densetsu Scarlet Symphony (both games)
* Nitroid

The following do NOT run under Parallels 5, have severe slowdown, or suffer from fatal glitches, although in some cases this may be due to the graphics card (apparently, some of the fan games don't communicate properly with NVIDIA cards.):
* Super Marisa World (runs at 30FPS)
* Mountain of Faith Phantasm (runs at 30FPS)
* Sengou Gensokyo (cannot input commands during battle, otherwise 100%)
* Touhou Labyrinth (either will not display, or overwhelming glitches)
* Touhou Soccer 2 (no display)


For unknown reasons, VMWare Fusion will not run the Touhou games properly

The games have not yet been tested with Parallels Desktop 6.  Stay tuned for information.

PC98 Games
Both T98Next and Anex86 work just fine under Wine.  Also, if you're into two-player PoDD with a gamepad, JoyToKey also works under Wine.  For properly configuring your respective PC98 emulator, please see the PC98 emulator thread.

Gotchas, Troubleshooting
One issue I've seen is with joysticks.  If you plug in your joystick while your Touhou game is running, it probably won't notice it.  Make sure it's plugged in and working before running your Touhou game.

Installing English patches has been known to cause otherwise troublesome games to start working better.

For SWR and HSTS, see here (SWR/HSTS Wiki).

The Wine developers are constantly adding and fixing functionality, so while things are still iffy with Touhou games they're definitely improving.  See below for a list of the current Touhou bugs on the Wine Bugzilla.

Outside the official games...
Touhou doujin games are also hit-or-miss.  Danmakufu doesn't work at all.  Age of Ethanols is a .NET game, so it should run natively in Mono, but in my trials in getting it to run I've discovered it's coded in part C#, part C++, so it won't work without installing .NET and whatnot from within Wine.


Touhou Games in the Wine AppDB (appdb.winehq.org)
[EoSD] [PCB] [IaMP] [IN] [PoFV] [StB] [MoF] [SWR] [SA] [UFO] [HSTS] [DS] [FW] [TD]

Wine Bug Status (bugs.winehq.org)
Official Games
[421] [EoSD - TD] Bad Text Part 2, DIB Engine Implementation:  Now Implemented
[13297] [EoSD - FW] Missing D3DXCreateTextureFromFileA in d3dx9_36.dll:  Now Implemented
[13490] [SWR, Patchcon] Nvidia video driver FPU bug, improper rounding causing game crash:  Fixed in Nvidia drivers 275.19
[15146] [MoF, TD] Bad Text Part 1, Mishandled rgb444 Depth Conversion:  Now Implemented
[18232] [SA, UFO] Huge framerate drop when OffscreenRenderingMode=fbo (Intel i945 graphics chips)  Driver issue resolved
[19106] [MoF] Improperly rendered backgrounds Reported fixed as of Wine 1.4-rc6
[13554] [IaMP] Broken config.exe (16-bit app), comctl32.dll not properly imported
[18394] [PoFV] Patching to 1.50a breaks game, problems with dpnet.dll
[18440] [SWR] Menu/Game select crashes, problems with GetGlyphOutline in d3dx9_33.dll
[24206] [HSTS] Ending network game causes hangup
[30538] [SA - TD] Framerate Regression due to EDID polling lag
Fangames
[30212] Koumajou Densetsu needs Scripting.Dictionary implementation.

Disclaimer
I can't guarantee that any of this won't blow up your computer, kill your waifu, etc.  Please be careful.
Also, I'm pretty bad at writing things like this, if you have any suggestions or fixes let me know.

Original Wine/Linux thread here.

Credits:  Ruro for the original sticky, Silentsword for the Virtualization on Mac info.

[Tengukami]

Thanks for this. I have few issues running Touhou in Wine. For the most part, everything runs fine for me in Wine 1.1.33, except:

- SWR and UNL don't run at all.
- PoFV tends to freeze between stages.
- UFO's custom.exe won't open, but the game runs fine windowed.

Don't really care about the fighting games, but it would be nice to fix the UFO custom.exe thing, and get PoFV running.

[Momiji]

Pretty much the same problems I have.  Also, a lot of the custom.exes don't work at all for me, and I don't really know if there's any fix for them.  I just don't even try to use them.

As for PoFV it freezes for me whenever I pick a character, and only certain characters in certain difficulty levels, along with random lockups between stages.  Really weird.

[Just a GBZero]

This gives a bit more info for SWR and 12.3 on linux
http://hisouten.koumakan.jp/wiki/Linux_support

[Momiji]

Thanks!  I'll add that to the guide.

