How to run (entry X) general thread

Competitions IFComp
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We’ve had “how to get entry X to run” topics in the past … Wabewalker from 2021 is one example I remember well, because I got stuck, and I found I wasn’t the only one, and I wound up enjoying it once I got started.

@DemonApologist noted some troubles with The Curse here. So I thought this would be a good topic for that and other entries that might be tricky to run.

Perhaps people who’ve used WINE a lot can nail down stuff they know gets overlooked?

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I (running Linux Mint 21.3 on an x64 system) didn’t encounter the same problem trying to install and run The Curse, so maybe it’s worthwhile talking explicitly about how I got it running under Wine.

  1. Wine was already installed on my computer, but those for whom Wine isn’t already installed can follow the directions on downloading and installing it that are found here.
  2. I organized my IFComp folder by moving each thing I want to play, including The Curse, into its own folder and unpacking any .zip files into the relevant folder. So, for me, The Curse appears in /home/patrick/games/IF/competitions/[2024] IFComp 30/Games/The Curse/. This probably isn’t strictly necessary, but helps keep things a little tidier, which I like.
  3. I opened a terminal and changed to the folder in which The Curse’s installer is housed with cd /home/patrick/games/IF/competitions/[2024] IFComp 30/Games/The Curse.
  4. I then ran the installer from the terminal by typing wine thecurseSETUP.exe.
  5. The installer ran, and it let it install to the default folder that it wanted, which was C:\Program Files\Thecurse. Unix-like operating systems don’t use drive letters, of course, so Wine maintains a mapping of drive letters to individual folders inside the (normally invisible) .wine directory that it creates inside the home folder of each user who uses Wine on a system. For me, my home folder is /home/patrick because I log in to my system as patrick, and my .wine folder is /home/patrick/.wine, so my C: drive is /home/patrick/.wine/drive_c. This means that The Curse is actually installed in /home/patrick/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/TheCurse.
  6. I probably don’t need to know that if I’m playing through The Curse on a single playthrough, because the installer gives me an option to launch the installed program immediately, and that worked just fine. Still, if I want to launch it again, I can open up a terminal, switch to the relevant folder with cd "/home/patrick/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/TheCurse", and then run the program with wine THECURSE.EXE. A quicker way to do this without mucking around with changing folders is to type wine "C:\\Program Files\\TheCurse\THECURSE.EXE" from any terminal.
  7. If you want to just be able to open The Curse (or other Windows programs) with mouse clicks without having to use a terminal, many Linux distributions have a separate package you need to install to accomplish that; on Ubuntu and its derivatives (and maybe other Debian-based distributions?) the package is called wine-binfmt, so sudo apt install wine-binfmt should install it, or you can use your favorite graphical package manager.

What I find happens when I open The Curse and choose “tell the story from the beginning” is that it opens three windows: one contains text saying “The end of the Cold War had been a real bummer for you …”; one starts “You are still absorbed in your thoughts …”; and the third is a terminal window containing the question “Are you the chosen one?” and prompting “Who knocks at the door?”

It seems that this third window (“Are you the chosen one?”) is the one actually running the game, and that you’re supposed to interact with. (It’s the only window you get if you choose option 2, “Skip the Intro”.) For me, it was buried under the other two “tell me the story from the beginning” windows, so you might need to close those or look underneath other windows on your screen, depending on how your window manager arranges your windows.

Does that help?

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Yes! This was extremely helpful. You mentioning the hidden terminal window made me realize that last night when I first opened the game, there had been a weird extra window that I closed not knowing what to do with it. (I honestly just forgot, I was tired at the time.) Subsequent to that, when I opened the game this morning, the “extra window” had been permanently gone and unrecoverable, leading to the issue I described in my post.

I deleted the game and re-installed it like I did the first time, and it allowed the essential window to be present again. Now that I understand the significance of that window, I just need to not close that one window to be able to continue playing.

So yeah, if anyone else is opening this game using Wine, my advice would be to absolutely not close the secondary window.

Sorry to have been enough of a mess that it caused the start of an entire new thread now immortalizing my technical mishaps :skull:. Hopefully it ends up being helpful to someone else as well.

Thanks again for the help!

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I think it’s entirely the reverse! This seems like something reasonable, to get rid of something that doesn’t seem to be carrying its weight, so you can focus on what’s important. You need to do some guesswork to nail the problems down.

The result of most of these threads tends to be people saying “Oh! I thought I was the only one confused.”

It helps me to remember the “real” Murphy’s Law which is, no matter how carefully you write documentation, and intelligent, thoughtful person will find a way to get it sensibly and logically wrong.

I still remember filling out some (relatively important) financial paperwork and feeling dumb I filled it out wrong, and when I described what I did, the person said “Oh, that makes a lot of sense, we should fix that.” It’s something I try to think of going forward whether it’s about paperwork or technical help or other stuff.

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