wine users - Mar 2008 - Any experience with old Half Life CDs?

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience loading Half Life using old
HL CDs instead of Steam. I have two old CDs - one form 1998 and one
from 2000. I tried installing from the 2000 CD and it installed OK but
when I tried to do the update from within the game it complained about
lack of Internet access. When I start the game I get a black screen
before the menu, and when I choose the New Game menu item the game
goes nowhere. The mouse still works but only killing X gets me back in
control.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=8

The results on this page look quite good but that's certainly not my
experience this morning. The results posted there are not of much
value in terms of knowing how user actually went about their installs
so I'm unclear how to move forward with this. I know this used to
work, or possibly still does, but I've not tried it on a Gentoo AMD64
system before. Wine is compiled as 32-bit.

Is this is a known issue?

I may or may not follow up on this. I have a Steam account so I'll
shift to that version soon as it has all the updates and is probably
more recently tested.

Thanks,
Mark

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On Friday 28 March 2008 12:05:49 pm Mark Knecht wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone has any experience loading Half Life using old
> HL CDs instead of Steam. I have two old CDs - one form 1998 and one
> from 2000. I tried installing from the 2000 CD and it installed OK but
> when I tried to do the update from within the game it complained about
> lack of Internet access. When I start the game I get a black screen
> before the menu, and when I choose the New Game menu item the game
> goes nowhere. The mouse still works but only killing X gets me back in
> control.
I had problems with the CD version, myself.  The problems changed with 
different versions of wine; at that point, having never played the game 
before and having received it as a parting gift when a job contract ran out, 
I really hadn't given it a whole lot of effort, either.  (After I played it,
oooh, yeah, a great deal of my tube time was spent wandering the Black Mesa 
Research Facility.)
> I may or may not follow up on this. I have a Steam account so I'll
> shift to that version soon as it has all the updates and is probably
> more recently tested.
When I discovered I could import my CD keys to Steam, and that Steam worked 
according to the appdb, I decided to give that route the college try.  Sure 
enough, installing Steam using the appdb's HOWTO for it, and installing Half
Life worked.  I can't recall running into problems once I started playing
it.

- -- 
Paul Johnson
baloo at ursine.ca
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