Made a guide on Github on how to install classic Windows 7 games with Wine, would appreciate some feedback
Posted by Coolcricri3@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 53 comments
Been trying to get my favorite games from windows 7 working on wine since Wine 9.0. By 11.0 it mostly works (all apart fro chess are 32bit, so it required installing them separately), only requiring a little fiddling. I have not found a structured instruction specifically for this online, only old generic guides linking to missing sites, so I wanted to make a more in-depth guide. With this occasion I wanted to learn to post on Github, and I would appreciate any constructive feedback given here
MarzipanEven7336@reddit
THere's literally a thousand complete applications that handle everything for you, use one of them.
amogusdevilman@reddit
Yea you can just put your non-steam games on steam and run them with proton afaik
LepidusII@reddit
not everyone uses steam or has an account for it
Cats7204@reddit
its free but ok
timuela@reddit
Steam is blocked in Vietnam :(
MarzipanEven7336@reddit
Lutris, Bottles are just 2 easy client applications for managing everything. Or on your distro you can click that icon that say "App Store" or similar and then click Gaming, I assure you there's like a dozen of these apps already.
RoddyUsher@reddit
I can guarantee whatever windows game they're trying to play is already proprietary software lol
newsflashjackass@reddit
Pirating proprietary software is not the same as patronizing a proprietary service.
MarzipanEven7336@reddit
This is literally the easiest way to do it, instead of managing WINE prefixes by yourself. Unless you're into weird kinky pain methods.
pocketgravel@reddit
Or even a bottle with a proton runner, then you add the games you want as shortcuts and reuse the same bottle multiple times, or duplicate it if needed. But yeah steam is the best way unless you need to manage dependancies directly where bottles can be easier.
MyraidChickenSlayer@reddit
So, I can put pre installed game on steam and play those?
Taldron@reddit
You often can even add the windows installer as a non steam game and install that way, then add the game afterwards. That's my cheat for bazzite, so far works almost every time.
MarzipanEven7336@reddit
Yup
Zatujit@reddit
you don't get it, win7 games are special and don't work well with wine unless you use resource hacker
MarzipanEven7336@reddit
You don’t get it, I worked at Microsoft for years, on several major projects, I’m aware of more than you could imagine. What exactly are you trying to achieve? Concrete information.
Zatujit@reddit
hmm ok dude
Zatujit@reddit
idc you worked for Microsoft i already tried at least with the winaero packaged ones and with plain wine or Lutris without the Resource hacker trick the text doesn't load properly. maybe it works with some versions of wine but its not as straightforward to make it work as you can imagine.
Zatujit@reddit
wine doesn't support MUI files, there seems to be patches for it but it wasn't accepted by the wine devs.
https://github.com/cschuls/WineMUI/tree/master
Zatujit@reddit
"win 7 classic games" = "board games that came with Windows 7 aka Solitaire, Purple Place, Chess Titans etc.."
shanehiltonward@reddit
I'm writing a guide as well. So far, I've got: Chapter 1 - Install Bottles, Chapter 2 - Use Bottles, and Chapter 3 - Play Your Games.
Coolcricri3@reddit (OP)
Tried it, had to cycle a few runners until kron4ek's worked best at the time. It is not really obvious how to make shortcuts that launch the game directly, and even with the dedicated CLI command it took 7-10 seconds to start the game, I initially ended up making a custom notification script for all 8 to make sure they were launching at all and not stuck. It may not be much for big games that you play for half a day, but these are smaller time-wasters like games. Wine takes only a couple milliseconds, since there is only one thing in the pipeline between the game and the OS. Lutris could be better if not for the fact it does not agree with having multiple .exes being launcheable from one installer, and only registered one at a time. The cover art for both apps is also kinda shit since it pulls them from other games with similar names
shanehiltonward@reddit
You should consider joining the Lutris team and solving their problems.
Firmteacher@reddit
Everyone talks about ‘just use steam/lutris’ but when the games just don’t want to launch even after adding in 2-3 %commands% and adding DXVK to the game directory of old games and sometimes they simply don’t want to work well, or even get past a single frame, or the audio is working correctly but frames won’t change without alt tabbing back to desktop then back to the game where it freezes frames but audio is still rolling.
