SPORE in linux

Spore works quite well, starting with Wine 1.1.5 (2008-09-20) (which fixes some graphical glitches and network issues) If you experience crashes, you may also want to use the -safe command line option for Spore, but it has the drawback to resetting your graphical settings to a "safe" (low-res) configuration, and perhaps slow the game a little

Good guides on how to configure it can be found at:

Wine App DB spore entry
SporeWiki, especially on how to compile the patched wine version (see below)
Linux outlaws guide
A Spore icon for your desktop if the game install fails to create one

Too bad this game (or rather, this toy. See the NYT article) has a big flaw, it does not allow to invert the mouse Y axis for the camera. Let's hope they will fix this soon!

Misc tricks:

sudo sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0 may reduce crashes (see Preloader page zero problem)

Running on a separate X server

Spore runs very well on your default X server, fullscreen or in a window, but for some performance gains, and to be able to switch easily between Spore and your desktop, you may want to run it in a separate X server. here is my script for this:

set -a
# on which display to run?
D=1
# reduce verbosity
WINEDEBUG=-all
# my X config file for 1440x900, resolution where I want to run Spore
CONFIG=xorg-1440.conf
X :$D -ac -terminate -config $CONFIG &
DISPLAY=:$D.0
# http://wiki.winehq.org/PreloaderPageZeroProblem
case `sysctl vm.mmap_min_addr` in *'= 0') : ;;
*) sudo sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0 ;;
esac
# the Wine spore directory
cd '/c/Program Files/Electronic Arts/SPORE'
wine Sporebin/SporeApp.exe

Legacy info

I include this for reference only. you do not need to do this on a recent wine.

Compiling the patched wine

Here is my quick howto for ubuntu 32 bit, to compile it in a separate directory ( /usr/local/wine-patched ), so you can keep also your regular, package-managed install of wine.

cd /tmp
mkdir git
cd git
sudo apt-get build-dep wine
sudo apt-get install git-core
git clone git://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git /tmp/git/wine-git
CC="gcc-4.2 -m32" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/wine-patched
cd wine-git
mkdir /usr/local/wine-patched
make depend
make
make install

Then you can run spore via: /usr/local/wine-patched/bin/wine Sporebin/SporeApp.exe from your spore install dir.

You can also download my compiled wine installation if you do not want to compile it yourself. It should work on Intel Ubuntu 32 bit 8.04. Get the 40M file wine-patched.tgz and untar it from root, e.g:

cd /tmp; wget http://colaz.net/tmp/wine-patched.tgz
cd /; tar xfz /tmp/wine-patched.tgz
rm -f /tmp/wine-patched.tgz

-- Colas Nahaboo - 2008-09-18