I'm hoping to manually install XWUA using WINE and not use additional launchers like Lutris, etc.

I did look at the Lutris install script though. And what I got from it was to:

- Create a 64-bit prefix
- winetricks dotnet461
- winetricks directplay
- install GOG's X-Wing Alliance offline installer

I can do the above OK.

But running XWAU2020.exe quits out after pressing the Next button. Does anyone have experience getting this to run?

Other than settings problems potentially, as it's a 32bit program and used windows 95 i'd double check on that, though with the changes GoG did i couldn't tell you what settings you'd need to do. Though minimum GoG settings say DX 7 or DX 9... But other than a few dll files and api call changes the game should be mostly unchanged.

You might have better luck installing from the original CD and running Wine on that instead.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2110

edit: Though it makes me wonder, if we determine the exact DLL's that were changed you MIGHT be able to swap them out with the original file(s) and see if it works.

I think you misunderstand. The problem is with running the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade MOD installer (https://xwaupgrade.com/), not the base game.

Ahhh gotcha.

I'd ask first is if you can extract the files via 7zip or not. If you can, you might just be able to overlay/replace the files (as that's typically easier than doing diff/patch anymore).

If not...Then i can't really offer any other suggestions. at this moment.

I tried it just now using Wineskin on a Mac. With a 64-bit engine, I installed X-wing Alliance, and then ran XWAU2020.exe. It failed, so I did winetricks dotnet461. XWAU2020.exe then worked and installed the upgrade without issues. (The game launcher also worked, however the game itself failed with a video dll that wouldn't initialize, but I hadn't done winetricks directplay which I assume would fix that. I stopped there since I didn't actually want to start playing just yet. ;) )

I don't suppose you get any error messages when XWAU2020.exe quits out? And dotnet461 was installed correctly? It seems to be pretty complex and took a while.

Thank you for trying and reporting back. Yes the dotnet461 install is long & goes thru multiple installers. A million wine messages go by such as:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
04ac:err:ole:CoGetContextToken apartment not initialised
0518:err:ole:get_stub_manager_from_ipid not found for ipid {00000098-0000-0444-a166-ada4ae54e1e7}
0518:fixme:virtual:NtFlushProcessWriteBuffers stub
0518:err:ole:CoReleaseMarshalData StdMarshal ReleaseMarshalData failed with error 0x8001011d
0514:fixme:ntdll:NtQuerySystemInformation info_class SYSTEM_PERFORMANCE_INFORMATION
0514:fixme:heap:RtlSetHeapInformation handle 00000000, info_class 1, info 00000000, size 0 stub![/i]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But the .Net installers complete and afterwards the XWAU2020 does begin to launch.

I do not believe DirectPlay is relevant to your issue because it does not have to do with video playback. DirectPlay was an old API for network communication intended for multiplayer games.

When I launch XWAU2020 the window stays runing and the only obvious error is:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0138:err:combase:RoGetActivationFactory Failed to find library for L"Windows.Foundation.Diagnostics.AsyncCausalityTracer"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If I drag the window around I get:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
016c:err:d3d:wined3d_debug_callback 008DFEA8: "GL_INVALID_OPERATION error generated. Object is owned by another context and may not be bound here.".
016c:err:d3d:wined3d_debug_callback 008DFEA8: "GL_INVALID_OPERATION error generated. Cannot modify the default framebuffer object.".
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After I press "Next" I get:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0178:fixme:ntdll:NtQuerySystemInformation info_class SYSTEM_PERFORMANCE_INFORMATION
0178:fixme:seh:WerSetFlags (2) stub
0178:fixme:heap:RtlSetHeapInformation handle 00000000, info_class 1, info 00000000, size 0 stub!
0188:fixme:process:SetProcessShutdownParameters (00000380, 00000000): partial stub.
0188:fixme:ntdll:EtwEventSetInformation (deadbeef, 2, 01E742E1, 28) stub
0194:fixme:heap:RtlSetHeapInformation handle 00000000013A0000, info_class 0, info 000000000011F680, size 4 stub!
0194:fixme:seh:WerSetFlags (2) stub
0194:fixme:heap:RtlSetHeapInformation handle 0000000000000000, info_class 1, info 0000000000000000, size 0 stub!
01a0:fixme:process:SetProcessShutdownParameters (00000380, 00000000): partial stub.
01a0:fixme:ntdll:EtwEventSetInformation (deadbeef, 2, 00000000024229B1, 28) stub
0188:fixme:service:QueryServiceConfig2W Level 6 not implemented
.016c:fixme:d3d:swapchain_blit_gdi Using GDI present.
0138:fixme:advapi:RegisterEventSourceW ((null),L".NET Runtime"): stub
0138:fixme:advapi:ReportEventW (CAFE4242,0x0001,0x0000,0x00000401,00000000,0x0001,0x00000000,005EAA3C,00000000): stub
0138:err:eventlog:ReportEventW L"Application: XWAU2020.exe\nFramework Version: v4.0.30319\nDescription: The application requested process termination through System.Environment.FailFast(string message).\nMessage: Unrecoverable system error.\nStack:\n at System.Environment.FailFast(System.String)\n at MS.Internal.Inva"...
0138:fixme:advapi:DeregisterEventSource (CAFE4242) stub
0138:fixme:seh:RaiseFailFastException (005EB488, 005EB4D8, 0) stub
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the installer quits :(