[Barrakketh]

DirectX support can be added more easily with winetricks.  Once you have it saved and marked as executable (note that you'll need the cabextract program available):

Code: [Select]

./winetricks d3dx9
It actually makes it easier to install a lot of things you might need for Wine.  If you find yourself running Japanese applications via the command line often it might not be a bad idea to add an alias to your .bashrc or .bash_profile:

Code: [Select]

alias jwine='LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 wine'
Last I checked the Touhou games won't run properly full-screen (even if you confine it to a window by telling Wine to use a virtual desktop), so if you want to play Touhou and have it "bigger" you can change the resolution from a script with xrandr:

Code: [Select]

xrandr -s 1024x768
Don't forget to change it back to your native resolution when the game closes.  Note that depending on your monitor you may get some display lag since it might scale the input (might very very little unless it also post-processes the image), and it would be a good idea to pick a resolution that has the same aspect ratio at your monitor's native resolution to avoid stretching.  If you want to see the resolutions your monitor says it supports:

Code: [Select]

xrandr -q


On launching Touhou properly - the reason why you need to change to the Touhou game's directory is twofold.  One, if you don't you'll have no music.  Secondly, it'll place the config file and score.dat inside whatever your current directory is.  If you experience those systems you probably forgot to do that.

Regarding locale - you might not have the needed locale (ja_JP.UTF-8) available.  On Arch Linux you can edit /etc/locale.gen and either uncomment the ja_JP.UTF-8 entry or add it to that file.  After doing so run:

Code: [Select]

sudo locale-gen
Gentoo uses the same method as Arch, Ubuntu uses (or used as of the last time I had to do this on Ubuntu) a different method that I can't recall, but the Debian wiki says that you can create the /etc/locale.gen file if it doesn't exist and what I've written above for Arch will also apply.

[Tengukami]

Last I checked the Touhou games won't run properly full-screen

My experience with Touhou fullscreen on Linux has been:

EoSD and PCB: Runs a million FPS for a few seconds, crashes. Vsync does not rectify this.
UFO: Runs 72 FPS.
SA: Can run fullscreen in Linux if you open custom_e.exe and "Fast" under "Input latency".

All others, including Double Spoiler, seem to run just fine for me in fullscreen.

[null1024]

Only tested PCB so far, with nothing but a vanilla Wine 1.1.43 on Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2.

Just double clicked th07e.exe in Nautilus, and away I went.
Runs flawlessly for me [fullscreen even, 60fps], with only the black boxes around text problem. Also, you have to change the setting in custom.exe related to DirectInput [uncheck it], or else control will lock up, and you won't be able to navigate the menus [and selection keeps going down in circles].

Oh, and Compiz still draws the GNOME bars over the top and bottom still, so I had to switch back to Metacity before playing. Not a real problem [you should do it anyway, it takes resources away from your game!], but a bit annoying.

[Momiji]

Just double clicked th07e.exe in Nautilus, and away I went.

I noticed that the English patches do tend to make things work that normally don't, especially on a 64-bit Linux install.  Hey, if you're trying out other games, post your results if you can.  It'd be nice to build a nice knowledge base here.  ^.^

[Barrakketh]

I noticed that the English patches do tend to make things work that normally don't, especially on a 64-bit Linux install.  Hey, if you're trying out other games, post your results if you can.  It'd be nice to build a nice knowledge base here.  ^.^

FWIW UFO launches by clicking on it from Dolphin.  So does launching it via the vpatch.

Tested EoSD on Arch Linux (x86_64) with the Catalyst drivers (10.4), Xorg 1.7, and forced Vsync - it'll actually run full-screen at 60 FPS with and without the vpatch (notable in that FPS isn't in the hundreds or thousands).

EDIT: Forgot Wine ver, 1.1.43.

[null1024]

Just tried EoSD myself, runs at "60" fps in game, but it feels like 30, runs at "120" fps in the menu but feels like 60.

StB runs just fine [60fps and whatnot]. Thought it might crash on starting up, displayed a bit of garbage and tried to change the resolution twice, but it opened up just fine [although I didn't initially expect it to fail, I've historically been able to get it to run in Wine], ran full speed, slight text problem [weird colors and odd transparency issues for some bits of text].
Also, pictures aren't corrupt anymore [can't remember the last Wine version I tried, but at least it's gone now]! Yay!

[Tengukami]

Hey guys.

Just thought I'd share something I discovered regarding making videos of replays. Many of you probably already know this, but I thought it'd be a good reference.

I use two apps: recordmydesktop and ffmpeg.

Recordmydesktop is available in Synpatic among other places and is incredibly simple to use. Just hit "Select Window", and drag the cursor over the game window, then hit record.



When finished, hit the record button in your panel to stop it. It'll then process the recording, and output it as an .ogv file, to /home by default. Recording a spellcard in Double Spoiler produces a high quality video about 90MB in size.

