Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

I have been trying to achieve this for awhile now, if anyone has a solution to this then I’d love to hear from you… because this is driving me to the verge of insanity. The objective: to run Final Fantasy VIII PC edition on Kubuntu, the result is as follows with a little bit of history thrown in.

A couple of months ago, I upgraded from Hardy Heron (8.04) to Intrepid Ibex (8.10). I still had KDE 3 for Hardy and wanted to try KDE 4, so why not just go all the way to Intrepid. And I did, the install was smooth as always except, well, the wireless. From past pain and experience, I suspected that it may not be a smooth transition. I knew what to do this time and used ndiswrapper with the Broadcom driver to get it all working again. KDE 4 looks quite snazzy by the way, a bit buggy in places but hopefully Jaunty Jackalope will resolve these issues.

I installed WINE (WINdows Emulator) via Adept, configuration was straightforward. I inserted the FFVIII CD and sure enough, it installed onto my dummy C:\ drive. All good so far, now here’s the fun part. I added the FF8Config.exe and FF8.exe programs into WINE. You need FF8Config to make sure the resolution of the game is correct and to change other settings in the game. I tried to run this and it didn’t work at all, I got the hour glass and nothing. Fine, let’s try the game itself. I run FF8.exe and a similar thing happened except, it would throw me back to the logon screen for Kubuntu. Maybe it was just being obstinate this once, let’s give it a chance. I repeat the process, KDE locks up this time and I had to do a hard reboot. I decided to do a bit of research and I am not the only one having problems, other users are getting different results. Some even manage to load the game but it may crash at a fight sequence, or it runs but ever so slowly.

I have tried all manner of possible solutions at WineHQ, to no avail. Someone did suggest copying some different files to see, but the light of hope is slowly flickering away into nothingness. You can now understand why people still cling onto Windows XP for dear life. Because even though the game works to a certain degree in Vista, the graphical anomalies are too distracting and takes away the gaming experience. I blame DirectX 10 for this but who knows what the problem is. My Windows XP VMWare machine doesn’t like it either, probably because the host machine is, yes you guessed it, Vista. As for Linux… I love Kubuntu, I really do, but this sort of thing is what makes Linux less mainstream than what it can be. It is getting there and I am an advocate for the Linux platform, but there is still an element of doubt in usability for the average computer user. The other side of the coin is that Vista is a pain in the posteria for certain backward compatability, I can name several other programs that won’t run but I have to admit the majority does work.

However, I will keep plugging away, because the feeling of nostalgia refuses to go. I am this close to dual booting into XP but I am too lazy to switch each time I want to play. I really wanted to play Final Fantasy VII PC too, but trying to get that to work really would put me in a strait jacket.

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Tags: Final Fantasy for Linux, Kubuntu, WINE

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.