I have installed Spore and Galactic Adventures in Ubuntu 12.04 using wine-1.4, but when I try to launch Galactic Adventures, the normal game launches. Is there any way to get it to launch with the patch?
How to play Galactic Adventures in Ubuntu 12.04
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There is no best way to do it, as such. Both Steam and Wine are ever-changing, and today's best method might break tomorrow*.
People have reported that Steam works with just standard Wine.
Install Wine
from the Software Center (or click the shopping bag icon).Right click the installer executable, go to Properties → Permissions and check Allow executing file as program, then right click it again and select Open with Wine Windows program loader.
If it turns out that doesn't work for you, you can try using PlayOnLinux.
Marco has detailed the instructions on how to get it working behind the link.
If it still doesn't work, you can give Crossover Games a go. Though it is number three on this list on purpose.
In general, it seems that Steam will work okay. You should try to run it using out-of-the-box Wine first. If you run into any trouble, feel free to ask a question under the wine tag at Ask Ubuntu.
Also see this site for Steam games that work with Wine (and, by extension, PlayOnLinux).
* Note: If you get it to work, updates to Wine will most probably never break it. But it may well be the Steam people are fighting off Wine compatibility. It may also be they are actively trying to make their program run well under Wine (games publishers have been known to do that).
Yes, actually. Wine will run Steam and DotA 2 (along with other source games, including TF2) fine. There are some particle rendering and lighting issues though. Also, performance varies by desktop environment. XFCE and LXDE have the best track record, where Unity and KDE have the worse. There is also a pulseaudio bug that crashes your game when it tries to get direct access to sound hardware, there is a fix. More at the wine appdb entry.
Best Answer
I don't know about running Spore and Spore GA under wine, but under their normal host OS, to play GA, you have to launch GA from its own installed shortcut and you need to have the GA disk. If you don't, it will run normal Spore. From your description, it sounds like either a) the launcher you are using is for normal spore, not the GA launcher, or b) its DRM isn't seeing the GA disk, so it is just going running normal Spore.
That was one advantage to installing GA--- it "cracked" normal Spore so the Spore disk was no longer needed at start up to play the normal Spore game. Useful when you wanted to travel but not worry about losing your GA disk.