Ignition (a racing game) Runs on Ubuntu with Wine

Here’s another “runs on Ubuntu with Wine”. Ignition is an old racing game that is now abandonware and it runs pretty well under Wine. As it’s abandonware (the company that created it no longer exists) it’s available to download from the Internet – I should point out that abandonware is yet another legal grey area (there are so many!) so check the laws in your country etc. etc.

You can download the game as a zip file from Abandonia.

Step One: Installation

It’s probably best to create a separate Wine prefix for this game. The reason is that as its an old game the menu screen runs at a 320×200 resolution, it’s unlikely that your Xorg configuration supports that so as a workaround we can tell Wine to run it in an emulated desktop rather than true fullscreen. So, once the file is downloaded, extract it somewhere temporarily, and open a terminal to the folder containing SETUP.EXE.

In the terminal, run the following commands:

export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ignition

wine SETUP.EXE

This should run the installer, when you are prompted to install DirectX 3.0 (yes 3.0!) just say no. When the installation is complete, run the following command in the same terminal.

winecfg

This will run the Wine configuration tool for the new Wine prefix. When it opens, switch to the “Graphics” tab, and check the box next to “Emulate a virtual desktop”. Then click OK.

Step Two: Creating the menu item

For some reason, the Ignition installer doesn’t create a menu item in the Applications menu, or an Icon. So, we have to do so manually.

First, download this image.

Copy it to: ~/.wine-ignition/drive_c/GAMES/IGNITION/ignition.png

Next, Open up the Text Editor and paste in the following text:

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=;
Comment=A great racing game
Exec=env WINEPREFIX="/home/USERNAME/.wine-ignition" wine "C:\GAMES\IGNITION\Ign_win.exe"
Hidden=false
Icon=/home/USERNAME/.wine-ignition/dosdevices/c:/GAMES/IGNITION/ignition.png
Name=Ignition
Path=/home/USERNAME/.wine-ignition/dosdevices/c:/GAMES/IGNITION
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name[en_GB]=Ignition

Replace all 3 occurrences of USERNAME with the name of your home folder. Now save the file as: ~/.local/share/applications/Ignition.desktop

The menu item should appear in the Wine programs menu with the icon that you downloaded. Now, start the game. It should run in a small window, once you get to the menu, navigate with the keyboard to the graphics options, and switch up the resolution to 800×600. This only affects the in-game resolution, not the menu.

Have fun!

The controls are:
Accelerate/Brake – Up Arrow/Down Arrow
Left/Right – Left Arrow/Right Arrow
Boost – SHIFT, if the boost is charged

If you experience crashes

If you experience crashes you will need to patch the exe file with the one from here.

Just extract the exe and replace the existing on in ~/.wine-ignition/drive_c/GAMES/IGNITION pay attention to the case of the filename as Linux is case sensitive; make sure that you actually replace the existing .exe.

This is actually a problem that affects Windows too, not just Wine :)