Getting HaloCE on Linux

With Halo Campaign Evolved, the second remake of Combat Evolved, having been announced and the subsequent wars on social media, I was reminded of my times playing Halo Reach and 4 a long time ago on my Xbox 360. I wanted to try CE (henceforth referring to the original) again.

Getting the game

I found a modded version of CE with enhanced graphics, on par with the console CE edition, over on https://gofile.io/d/sfJl6z so I promptly downloaded the zip file, extracted it, and tried running the game's exe in Proton. I was hit with some interesting issues which I will go over here, in the hopes it might help someone in the future.

First was the executable file finding a version mismatch. The error probably stemmed from Chimera, one of the mods. I was able to patch it with rcedit, which you can get here: https://github.com/electron/rcedit/releases/tag/v2.0.0

Afterwards, I ran the following to set the version properly:

Now, running the game in Proton did not work, between segmentation faults and errors initialising something about DirectX? I forgot how to speak Windows, and it has been 15 minutes since I did the fixes, so naturally, I forgot.

Xenia from the future here. I saw some mentions about it in the Twitter thread where I found the game but I haven't yet tried this with Proton. I might try it out if I would rather spend more time in the terminal than playing the game today.
Adding -vidmode 1366,768 as parameters did not work on Proton for me. Have yet to try dgVoodoo.


However, running with `wine haloce.exe` worked fine, save for audio issues which are a problem with me and not Halo. I fixed that with the resources here, if that's helpful: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=135032


Now, I had tried running the game from Proton, so already had the compatdata folders. For the sake of consistency with my previous Halo CE install, I moved the game files to the Program Files (x86) directory though this is not necessary. The game stores saved files in the users directory. So for me it was steamapps/compatdata/3939493027/pfx/drive_c/users/alex/Documents/My Games/Halo CE where Documents is mapped to my actual Linux user's Documents.

This let me transfer my save file.
So, to conclude, I made a bash script to run the game properly, including the weird Documents folder for my savefile.

I think this is all the information you need to get Halo CE (modded) running, and play an actual piece of art and not whatever slop 343 vomited up now. Though, inevitably, some nonce will tell me that they got it running SO easily, out of the box bs on their Linux installation.