If you want to keep the quality but reduce the file size, you can get ffmpeg from Synaptic. Open the directory that the video is in in Terminal and paste the following command:

$ ffmpeg -i out.ogv -target ntsc-dvd -aspect 4:3 [whateveryouwanttonameit].mpg

The output is pretty much the same quality, but at a third the size: in this case, down from 91.8MB to 33.1MB

That's all there is to it.

The one caveat I should mention is to check your sound outputs. Depends on your OS, so to make sure you record sound as well as video, have all your outpits on.

[Momiji]

Oh, right.  There's two versions of this in Gentoo,  recordmydesktop (shell-only) and recordmydesktop-gtk (GTK+ based).  And having a soundcard with self-recording capability (i.e. generally none of the "intel-hda" chips) or some sort of ALSA loopback dark magic is necessary for audio recording.

[chejomolina]

Hi i'n new here, thanks for all information very usefull i try it with EoSD and work fine but on stages 4 and 5 fps get down to 3 or 4 fps too bad but i can play firts stages very good that's something

[Momiji]

Huh, weird.  Does it slow down on the same stages consistently, or just after a certain period of time?

[chejomolina]

well is in the same stages allways dosn't matter the time it's on stages 4 and 5 also the game is windowed fullscreen get down frames

[Tengukami]

Only advice I could give would be to Force 60 FPS in your config.exe, and if that doesn't work, try playing windowed mode.

I know, windowed mode isn't ideal.

[Tsubame]

Um, it should be noted that the required DLLs for MoF onwards to run are in the CD's "directx" directory. However, you will need cabextract to get them.

The file usually has the name MonYYYY_d3dx9_NN_x86.cab, where "Mon" is the name of the month the DLL was released, YYYY the year, and NN the number of the file you're looking for. Of course, you could replace "x86" for "x64" if you need the 64-bit support file, but since I've never used a 64-bit OS, I don't know much about those cases  :derp:.

Taking UFO for example, the game asks for the file d3dx9_40.dll. Inside the game CD's directx folder you will find Nov2008_d3dx9_40_x86.cab, which contains the DLL we're looking for.

With this, you can avoid going to a windows install, IIRC.

P.S.: For reference, d3dx9_36.dll is inside Nov2007_d3dx9_36_x86.cab.

[Momiji]

Just added some info on installing Wine on OS X, lemme know if it works.

[null1024]

Mmkay, tested 12.3 in Wine... it runs badly for me [slows down within the first 5 seconds of starting it, windowed or not].
A shame, because I really don't feel like rebooting into Windows every time I want to play it.

[Momiji]

The fighting games will definitely have more problems than the other games.  Have you tried any of the others yet?

Also, what version of Wine are you running?  And have you set up any dll overrides yet?

[Dorian Loup]

So!

I'm currently trying to make IN and UFO work on my new eeepc (1015 PE).

It work, but it lags a lot too much. IN is around 30-40 fps ans UFO around 10...

I'll try with Cedega during the week end, I'll update you to make you know if it worked.

If it doesn't work, I will have to boot quite often on windows to play

[Momiji]

I'm currently trying to make IN and UFO work on my new eeepc (1015 PE).

It work, but it lags a lot too much. IN is around 30-40 fps ans UFO around 10...

Looks like this has a GMA 3150 graphics chip.  Even though it supposedly supports hardware texturing, I wouldn't expect to get much more out of your netbook than you are.  It's probably also due to the slow Atom processor.

[Momiji]

Just a heads up, the Wine devs have finally implemented D3DXCreateTextureFromFileA in d3dx9_36.dll, closing bug 13297.  There's still some Touhou-related bugs left to fix, but it looks like one of the major ones has finally fallen!  Upgrade your Wine installs and test your games out!

So far, everything's pretty much working for me.  The only game I still have problems with is PoFV, which still locks up when loading certain scenarios, and the fighting games.

[ghost333]

i have an installation of linux mint 9 and wine 1.2.2
i try to play PCB  but it  crashes after the main menu when i try to select anything from it,
it used to work back in the old good days of linux mint 7 and suse.
but no light here.
any help apreciated.

[Momiji]

First off, can you try the development version (1.3.15) as opposed to the stable version (1.2.2)?

[ghost333]

ok i installed the binary.
but still it wont work.
also notes of intereste:  IN encounters the same problems while MOF ,SA , UFO seems to play

[Romantique Tp]

Does EoSD run properly ?

[Tengukami]

ok i installed the binary.
but still it wont work.
also notes of intereste:  IN encounters the same problems while MOF ,SA , UFO seems to play

I'm running Linux Mint 10, and I use WINE version 1.1.33 for my Touhou games. They all run fine except:
 - Can't get SWR to open, let alone run.
 - UFO runs at 72FPS in full screen only.

That's it. Try 1.1.33 and see if anything changes for you.

[ghost333]

Does EoSD run properly ?

i dont have EOSD so i cant really try.


1.1.33?
hmn i cant find a binary and building one will require to install 32bit dev files