Hello,

can someone explain to me how I can start the game under Linux?

I installed the game using Wine. Inside the games directory of GOG, there is a separate DOSBOX folder. Is the GOG version of dosbox explicitly required to play the game? I also have a separate dosbox installation on my system. When I execute the file MMAIN.EXE via dosbox, a dialog box appears with the selection of 6 menu items. With the input of the number 1 a new game should be able to be started. However, as soon as I confirm the selection, the input is ignored. Is the file MMAIN.EXE relevant at all? How can I launch it with the dosbox version of GOG? Which files are relevant, so that I can start the game e.g. by using Lutris?

My DOSBox version 0.74-3
wine-7.0-rc3 (system)
Lutris 0.5.9.1

Thanks a lot for your support!


Many regards
turrican05

Look at the *_single.conf files in the Windows dosbox games; they will tell you what gog is using to launch the game. In the case of Starflight 2, it's sf2.bat. MMAIN.EXE is used by that to display the menu and return a code to the batch file for further processing.

There is more to be said, especially for a game like this that overwrites distribution files. I use an overlay filesystem to keep the installation pristine, and use a patched dosbox that inserts keypresses with "addkey", allowing me to use the unmodified sf2.bat but still start intantly with "addkey enter 2 p600 enter". THe tools and general procedures I use are at https://bitbucket.org/darktjm/gamesup if you care.

Hello darktjm,

thank you very much for your quick answer & help. I can start the game now. What do you mean by "...especially for a game like this that overwrites distribution files" ?? I will have a closer look at your link. I hope that very soon I will also find the time.

Thanks again! :-)


Best regards
turrican05

The way it saves state is to overwrite the data files. The purpose of the batch file is to copy (some) of the files from other copies to at least partially restore the game to its original installation. I suppose you don't really need to care about it, especially since you can just re-install the game to restore it, but I don't like games overwriting their distributed files for any reason.

Mmmh. That sounds somehow strange and I did not know this procedure so far. Have anyway many thanks for your help & comments.

But I think it could be quite helpful if you adjust the keyboard mapping within dosbox and switch from controlling the numberic keypad to the normal cursor keys. :)