Wife bought Darwinia via Amazon - can I install for Linux?

[sorceror]

My wife purchased Darwinia for my birthday via Amazon. (If it matters, the distributor is 'Cinemaware Marquee'.) I tried using the Linux install script on my Ubuntu 6.06, but all I get is a dialog saying:

Please mount Darwinia CD.
Choose Yes to retry, No to cancel.

I can click 'Yes' as many times as I like but the dialog just keeps coming up. If I click 'No' the install cancels out. I tried both as a regular user and (heaven forfend) as root. I can't tell where exactly it's looking for the CD but I've tried both my DVD-ROM drive and my DVD-RW drive. It's mounted under /media/cdrom but even if I make a symlink from /mnt/cdrom to there, the installer doesn't appear to see what it expects.

Am I screwed? Do I have the wrong version of Darwinia and am doomed to install it on Windows?

[Dave2]

The US distributors apparently didn't include the datafiles necessary for the Linux installer to work, and only shipped a Windows installer.

If the installer works in Wine, then it should be salvageable; only having 1st gen UK retail boxes (InstallShield, yay), I'm not sure if it can. If it can be run in Wine, follow the following instructions:

• Run the Linux installer, unchecking the option to install datafiles.
• Install Win32 Darwinia with Wine (yeah, you probably did this earlier).
• Locate main.dat and sounds.dat, these are probably in the root of the Win32 Darwinia directory.
• Copy these into /the/path/to/darwinia/lib/
• Launch Darwinia via one of the installed launchers.

It'd be simpler if there was an unpacker on Linux for the installer software used, but I didn't find one when I searched a while ago.

[sorceror]

The US distributors apparently didn't include the datafiles necessary for the Linux installer to work, and only shipped a Windows installer.

It'd be simpler if there was an unpacker on Linux for the installer software used, but I didn't find one when I searched a while ago.

Your directions worked, I just ran it a moment ago and played around on the first level! Thanks, after a bit of digging I see the same basic idea on the "Linux binary" sticky topic on this forum, too. It seems to run well.

I don't know if it would work in Wine (might have time to try that at some point) but I installed it on my WinXP partition and copied the data over. BTW, impressive programming on this one - the graphics are quite nice, but they used fractals to good effect, clearly - the data files are in the KB range instead of the MB range. The biggest file is the copy of libSDL they ship with it.

[sorceror]

I don't know if it would work in Wine...

...but now I do. The installer ran fine in Wine, and I was able to get the same main.dat and sounds.dat files that way. So, the files can be extracted on a Linux-only system. More convoluted than I'd like, but I am quite happy to have a game that I can play on Linux.