Installing Ubuntu on the MacBook recently, I knew there would be a bunch of OSX programs I would no longer be able to run but I was pretty confident that I'd be able to get some Windows programs going with wine. Having had good luck with Temple of Elemental Evil on the Elitebook last December, it was as simple as copying over my .wine folder to bring that over to the MacBook, and it seems to work well (so far). I was a little worried about WarCraft III since I hadn't ever tried that on the Elitebook - I'd always run it under OSX, but as it turned out, that wasn't anything to worry about either. Hey, I realize this is a 10 year old game, but its one of my favorites and I like to putter around in it from time to time! My notes on getting it set up follow.

I might have chosen to install from the CD, but since I already had an .iso image of the disc (I can't stand playing games that insist on having a spinning CD), I decided to use that. I won't cover creating an iso image of the disc here.

First I created a place to mount the iso: mkdir /mnt/WarcraftIII

Then I mounted the Warcraft III iso. This can be done once,

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 \
/home/[username]/path/to/WarcraftIII.iso /mnt/WarcraftIII

or it can be added to the fstab so that it will mount at boot time (or so you can just mount it with 'sudo mount /mnt/WarcraftIII' when you need to use it). As it turns out this wasn't really necessary, because the later patch levels from Blizzard allow the installed game to run without a CD in the drive, but here's the line I used in fstab anyway if you're interested:

/home/[username]/path/to/WarcraftIII.iso \
/mnt/WarcraftIII udf,iso9660 user,auto,loop 0

Then I ran winecfg and made sure I had a drive letter set up as to point to /mnt/WarcraftIII. In my case I used drive letter F. Make sure you select it as Type: CD under advanced.

To install Warcraft III, just issue wine F:\\Install.exe note: you'll need your serial number from the official CD!

Exit the installer, and rename the Movies directory which you'll find in your /home/[username]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Warcraft III folder. I've read they don't play correctly or may cause the game to crash. I suppose you could watch them externally to the game if you really wanted to.

Grab the latest PC patch from: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/warcraft-iii-patch-downloads, save it somewhere easy to reference from the command line, say, /tmp and install it with: wine /tmp/War3ROC_126a_English.exe (I tested with 1.26a). This launches the game at the end, I closed it and unmounted the iso image since it isn't needed with the patches greater than 1.21b.

Some folks have suggested running the game with the -opengl switch, but it seems to run fine in 1280x800 with the default launcher that it put on my desktop which has the following command line: env WINEPREFIX="/home/[username]/.wine" wine C:\\Program\ Files\\Warcraft\ III\\Warcraft\ III.exe.

The only unresolved questions I have were how to move my saved games over from OSX or if thats even possible, but its certainly not a priority. The other is to test multi-player which will have to wait till I can coordinate some game time with the kids.