Getting Started on Linux Bottles

This guide assumes that the user has correctly installed Bottles, including Lutris wine dependencies, vulkan drivers (both 64 and 32-bit drivers) and wine-staging for their specific distribution. This may not be strictly necessary, but, it doesn't hurt to have these dependencies installed at the system level.

Please read the Notes section below.

1. Download the latest Windows client
2. Open Bottles and let it install the necessary components
3. Once it completes, you'll be presented with the primary Bottles interface. Click on the + button

   

4. Next, choose to create a Custom environment

   

   1. Leave the Runner' as-is (e.g., soda-9.0.1 as of 26 October 2024) and choose a 32-bit architecture

      

   2. Provide a Name, such as The Al'Kabor Project and click Create

      

   3. Now, wait as it creates the bottle

      

   4. Click on Close when you receive the message that it has been successfully created
5. Under the Bottles tab, click on the newly created The Al'Kabor Project bottle (or, whatever you named it in the previous step)

   

6. Once it opens, click on Settings
   1. Install DXVK by using the dropdown menu

      

   2. Install VKD3D by using the dropdown menu

      

   3. Under the Display option, turn on the Discrete Graphics option to use your main GPU

      

   4. OPTIONAL: Under Compatibility, change the Windows Version to Windows 7

      

   5. Next, scroll back up to the top of the window and choose the back arrow to return to the bottle's main page

      

7. Choose the 'Dependencies section and install Windows components needed to run the TAKP client
   1. Click on the arrow that points down to install allfonts (Bottles' version of Microsoft Corefonts)

      

   2. Install both d3dx11 and d3dx9 using the same download arrow, Note: I do not think that these are absolutely necessary, but it works with them installed

      

   3. Install gecko and mono in the same manner

      

      

   4. And, finally, and importantly, install vcredist2020, which is Bottles' version of VCRun2010

      

   5. At the top of the Bottles window, choose the back arrow to return to the main The Al'kabor Project bottle page
8. Now, open up a terminal and either type or cut-and-paste the line below to install dinput8 into the bottle¹

   WINEPREFIX=~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/<BOTTLES_NAME> winetricks dinput8

   Close the terminal once dinput8 is finished installing

9. Back at the main Bottles page, click on the + Add Shortcuts... button

   

10. Navigate to the location for eqgame.exe

    

11. Once that is created, return to the main Bottles page and click on the three dots to bring up a menu and choose Add to Library

    

Success!

In order to get the graphic on the Library launcher, see the method below². It's not necessary, but I like having nice graphics on my launchers

Notes

1. I am using Bottles as a flatpak on Bazzite Linux, an immutable gaming-focused distro; you may have to enter a different path based on your Bottles installation
2. To get the thumbnail to show, do the following:
   1. Use your favorite search engine to search for the EQ Macintosh Edition, or, use a local file you already have. Download the one you like and, if you like, rename it something easy to remember, such as eqmaclogo.jpg
   2. Using your Files app, navigate to the ...data/bottles/bottles/The-Al'kabor-Project folder
   3. Create a new folder named grids and copy the eqmaclogo.jpg file into that folder
   4. Go back up several folders to arrive at the ...data/bottles folder and edit the library.yml
   5. Change the following line using your favorite editor (Geany, vim, et al.):

      thumbnail: null

      thumbnail: grid:eqmaclogo.jpg