Windy Dale

During my unemployment in mid-2001 I had quite a lot of free time on my hands. When not working on my resume or applying for jobs, I would play Icewind Dale. It took me a little over a week to beat, and I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I purchased the expansion pack, Heart of Winter, and beat that. Carina had a copy of Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, which she gave me. I never won the final fight, but otherwise really enjoyed that game, too.

I purchased Icewind Dale 2 as a birthday gift to Carina a couple years back. She installed it, and then her hard drive exploded some months later, so she never really played it. By this time, I was a full-time GNU/Linux user, so IWD2 wasn’t something I had any real expectation of playing, despite my high hopes. I compiled and installed the latest version of Wine at the time, and tried to install the game. It failed, so I dutifully filed Wine bug #3564. I gave up on it, and pretty much forgot about the game.

Carina installed IWD2 onto her new laptop sometime this summer, and she’s recently begun playing it in earnest. Feeling somewhat envious of her excursions back into the world of Faerun, I decided to take another stab at getting Wine to run it, this time using Ubuntu’s Wine package.

The installation started without problems. Having ample disk space, I selected the “Full Install” option, and was feeling pretty confident as the first disc copied its contents into my laptop. Eventually I was prompted for the second CD, and that’s when things fouled up. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the installer to recognize that I had inserted the correct CD. I tried several times to perform a full install, even going so far as to mount a disc image of the second CD. Nothing worked.

So I cajoled Carina into sharing her IWD2 installation, which I copied over to my computer. A quick edit to the ini file later, and the game launched successfully! I created a party, and eagerly clicked “Continue” to start my adventure … when I was prompted to insert the second CD. Thankfully, I still had the disc image I had created earlier in my home directory. I mounted that image, ran winecfg to map the mount point as a CD drive for Windows applications, and re-ran IWD2.exe. I re-created my party, clicked “Continue”, and I was off!

I stayed up way too late last night, directing my adventurers through a few battles with goblins and orcs, and doing the mandatory “FedEx” type quests to gain some experience. I’ll need to purchase another copy of IWD2, in order to make my copy legitimate. I’m also interested in trying cooperative multiplayer with Carina, for which we’ll each need our own serial number. Carina and I played through Neverwinter Nights together, and really enjoyed the multiplayer aspect.

I’m tempted to dig out an S-Video cable to connect my laptop to the television while I play…

(The title from this post comes from the immortal JeffK. Thanks to him, I am almost physically incapable of saying “Icewind Dale”, and instead always say “Windy Dale".)