Sid Meier's Pirates! Guide

Sid Meier's Pirates is an adventurous action strategy game where you pilot your own ship and crew through the dangerous Carribean waters. Fight against the Spanish, English, French and Dutch and plunder the loot from your victory. Dig up treasure, Attack ports, Romance the Governor's daughter and dual with fierce captains.

Follow my step-by-step guide on installing, configuring and optimizing Sid Meier's Pirates in Linux with PlayOnLinux.

Note: This guide applies to the retail version of Sid Meier's Pirates. Other versions may require additional steps.

Tips & Specs:

To learn more about PlayOnLinux and Wine configuration, see the online manual: PlayOnLinux Explained

Mint 16 32-bit
PlayOnLinux: 4.2.2
Wine: 1.5.18

Installing Wine

Click Tools
Select "Manage Wine Versions"

Look for the Wine Versions: 1.5.18

Select it
Click the arrow pointing to the right

Note: Try using stable Wine 1.8 and 1.8-staging

Click Next

PlayOnLinux will automatically download it

Extracting

Note: PlayOnLinux may also install the compatible version of Gecko also.

Installed

Wine is installed and you can close this window

Setup PlayOnLinux

Launch PlayOnLinux
Click Install

Click "Install a non-listed program"

Click Next

Select "Install a program in a new virtual drive"
Click Next

Name your virtual drive: sidmeierspirates
No spaces
Click Next

Check all three options:

• Use another version of Wine
• Configure Wine
• Install some libraries

Click Next

Select Wine 1.5.18
Click Next

Note: If you are running a 64-bit system, PlayOnLinux will prompt if you want to use a 64-bit or 32-bit virtual drive.
Always select 32-bit virtual drive

Wine Configuration

Applications Tab
Windows Version: Windows 7
Click Apply

Graphics Tab
Check "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows"
Check "Emulate a virtual desktop"
Desktop Size: 1024x768
Click OK

Installing Libraries

Check the following libraries:

• POL_Install_corefonts
• POL_Install_dxfullsetup
• POL_Install_tahoma

Click Next

Note: All libraries will automatically download and install

Installing Sid Meier's Pirates!

Select "Select another file"
Click Next

Click Browse

Navigate to your Sid Meiers Pirates DVD
Select Setup.exe
Click open

Click Next

Click OK

Click Next

Click Yes

Click Yes

Click Next

Desktop icon?
Click No

Installing

Click Finish

PlayOnLinux Shortcut

Select Pirates!.exe
Click Next

Name your shortcut: Sid Meier's Pirates!
Click Next

Select "I don't want to make another shortcut"
Click Next

PlayOnLinux Configure

Back to PlayOnLinux
Click Configure

General Tab
Wine version: 1.5.18
Click the + to download other versions of Wine
Click the arrow to select another version of Wine

Wine Tab
Click Configure Wine

Libraries Tab
Type "ms" into text area
Click the arrow and scroll to msvcp71
Select mscvp71
Click Add

Now msvcp71 is on your list of libraries
Click OK

Back to PlayOnLinux Configure

Display Tab
GLSL Support: disable
Select Video Memory Size
This is the amount of Memory your video card/chip has

Close configure

Launch Sid Meier's Pirates!

Back to PlayOnLinux
Select Sid Meier's Pirates!
Click Run

Note: Clicking Debug will show you output errors and bugs.

Video Settings

Click "Change Your System Options"

Click "Video Settings"

Adjust your resolution to match your Linux desktop
Wine virtual desktop will automatically resize and your game will appear fullscreen

Adjust detail and lighting as needed.
Performance depends on the video card you are using

Rule of Thumb:
High settings = More detail, lower frame rates
Low settings = Less detail, higher frame rates

Conclusion:
I had a hard time getting Sid Meier's Pirates! to appear fullscreen on my system.
Its an older game and doesn't seem to support all widescreen resolutions. I ended up changing my desktop resolution to 1400x1050 then matching in game resolution to 1400x1050
Then the game appeared fullscreen.

