I was looking at the bookshelf full of old games I've collected over the years, and was annoyed that there wasn't any sort of unattended regression test for their installers... 'course, that's hard, since you'd have to somehow insert the cd-roms automatically. But you can kind of fake it by mounting .iso files, at least for some games, so I tried doing it for Diablo II. And it seems to work! I wrapped it up in an extensible script, with a menu and some functions stolen from winetricks. It's at http://code.google.com/p/winezeug/source/browse/trunk/wisotool (though you have to check out that directory from svn to run it, as it currently depends on two other files there).
The idea is you run the script like this to load a cd-rom into its cache of .iso files: sh wisotool load If the cd-rom has a key associated with it, specify it like this: sh wisotool load=XXX-YYY-ZZZ-WWW The .iso files are cached in ~/.wisotoolcache in filenames named after their sha1sums (so best run on a fast machine :-)
Then (assuming somebody has added a verb for the app to the script), you can then run the script to install from the .iso files. For instance, sh wisotool diablo2 or sh wisotool morrowind
It only supports those two games at the moment, it doesn't run on windows yet (though it should eventually), and the diablo2 verb starts the game (I couldn't figure out how to stop it).
It's kind of like playonlinux in that it has separate scripts (well, functions) for each game it supports, but utterly unlike playonlinux because it doesn't try to patch or futz with wine in any way (beyond running winetricks if needed), and the installs are totally unattended (unlike playonlinux, where you have to click things and insert discs).
I have no idea how many games this will work for, but heck, may as well try it.
I expect to use this in automated testing sometime, and welcome additional verbs if people feel like writing them. - Dan
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 9:16 PM, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com wrote:
But you can kind of fake it by mounting .iso files, at least for some games, so I tried doing it for Diablo II. And it seems to work! I wrapped it up in an extensible script, with a menu and some functions stolen from winetricks. It's at http://code.google.com/p/winezeug/source/browse/trunk/wisotool
I forgot to mention: Austin already contributed a verb for morowind (with a little borrowed code from appinstall). So that's two apps supported so far.
One big difference between wisotool and appinstall is that wisotool tries to be a building block, whereas appinstall was the whole enchilada. We might end up refactoring appinstall to use wisotool, who knows. - Dan
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Dan Kegel