wine

• arch wiki - wine
• this section will be mainly focused on running visual novels, see eshrh's gist
• also see TheMoeWay - Visual novels on Linux
• need Japanese locale for most games, so generate the locale
• edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment ja_JP.UTF-8 UTF-8, run locale-gen

locale-gen

• enable the multilib repository by uncommenting the right section in /etc/pacman.conf

[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

• install wine

pacman -S wine

• install optional dependencies
• install winetricks (basically a package manger inside wine)

pacman -S winetricks

• install zenity (GUI for winetricks, you could just use the CLI)

pacman -S zenity

• wine-mono for .NET

pacamn -S wine-mono

• if getting an error about ntlm_auth when installing things with winetricks, install samba

pacman -S samba

• most visual novels are 32-bit, so set WINEARCH to win32

set -gx WINEARCH win32

• opt out of microsoft .NET telemetry

set -gx DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT 1

• set windows version to windows XP, sometimes helpful

winecfg

• "Applications" -> "Windows Version:" change to "Windows XP"

extra packages and fonts

• if game doesn't work, try installing more libraries

pacman -S giflib lib32-giflib libpng lib32-libpng libldap lib32-libldap gnutls lib32-gnutls mpg123 lib32-mpg123 openal lib32-openal v4l-utils lib32-v4l-utils libpulse lib32-libpulse libgpg-error lib32-libgpg-error alsa-plugins lib32-alsa-plugins alsa-lib lib32-alsa-lib libjpeg-turbo lib32-libjpeg-turbo sqlite lib32-sqlite libxcomposite lib32-libxcomposite libxinerama lib32-libgcrypt libgcrypt lib32-libxinerama ncurses lib32-ncurses libxslt lib32-libxslt libva lib32-libva gtk3 lib32-gtk3 gst-plugins-base-libs lib32-gst-plugins-base-libs lib32-gst-plugins-good vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader

• if game doesn't work, try installing more libraries with winetricks

winetricks d3dx9 dirac dotnet35 dotnet40 dxvk lavfilters vcrun2003 vcrun2005 vcrun2008

• disable wine DLL overrides

winetricks alldlls=default

• start winetricks

winetricks

• "Select the default wineprefix" -> "Install a font" -> check cjkfonts and corefonts

running a game

• mount .iso as usual, unpack

sudo mount game.iso /mnt
sudo cp -r /mnt/* game/

• run game

LC_ALL="ja_JP.UTF-8" TZ="Asia/Tokyo" wine game.exe

• kill game

wineserver --kill

CDemu

• if error along the lines of "disk not plugged in"
• try restarting
• if that doesn't work, use cdemu

sudo pacman -S cdemu-client cdemu-daemon

• start daemon

cdemu-daemon

• mount iso

cdemu load 0 game.iso

• check mount point

lsblk

• for me, either /dev/sr0 or /dev/sr1, check by file size / run lsblk before loading and after
• mount

mount /dev/sr0 /mnt

• add mount point to wine

winecfg

• "Drives" -> "Add...", pick arbitrary letter ("E:" is typical), change "Path:" or click on "Browse..." to /mnt
• run game as usual, hopefully just works