The sheer level of headache it is to get NFS underground - prostreet running was enough to just go back to windows since I just drop in DXVK and widescreen fix and game runs perfect right from there on.
Zatujit@reddit
https://github.com/Zatujit/easy-win7-games-wine-patcher
(i think wine 11.6 tar doesn't work well on some distros, will try to see if i can use something like umu-launcher)
chadlavi@reddit
Jesus Christ I'm old
pocketgravel@reddit
insert looper gif of Bruce Willis rapidly aging
Zatujit@reddit
i thought of doing the same thing but with a script. I think Resource Hacker supports CLI right? I did not managed to use the correct command i think, the hash was different and it did not work.
Zatujit@reddit
will try again and see if i can manage to do it
Zatujit@reddit
resource hacker seems too buggy on wine for this
Zatujit@reddit
okay i see what i did wrong managed to have the same md5sum for the chess.exe file by CLI will try to automate all of that
Coolcricri3@reddit (OP)
I initially tried making a script to automate merging the .mui files, but I could not get it to work, did you manage that part?
Zatujit@reddit
yes
Coolcricri3@reddit (OP)
Could you send it to me so I can see what I did wrong?
Zatujit@reddit
it involved 1) transforming the MUI into resource files 2) adding each individual resource
took me the day to figure out, gonna set up a github i think
Zatujit@reddit
see: https://github.com/Zatujit/easy-win7-games-wine-patcher
Coolcricri3@reddit (OP)
From what I understood so far you generated the Resource Hacker scripts with a python program, I tried to do it manually before giving up. Is renaming the .mui files necessary for it to function, or are you actually modifying them to be usable in the Reshacker script?
Zatujit@reddit
i thought but its not impossible that it was unnecessary i struggled a bit in the beginning and may have made bad assumptions.
Zatujit@reddit
tried again:
```
[18 Apr 2026, 22:38:48]
[FileNames]
Source : C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Chess\chess.exe
Save As : C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Chess\Chess_patched.exe
Log File: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Chess\Chess_log.log
[Commands]
-addoverwrite "en-US\chess.exe.mui", DATA,__GDF_XML,1033
Added: DATA,__GDF_XML,1033
-addoverwrite "en-US\chess.exe.mui", MENU,129,1033
Error: The resource mask is invalid with no valid resource type specified.
Failed!
```
Zatujit@reddit
i thought but its not impossible that it was unnecessary i struggled a bit in the beginning and may have made bad assumptions.
Zatujit@reddit
it has same hash when im running with the GUI and the script
deviled-tux@reddit
What is this “resource hacker” step doing?
Coolcricri3@reddit (OP)
Wine cannot handle .mui files, Resource Hacker is a windows tool that can merge .mui files into the .exe
deviled-tux@reddit
sorry man what is a mui file?
Dwedit@reddit
MUI files are something that Windows uses so that they can ship a bare EXE without any language resources in there. So they split it apart, the EXE ships with nothing in there, and the MUI contains all the resources that are localized for a specific country and language.
MattyGWS@reddit
Baffles me that people find flatpaks, snaps and appimages confusing but were fine with mui
Coolcricri3@reddit (OP)
Like a .dll, but for language, a resource the .exe needs to run, often found in windows vista/7 era programs
Zatujit@reddit
using plain wine for games is not ideal tho.
xYarbx@reddit
Feedback don't use wine for gaming it's optimized for maximum compatibility and stability where are proton that's a fork of wine optimizes for performance and applies game specific patches. If you can't run it in the modern version you have access to every major release and then there are plenty of forks of proton that further specialize in things like proton-tkg that is specifically for old windows games or boxtron for dos games.
monochromaticflight@reddit
At this point, wouldn't it be easier to run Windows 7 in VM? And less performance loss.
It looks like a cool learning project though.
mistifier@reddit
have you tried installing this?
https://winaero.com/download-windows-7-games-for-windows-11/
Zatujit@reddit
its not enough for wine it needs the mui file in the exe otherwise the text is messed up.
Dwedit@reddit
Install Resource hacker, open the EXE file, Action->"add from a resource file", pick the MUI file, delete all the MUI resources from the exe, save as.
Davoomer@reddit
I’ll check it later, and I’ll give you some feedback. Thanks!