STAR WARS Galactic Battlegrounds Saga – How to Play Game on Linux

Some tinkering is needed to get it running, but nothing too difficult, no mods required.

Vanilla Wine

This section assumes that you’ve installed Steam for Windows in Wine, and installed SW Galactic Battlegrounds within that.

Steam starts steamapps/common/STAR WARS – Galactic Battlegrounds Saga/Game/player.exe, which is a launcher for the game. It doesn’t work.

The real game comes in two variants: Battlegrounds.exe is the basic game, and battlegrounds_x1.exe is the basic game plus the clone campaigns. You need to remove player.exe and substitute it with one of these (for example mv player.exe player.exe.old; ln -s battlegrounds_x1.exe player.exe). Unfortunately, we are not finished.

Battlegrounds.exe doesn’t let you play the campaigns, complaining about a missing CD. The solution is to run winecfg, on the Drives tab add a new drive, in the advanced options set type to CD-ROM, and point it to any directory.

battlegrounds_x1.exe will not start due to some problem with win32.dll. The solution is to replace the win32.dll in the game’s directory with win32.win7.dll.

Proton

This section assumes that you’ve installed Steam for Linux.

To install SW Galactic Battlegrounds you need to open its properties window, select the Compatibility tab, and enable Proton for this game. Choose a recent Proton version, and close this window. Now Steam allows installing the game.

Steam starts steamapps/common/STAR WARS – Galactic Battlegrounds Saga/Game/player.exe, which is a launcher for the game. It doesn’t work.

The real game comes in two variants: Battlegrounds.exe is the basic game, and battlegrounds_x1.exe is the basic game plus the clone campaigns. You need to remove player.exe and substitute it with one of these (for example mv player.exe player.exe.old; ln -s battlegrounds_x1.exe player.exe). Unfortunately, we are not finished.

The issue that affects both versions is that Proton runs the game in fullscreen, and the whole thing is shifted a bit, so you don’t click on the thing directly under the mouse pointer. The solution is to set Proton to emulate a virtual desktop, and run the game fullscreen within that desktop. If you have a 64bit version of Wine installed on your system, you can run WINEPREFIX=~/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/compatdata/356500/pfx winecfg, and on the Graphics tab enable the virtual desktop. If you don’t have it, then you can open ~/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/compatdata/356500/pfx/user.reg in your favorite editor, and add the following:

[Software\\Wine\\Explorer] 1649369789
#time=1d84acd21520bf8
"Desktop"="Default"

[Software\\Wine\\Explorer\\Desktops] 1649369789
#time=1d84acd215207d4
"Default"="1280x1024"

Battlegrounds.exe doesn’t let you play the campaigns, complaining about a missing CD. The solution is to run winecfg, on the Drives tab add a new drive, in the advanced options set type to CD-ROM, and point it to any directory.

battlegrounds_x1.exe will run without any further tweaks (win32.dll is different in this version, I didn’t investigate further).

Helena Stamatina
About Helena Stamatina 1520 Articles
I love two things in life, games and sports. Although sports were my earliest interest, it was video games that got me completely addicted (in a good way). My first game was Crash Bandicoot (PS1) from the legendary studio Naughty Dog back in 1996. I turned my passion for gaming into a job back in 2019 when I transformed my geek blog (Re-actor) into the gaming website it is today.

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