That error occurs here too, but doesn't cause any problems, so that appears to be something that can be ruled out as an issue. I also get a lot of "fixme"s that don't have any negative effect. That's something that doesn't occur here, but it doesn't seem fatal or related to the real problem. Yeah, I don't get any of that. This particular error is definitely .net related though. The prefix I was using defaulted to Windows 7; on the off chance yours is set to anything older, those don't work at all here. Other than that, what version of Wine are you using? I was using a variant of Wine 6.

You're right of course about directplay; for some reason I was thinking of direct3d. I had also downloaded a XWAU2020update_v5.0.exe file, so out of curiosity I installed that too and now it runs.

OK, good to know. I'm using wine 7.22 and the prefix is Windows 7. I'm not sure what to do. Maybe I could install the stupid thing on Windows and then copy the files over to a wine prefix.

Sounds like a regression in Wine - they're not all that uncommon, unfortunately. If you're using the (official) WineHQ Wine package you could temporarily revert it to an earlier version to see if that gets the installer going. Other than that, maybe also try Wine Staging as that has a collection of useful hacks and patches that tend to fix some things at times.

P.S.: Apparently there's another guy that attempted the same thing and got it working by "Installing dotnet48 with winetricks and disabling DXVK". That seems odd to me, but it's just a matter of setting WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3d9=b", I think. Or maybe even [...]="d3d9,dxgi=b", should the installer somehow query via dxgi. Or perhaps it's the .NET version at fault, who knows. Since the post is Steam Deck related, the current stable version of Proton is branched off of Wine 7.0 - so it may just be a Wine regression after all. But at least you have some extra things to try now, I guess :). Hope it helps.

Can you try a Wine 6.x version? I've never used barebones Wine, since something like Wineskin makes a number of things easier, as it's simple to use different versions. I'm not sure if that would help anyway, but it does seem like something is not going quite right with the .net stuff. Which has always been kind of finicky in my experience.

I tried using 7zip on the XWAU exes, and it does actually extract most of the files, but it errors out and it looks like some files are missing. Plus the installer is interactive with several installation options so that's not ideal even if it worked 100%. It seems like installing on Windows and copying files over should work, though I think the launcher is still using .net, so if that's not working right it could be problematic with the joystick configuration options and so on.

I tried dotnet48 and wine-staging. It didn't abort, and instead kind of hung.

---------------------
01dc:err:d3dcompiler:D3DCompile2 Failed to compile shader, vkd3d result -5.
01dc:err:d3dcompiler:D3DCompile2 Shader log:
01dc:err:d3dcompiler:D3DCompile2 <anonymous>:87:1: E5017: Aborting due to not yet implemented feature: Call to user-defined function "Transform2D_VS0".
01dc:err:d3dcompiler:D3DCompile2
-------------------------
I'm not sure why VKD3D would be involved. Maybe this is the issue and newer versions of wine are using it where they used to use OpenGL or something. I'm not sure how to change the behavior or if it's even possible. It would have been nice if this installer wasn't doing graphics things in the 1st place.

I would like to try an older version but I'm afraid I'll mess up my Arch system. So what I may do is just wait a while. RC2 of 8.0 is already out so I imagine 8.0 is not far away. Arch has package updates pretty quick so maybe 8.0 will be ready next month and maybe it will fix things for me.

In any case thank you very much everyone for the suggestions.