How-to: Playing Psychonauts on Linux with Wine!

”Psychonauts is based on the exploits of Raz, a young boy gifted with psychic abilities who escapes the circus to try to sneak into a summer camp for those with similar powers in order to become a "Psychonaut". He finds that there is a sinister plot occurring at the camp that only he can stop from happening. The game is centered on the widely strange and imaginative minds of various characters that Raz enters as a Psychonaut-in-training in order to help them overcome their fears or memories of their past in order to gain their help and progress in the game. Raz gains use of several psychic abilities during the game that are used for both attacking foes and solving puzzles.” Source

I decided to test Psychonauts because I felt bad that I bought the game a year ago for about 3 Euro, and I had not touched it since then.

Testing
This test was done in a clean wine prefix and the game was played in a Virtual Desktop. The testing was done with a genuine European copy (It's already patched to the latest version of the game).

System Specs:
Operating System: Ubuntu 8.04
Wine version: 1.0-rc2 with 3DMark patch applied.
Video Card: Nvidia 8800GTS 640MB
CPU: Intel E6550 2,333 GHZ
Memory: 2 gb RAM

Installation
First off, you have to cd to your dvd directory in a terminal, in my case it look like this:

david@david-desktop:~$ cd /media/cdrom0

and then you start the installation program by typing "wine setup.exe", in my case it look like this:

david@david-desktop:/media/cdrom0$ wine setup.exe



Important! The game needs DirectX 9.0C in order to run.You can find Twickline's awesome guide here.

Playing the game
To start the game, you can either direct cd to the game directory via the terminal, and start the game by typing "wine Psychonauts.exe", or you can just start it from your startmenu
(Program -> Wine -> Programs -> Double Fine Productions -> Psychonauts -> Psychonauts)



Performance boosters
If you want to enhance performance, the you can add WINEDEBUG=-all before ”wine Psychonauts.exe”, ”WINEDEBUG=-all” means that the Wine Debugger will be shut off.

Compiz can be quite the performance killer. Since I use Gnome, I replace Compiz by typing ”Metacity –replace” in a terminal before I play. Then I simply turn Compiz on again by starting a new terminal and typing ”Compiz”.

You can change some settings in Wine's regedit (type ”regedit” in a terminal) to enhance performance. This is how my settings look like:



You can read more about regedit on this page: http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys

Problems
Some textures in the game are flickering, but it's kinda rare.

Moving around the camera with the mouse can sometimes be tricky, but maybe that is a problem with the game itself instead of Wine?

Video
And finally, here is a video when I play Psychonauts. (the performance is a lot lower because of the screencast program)