As a kid, I played this game called Spiritual Warfare.  I’m not sure if it was a gift or if it was something that we got at the Christian bookstore.  Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun.  I don’t remember that much of it, but I do remember some of the hymns that played in the background during the game play.

I found that you can still purchase the game online.  I thought my son would enjoy it, plus it would be a good challenge to get it to work in Linux.  Here’s the website:

• Wisdom Tree: Spiritual Warfare Game Page

Note:  I had a little issue with my order, and it took over a month to arrive.  I think I caught the company at a bad time when staff was working through some form of personal emergency compounded by some shipping issues.  They made up for it by providing another game, which I will have to blog about when I get a chance to try to get it working.

Installing Wine

The game came on a CD with a Windows installer.  The game itself is a DOS game, but the installer requires Windows.  I used Wine to run the installer.  In actuality, since Windows is not required for running the game, I could have used a VM or a friend’s computer.

I added the latest Wine repository and installed Wine with these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.6

This installed the Wine version 1.6.  On my laptop, I tried it first with version 1.7, and that did not work at all.  Apparently, there is a bug out there between the latest kernel, Wine, and 16-bit applications.  It gave me this error on my laptop:

err:module:attach_process_dlls "krnl386.exe16" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winevdm.exe" failed, status c0000005

I went to my other laptop, and the 1.6 version worked fine.

I created a separate Wine prefix for this install.  I think the 32-bit part was important (WINEARCH=win32).

mkdir .wineprefixes
export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wineprefixes/spiritualwarfare
export WINEARCH=win32

I ran winecfg to create the Wineprefix, although that wasn’t necessary.  The only thing that I did was to select Windows 98 for the Windows version.

To start the installation, I ran:

wine cmd
d:
setup.exe

Actually, the CD wouldn’t work in the other computer.  I had no problem copying the install files off the CD on my laptop and transfering them over the network to the other computer.  You can just launch setup.exe from any location where you have the install files.

wine setup.exe

I basically accepted the defaults for the install.  This installed the game into C:\SPIRIT, which considering Linux and the Wine prefix, that would be $HOME/.wineprefixes/spiritualwarfare/drive_c/SPIRIT.

DosBox

Wine will not run the game itself because it is actually a DOS-based game.  So, I installed DosBox with this command:

sudo apt-get install dosbox

Then, after starting DosBox, and I had to do a couple of things to get it to run.   First, you have to mount the C: drive to get access to the executable:

mount c .wineprefixes/spiritualwarfare/drive_c

Then, you can just launch it like you would in DOS:

C:
cd \SPIRIT
spirit.exe

At first, the game was a little fast.  I learned that you can slow it down with the Ctrl + F11 sequence.  (You can speed it back up with Ctrl + F12).  Then, you can go to full screen mode.

Shortcut

Now, my son is not going to enter a mount command and go through all of that.  (If it was the only way he could play the game, I’m sure he would learn how!)  I found that I could create a custom configuration file just for the game.  I copied the default one:

cp $HOME/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf $HOME/.dosbox/spiritualwarfare.conf

Then, I edited my copy.  I changed:

• fullscreen=true
• cycles=768 (under [cpu] )
• The [autoexec] section

At the end, the lines I put in autoexec where:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.
mount c ~/.wineprefixes/spiritualwarfare/drive_c
c:
cd SPIRIT
spirit
exit

Finally, I made a shortcut with the “Menu Editor” program (alacarte), and I entered the command:

dosbox -conf $HOME/.dosbox/spiritualwarfare.conf

Game Play

In the installation directory, there is a readme.txt file with some helpful information to playing the game.  You’ll probably want to go through that.  Just to help, here are the keys to use:

Arrow Keys – Control the hero
Space Bar – Makes the hero throw fruit
Tab – Makes the hero drop a vial or throw the jawbone or the sword
Pause or F10 – Pauses the game

1 – Select Pear
2 – Select Apple
3 – Select Pomegranate
4 – Select Grapes
5 – Select Banana

P – Pray
M – Bring up the map
V – Select Vial of God’s Wrath
S – Select Sword of the Spirit
J – Select Samson’s Jawbone
R – Select the Raft
T – Light the Torch
A – Use Anointing Oil

F1 – Options Menu
F2 – Load Game
F3 – Save Game
F4 – Sound Menu
F5 – Game Speed Menu

ESC – Quit Game or Clear Menu

Other than that, just explore.  Keep looking for things to get.  It’s a lot of fun.

Resources

• Wikipedia: Wisdom Tree
• Wisdom Tree Games
• Wisdom Tree: Spiritual Warfare Game Page
• Wine HQ: Wine for Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives
• Ask Ubuntu: How to force Wine into acting like 32-bit Windows on 64-bit Ubuntu?
• Wine HQ: Cannot create 32bit wineprefix (Ubuntu package problem?)
• Linux Questions.org: Kernel 3.14.4 and the Nvidia Drivers (and WINE).
• How to use a .conf file with dosbox
  
• DosBox Wiki: Special Keys