I also had issues with performance as well. It didn't matter how high or low the graphics setters were... I found that Wine 1.5.18 performed well enough, but there was still a game lag when sword fighting. Everything else ran well.

Screenshots:

 

High Res Screens:

 

Let me guess you did what I did and bought the humble bundle with all the Sid games. I installed Railroads but I get so many buffer under run errors that it makes the game unplayable. I saw this so I thought I would try Pirates. I will go back back to the top and try this one...

 

Nope, but I saw that bundle... thought about it, but I'm not really into sim/God games. Pirates is pretty fun though.
By the way, I'm updating the guide because Wine 1.4.1 and Wine 1.3.8 run much smoother than newer versions.

 

This game won't work as POL fails to find Steam no matter what version of wine that I try. Did Valve/Steam break wine functionality again?

 

So you are playing Sid Meier's Pirates through Steam?
Cool

What exactly happens?
Does Steam even launch?
Try doing a debug and post it so we can see what is going on.
Don't forget to disable the overlay

By the way, I know my guide uses and older version of Wine, you "can" use Wine 1.6.2 which works well with Steam, but I was having a lot of stutter in-game.

 

I tried disabling the overlay last night and now it works. The POL short cut doesn’t work. I made a short cut to Steam. I can launch it from Steam and that works. I posted the debug file to POL in the forum post that you posted to. I don't use the debug button since that doesn’t show all the information in the POL file always. If the POL log is too long then debug will cut it off. I just use dolphin to navigate to the correct POL wine prefix and then display the log file then copy and past to post.

 

I saw your debug on PlayOnLinux forum. With the overlay off, it is running now correct?

 

Yes. I had to turn off the overlay to get Civilization 5 to work also. Its beginning to look like wine has problems with the Steam overlay on all games. It seems like the only time I can get the overlay to work lately is with Steam for Linux.

BTW: Cities in motion 2 is now ported to Linux via Steam for Linux. Same thing with Democracy 3.

 

Yup, Daerandin found that out a few weeks ago. That overlay is causing problems, but I have no idea if wine is working on a fix or not.
I'm sure you have noticed that I'm staying a way from Steam guides for now.
I've added the -no-dwrite and disable overlay to my current Steam guides, but I'm afraid Steam is going to continue making changes that end up breaking Wine.

Good to see more games native to Linux. I've been playing Wakfu and it runs great in Linux. No issue at all.

 

You would think that valve/Steam would make a point of trying to make sure their updates do not break wine functionality since the make Steam for Linux. It could be that the wine devs don't want to work with them. If so then that doesn’t make any sense to me. Then again we all know how ridiculously arrogant the wine devs are. Lol

 

Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol won't even start.

 

Sounds like you got it working when disabling the overlay... correct?

 

Pirates but not Ace Patrol.

 

Are you using Steam as well for Ace Patrol?
Try posting the Debug in the PlayOnLinux thread...

 

I started a thread several days ago in Manual Installations. Maybe you overlooked it.
Sid meier's Ace Patrol (Steam)

 

I noticed the post, but didn't read it because I assumed it was working after disabling the overlay. Sorry about that
Actually I did reply... remember I said something about msvc?

 

I never get to steam so the overlay is not an issue yet. Here is the first line of a wine debug.

Unhandled exception: unimplemented function msvcp110.dll._Xtime_get_ticks called in 32-bit code (0x7b83d899).
Register dump:

Simply adding msvcp110 doesn’t help. What package is the dll in?

 

Thats right. I've never seen msvcp110 before. I don't even remember seeing it available in PlayOnLinux packages either.
Its definitely related to Visual C
I recommend installing everything related to Visual C and see what happens.

• vbrun6
• vcrun2005
• vcrun2008
• vcrun2010
• msvc80
• msvc90
• msvc100
• crt

I can't remember them all. Or of course, you can do them one at a time until you find the one it needs

 

I tried all in your list except for crt as I could not find that in the POL install components list. It still doesn’t run and wine still says 'Unimplemented function msvcp110.dll.'