Playing StarCraft on Linux

From Liquipedia StarCraft Brood War Wiki

Many users have tried running SC:BW on Linux with different combinations of distros and versions. This is a compilation of solutions that could help you with some problems.

Normal Installation[edit]

Use any wine version to install your SC:BW, obtained on your battle.net account. Your game should be able to run in some setups; if it runs, just update the game entering b.net multiplayer before the next steps.


BUGS[edit]

Black screen after running[edit]

You could change your drivers to proprietary (not recommended), run the game on windowed mode with ChaosLauncher or try a different wine version. Refer to the bug below.


Garbled Battle.net[edit]

Because of the method SC:BW draws the screen, wine becomes a little confused. The buttons could be missing, text could be overwritten on the same place without cleaning the previous text, the font could be blocky.
There is some discussion here about possible causes. One solution is to run the game via ChaosLauncher with the window mode plugin, but this is not enough if you want to run the game on fullscreen. There are some patches that people submitted to solve this bug, but compiling may be a bit tricky. A quicker way to use them is to download PlayOnLinux. This program can provide you a wine version that has this fixed, probably with one of these patches. After installing, go to Tools>Manage Wine Versions. Install version 1.5.1-Starcraft_battlenet; it should be installed on ~/.PlayOnLinux/wine/linux-x86/1.5.1-Starcraft_battlenet/bin/wine. Remember this path, as you will have to call it when running this specific wine version.

Another useful thing is to download some Windows fonts. On your console:

$ wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks

$ chmod +x winetricks

$ sh winetricks corefonts


This should solve this bug. Now, to run SC:BW, remember to call wine from the 1.5.1 path:

$ ~/.PlayOnLinux/wine/linux-x86/1.5.1-Starcraft_battlenet/bin/wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/StarCraft/StarCraft.exe

Keyboard stuck[edit]

Some users experienced a bug that makes your keyboard unresponsive after creating a new multiplayer game. This could be caused by the window losing focus and the keyboard inputs going straight to console.

You can circunvent this bug by running the game on a separate X server, so that the window never loses focus:

$ xinit ~/.PlayOnLinux/wine/linux-x86/1.5.1-Starcraft_battlenet/bin/wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/StarCraft/StarCraft.exe -- :1

You can go back to your desktop using Ctrl+Alt+F1~F8.


Wrong aspect ratio[edit]

When running on a widescreen monitor, your video driver could be stretching the image to fill the entire screen. If you use an open-source driver (intel, nouveau, radeon), run this on terminal (you should replace --output HDMI-4 with your connected display; check with xrandr --prop):

$ xrandr --output HDMI-4 --set "scaling mode" "Full aspect"

If you use proprietary drivers, there should be an option on your video configuration manager. Enable fixed aspect ratio.


No sound when running on a separate X server[edit]

You must add your current user to the audio group:

$ sudo adduser _username_ audio
Also, you should relog with your user for the change to take effect.