Monday, 26 May 2008 08:49

”In 1999, Rockstar Games and Rockstar North (then known as DMA Design) furthered the groundbreaking gameplay concepts established just two years prior in the original Grand Theft Auto - with the release of GTA2. GTA2 expanded on the top-down, open-ended crime world gameplay formula with a host of new features including the advent of multiple rival gangs – seven, to be exact, including the Yakuza, Scientists, Looneys, Rednecks, Zaibatsu, the Russian Mob and Hare Krishnas. Earn your respect with each gang. Reap the benefits with all manner of shady work-for-hire gigs contracted your way. And climb your way to the top of the criminal pile. ” Source

Rockstar has been kind and released the game for free at http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/

Testing
This test was done in a clean wine prefix and the game was played in a Virtual Desktop.

System Specs
Linux distribution: Ubuntu 8.04
Wine version: 1.0-rc2 with 3DMark patch applied.
Video Card: Nvidia 8800GTS 640MB
CPU: Intel E6550 2,333 GHZ
Memory: 2 gb RAM

Installation
Download the Grand Theft Auto 2 installer from http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/ and unpack the ZIP. Start the installation by typing “wine GTA2.exe” in a terminal.
david@david-desktop:~$ wine GTA2.exe

Playing the game
Before you start the game, there are two things you will need. First of, you will need DirectX 6.1 or higher, Twickline has made an guide about DirectX 9.0C, so the easiest thing to do is just to install DirectX 9.0C. The second thing you need to do is to get a copy of DPLAYX.dll from here. Place the dll in you GTA folder.

After you have installed the game and made sure that you have both of the things mentioned above, than you can start playing the game, by either typing “wine gta2.se” in a terminal from the games folder, or by launching the game from the start menu.

Performance boosters
If you want to enhance performance, the you can add WINEDEBUG=-all before ”wine gta2.exe”, ”WINEDEBUG=-all” means that the Wine Debugger will be shut off.

Compiz can be quite the performance killer. Since I use Gnome, I replace Compiz by typing ”Metacity –replace” in a terminal before I play. Then I simply turn Compiz on again by starting a new terminal and typing ”Compiz”.

You can change some settings in Wine's regedit (type ”regedit” in a terminal) to enhance performance. This is how my settings look like:

You can read more about regedit on this page: http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys

What was not tested
I did not try internet play.

Video
And finally, here is a video when I play Grand Theft Auto 2. (the performance is a lot lower because of the screencast program)