Getting Dragon Age Origins (v 1.04) to work on Ubuntu 10.04 and wine

So for the past 7 hours I’ve been going back and forth trying to install DA:O, add the expansions and update it, while getting it to work. In the end I finally realized how to get it working (up to 1.04 and all the dlc’s).

Prequisites:

• Wine (latest version is recommended)
• WineTricks
• Dragon Age Origins
• A brain.. no srssly, I spent all those hours doing the same mistake!

What I did wrong:

Well, I started out with a clean wine installation (this is actually a good thing). I used winetricks to download and install the following:

• corefonts
• d3dx9 (and d3dx9_28, d3dx9_36, d3dx10, d3dx0f) dll’s
• dotnet20 and then dotnet30
• physx
• vcrun6
• vcrun2005
• vcrun2008

After I installed winetricks installed all of this, I then inserted my Dragon Age Origins CD (oooOOoh Shiny) and ran the setup. After it was finished, guess what? Version 1.0 worked! PERFECT I SAID! I then used the “daupdater.exe” to install the addons I had! Most of them worked except for “Return to Ostagar” and “Leilana’s Song“, since they asked for 1.02 version. So I proceeded to update my installation, but not before realizing “Witch Hunt” requiered 1.04! So I installed 1.02, and then 1.04! Success, no errors during setup and patching. Time to start the game. But wait! What’s that? An output window saying:

R6034 An Application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly

Now what the? Dragon Age was running thine a few minutes ago, heck I even got to my camp after saving the little father dwarf and his “enchanting” son. So what gives? So I tried reinstalling vcrun2005 and 2008! Nothing changed. I tried removing msvcr80.dll and msvcp80.dll and replacing them! Nothing! So I went back and forth doing this for a while, browsing the Interwebz only to find solutions that didn’t work for me. [still, I’m posting them here, it worked for others, maybe it worked for you if mine wont. Here’s one of them: Clickity click click.]

What finally got Dragon Age working:

Well after browsing and browsing… and browsing some more I realized [this is why I said you need a brain.. anyone would have noticed this] that the errors I’m getting are all pointing towards the Visual C runtime! Now, if you follow carefully the installation log that’s outputted while updating and patching the game, you would see that the Visual C Runtime is installed again, breaking the previous one (that you installed), and that causes the error! Well what’s the fix, you ask? Well it’s quite simple my dear Watson reader. While making sure you have a clean version of Wine (no runtimes, no dotnet, no .dll’s installed), proceed and run the Setup for DA:O. After it’s done, update it to the latest version. Then, go ahead and install the following:

• corefonts
• d3dx9 (and d3dx9_28, d3dx9_36, d3dx10, d3dx0f) dll’s
• dotnet20 and then dotnet30
• physx
• vcrun6
• vcrun2005
• vcrun2008

Now, when you will run the game, you will noticed that… Taddaaahh!! It works like a charm! No screen flickering, no inverted colors, the soundtrack can be enjoyed at it’s full, and Morigan is as  bitc friendly as ever!