Configurations
After your installation, it will probably be necessary to occasionally configure your games and programs if something is missing, or you just want to try new settings. To do so, select the game or program you want to configure in your PlayOnLinux main window and click on the Configure button on top of the window. A new window will open on the left side, where you can see all of your Virtual Drives and the shortcuts you created in them. You can switch between them by just pressing on either the game or the name of the virtual drive to configure this particular drive. Please note that Configuration changes are always done for the ENTIRE virtual drive, not only for a single program/game in it, which is why I said it’s better to have one virtual drive per game/program.
On the “General” tab, you can create new shortcuts in case you missed one or change your Wine version that you want to use with this virtual drive. On the “Wine” tab you can start certain tools for your Wine environment. “Configure Wine” allows you to set up your Windows API version, or virtual desktop settings. “Registry Editor” allows editing of the Windows registry, and “Command Prompt” opens a cmd shell inside your virtual drive from which you can type your Windows/DOS commands. These are probably the only buttons you need, and you might not even need them at all.
The “Install Components” tab is quite interesting. It allows you to decide what drivers you want to install in your Wine environment. Some might know this from “winetricks”, but this is like a graphical tool for winetricks where you can select what kind of drivers you want to install. If you want to install DirectX, DirectPlay, or even Xvid codecs, they are often just one click away inside the “Install Components” tab.
However, it seems that not all of the components are working 100%. For example, MS Core Fonts and some video codecs install scripts don’t seem to work properly, but it’s hard to find the ones that are not working, since most are.
The last tab that’s probably important is the “Miscellaneous” tab from which you can choose to run an .exe file inside the virtual drive environment. This can be useful if you want to install patches for certain games.
Installing additional Wine versions
This is another very important feature and you can reach it on the main screen of PlayOnLinux by clicking on “Tools -> Manage Wine versions”. Here you can install and remove different versions of Wine, since not every program may work with the system version of Wine that comes with ExaGear. Some games that you install via pre-made scripts inside PlayOnLinux will also install their own Wine version, which you might not want to use, so you can just remove them here after you’ve switched to the version that you want to use. Since you now know the basics, you are ready to play Windows games on PlayOnLinux inside ExaGear, running on your ODROIDXU3/XU4 ARM board.
Windows games on Linux
Not every game you want to run under Linux in Wine will work. Even on my laptop, I often struggle to get some games to work. So If you try a game and it fails to run, don’t give up, especially on ODROIDs, where we are very limited due to the missing OpenGL drivers. We have to be a little patient and find the games that do not require hardware acceleration to run properly. To make it easier for you to start, I made a list of games that I got to work, as well as any issues I encountered and how I solved them.
Keep in mind that there are often different versions of games out there. I don’t always use the CD version to get things to work, or you may have to use a “NoCD” patch. If you feel uncomfortable with these solutions, there are other ways as well, but I often choose the easiest solution
