ThiefOnLinux

Notes

Cutscenes

• You need a native copy of the elusive quartz.dll (not sure if the game CD installs this one)
• You need the IV50 intel video codec, on the game disc as iv5codecs.exe

still not working for me yet... check the install.cfg file, make sure it is pointing to the right place, etc

Multiprocessor systems

Thief wasn't designed with multi-core systems in mind. In the schedtool package, you can get the schedtool program, and then run Thief on one core only, with:

schedtool -a 0x2 -e wine THIEF.EXE

Widescreen page fault

Thief wasn't designed in the era of widescreen monitors, either. I was getting a page fault on startup like this:

wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x0000000a at address 0x448d17 (thread 0009), starting debugger...
Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x0000000a in 32-bit code (0x00448d17).

...

Backtrace:
=>1 0x00448d17 in thief (+0x48d17) (0x0000002c)
  2 0x00000000 (0x00000000)

...

Threads:
process  tid      prio (all id:s are in hex)
0000000a 
        0000000b    0
00000008 (D) D:\ThiefG\THIEF.EXE
        0000000d    0
        00000009    0 <==
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_SetCooperativeLevel (0x128db0)->((nil),00000008)

I tried all kinds of things until it twigged: It was attempting to display fullscreen on my widescreen monitor, and getting horribly confused. The easy fix:

• Run winecfg
• Choose Graphics tab.
• Select Emulate a virtual desktop, and enter some standard 4:3 size. I chose 1280x768. It doesn't seem to matter too much, since when Thief starts (successfully this time!), it changes the 'monitor' resolution to whatever the game setting is.

According to the TTLG forums, there is a fan-made 'fix' for the widescreen issue - though it is probably a lot more involved, patching binaries and whatnot...

Links

• AppDB entry
• One TTLG post