Is Return to Krondor playable under GNU/Linux? WineHQ doesn't provide much help, as the test results posted there vary from "Garbage" to "Silver".

I've just tried. It garbles the screen when launching and doesn't show the movies, although this is fixed by installing LAVFilters. Some of the text seems to be missing. I played a little without any particular trouble, although at some point the mouse pointer disappeared which made the game unplayable. Perhaps you should try asking in this thread.

This game is unplayable to me, because text does not wrap. Any text longer than one line is cut off. There's too much important text missing It's been that way since I first started trying it in wine (perhaps back when wine had a date stamp instead of a version number). The other issues can probably be worked around. Movies aren't a big deal, and last I tested it played all battle sounds thrice.

Then I have the same issue. I only see two separate lines of text in the beginning of the game with the rest missing.

There is an installer for the GOG version of Return to Krondor using Wine for Lutris.

I tested it and the game will install and run. I was able to start the game, listen to dialog, run around the intro chapter, buy/sell items, combat, disarm traps, etc.

However, it does have the issues that others have mentioned. The audio repeats three times in combat (annoying, but not gamebreaking).

The major issue is the text overflow. With so much text unreadable, it would be gamebreaking.

So, while the game technically works, it isn't really playable.

Works very well with the Lutris installer!
About the font: I renamed the Krondor.ttf and copied another font into the Krondor folder and renamed it to Krondor.ttf.
Goes very well and suitably readable with e.g. Arial or Times New Roman.
It works with many scalable ttf fonts.
Just try it and find your favorite font.

Thanks. That does actually fix the wrapping problem. I never would've guessed that it was the font that was the problem. I don't know enough about fonts in general or truetype in particular to know what the exact problem is with krondor.ttf, but it does generate many errors when trying to load in many ttf utilities.

I stumbled around and found something that seems to work in fixing it: Using fontforge (http://fontforge.org/), I copied the defined glyphs (0xf020..0xf2f3) down to where they belong (0x20..0x2f3) and saved as a (mostly valid) ttf. I did it manually, but I also tried writing scripts to do it, so you don't have to do it manually.

In fontforge's own language, if it was built to be scriptable that way (save to a file and make it executable):

#!/bin/env fontforge
Open("krondor.ttf");
Select(0xf020, 0xf2f3);
Copy();
Select(0x20, 0x2f3);
Paste();
Generate("krondor.ttf");

In Python, if built with python support (save to a file and run with python <file>):

import fontforge
kf=fontforge.open("krondor.ttf")
kf.selection.select(("ranges",None),0xf020,0xf2f3)
kf.copy()
kf.selection.select(("ranges",None),0x20,0x2f3)
kf.paste()
kf.generate("krondor.ttf")

EDIT: just saw that this post was about RTK, which I don't own, so I might be wrong! It is true, however, for the original BAK.

Hello,

please note that the Krondor series are DOS games and do not need Windows at all.

When using the Windows installer, you essentially use a Windows version of the Dosbox emulator under Wine, which causes your problems.

You can use the Windows installer, and then create a simple wrapper script:

/usr/local/games/krondor.sh

-8<-------------
#!/bin/sh
cd /PATH/TO/GAME
dosbox KRONDOR.EXE &
-8<-------------

Simply change /PATH/TO/GAME to your intallation location, and make the script executable with chmod.
Be aware that file and directory names are case sensitive in Linux.
You need to have a Linux version of Dosbox installed for this in your path.

GOG could in fact make a Linux version easily, as you can see.

Regards, Christoph

Good that you realized that, since RTK is, in fact, a Windows game. Also, I do not recommend following the instructions you provide. Instead, I recommend making a configuration file based off of the ones gog provides for Windows. Among other things, this includes cputype=386_slow and enabling CD music (although I don't remember if it's any better than MT32 music, which also requires slightly more work).

And yes, BAK is one of quite a few DOS games that gog does not bother making a Linux installer for, even though they could and should. For me, that's 64 out of 114 games: more than half of the DOS games I bought from gog. All of them work on Linux just as well as on Windows, except that there is no gog-written graphical settings editor (and some games have Windows-only 3rd party enhancements, such as the Gold Box Companion and the All Seeing Eye).