There are very few computer games that I think have really captured my
imagination, Homeworld is one of them. I still have the original CD and box so I
though it best to clone it for safekeeping. So after borrowing a USB CD drive
and running dd I decided to launch it for some nostalgia. Turns out though you
can’t change the resolution in-game due to a wine bug, two in fact:
- Bug 23714 - Homeworld : Can’t changeresolution
- Bug 38763 - Homeworld hangs when changing screen resolution or switching renderer
However running a game at 640 on a 32” 2K monitor is a bit… Too nostalgic. :)
We can work around this bug by forcing homeworld.exe to start at our desired
resolution, and with a different renderer rather than switching later; and we
can make it convenient by setting this in the registry. You can run wine homeworld.exe /help to see all your options:
Invalid or unrecognised command line option: '/help'
SYSTEM OPTIONS
/heap <n> - Sets size of global memory heap to [n].
/prepath <path> - Sets path to search for opening files.
/CDpath <path> - Sets path to CD-ROM in case of ambiguity.
PROCESSOR OPTIONS
/enableSSE - allow use of SSE if support is detected.
/forceSSE - force usage of SSE even if determined to be unavailable.
/enable3DNow - allow use of 3DNow! if support is detected.
SOUND OPTIONS
/dsound - forces mixer to write to DirectSound driver, even if driver reports not certified.
/dsoundCoop - switches to co-operative mode of DirectSound (if supported) to allow sharing with other applications.
/waveout - forces mixer to write to Waveout even if a DirectSound supported object is available.
/reverseStereo - swap the left and right audio channels.
DETAIL OPTIONS
/rasterSkip - enable interlaced display with software renderer.
/noBG - disable display of galaxy backgrounds.
/noFilter - disable bi-linear filtering of textures.
/noSmooth - do not use polygon smoothing.
/stipple - enable stipple alpha with software renderer.
/noShowDamage - Disables showing ship damage effects.
VIDEO MODE OPTIONS
/safeGL - don't use possibly buggy optimized features of OpenGL for rendering.
/triple - use when frontend menus are flickering madly.
/nodrawpixels - use when background images don't appear while loading.
/noswddraw - don't use DirectDraw for the software renderer.
/noglddraw - don't use DirectDraw to setup OpenGL renderers.
/sw - reset rendering system to defaults at startup.
/noFastFE - disable fast frontend rendering.
/fullscreen - display fullscreen with software renderer (default).
/window - display in a window.
/noBorder - no border on window.
/640 - run at 640x480 resolution (default).
/800 - run at 800x600 resolution.
/1024 - run at 1024x768 resolution.
/1280 - run at 1280x1024 resolution.
/1600 - run at 1600x1200 resolution.
/device <dev> - select an rGL device by name, eg. sw, fx, d3d.
/nohint - disable usage of OpenGL perspective correction hints.
TEXTURES
/nopal - disable paletted texture support.
MISC OPTIONS
/pilotView - enable pilot view. Focus on single ship and hit Q to toggle.
So first step is to run iw with something other than sw:
wine homeworld.exe /disableAVI /device d3d /1600
Quit once it starts. The relevant registry entries have been added, now we just tweak them (some lines removed):
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Sierra On-Line\Homeworld]
"d3dToSelect"=""
"deviceToSelect"="d3d"
"glToSelect"="rgl.dll"
"screenDepth"=dword:00000020
"screenHeight"=dword:000005a0
"screenWidth"=dword:00000a00
The pertinent ones are "deviceToSelect"="d3d", which gets us using D3D (I
will need to explore getting OGL to work next), "screenDepth"=dword:00000020
which gives us 32 bit depth, and screenWidth & screenHeigh which I’ve set to
2560x1440. Of course, you can now just add these registery keys yourself and not
bother with the CLI options, but I do suggest trying /pilotView if you haven’t
:)