Run Win 16-bit Application in Wine

Question

Xubuntu 12.04. HP Compaq nc8430. 2 GB RAM. Wine 1.4.

I'm trying to run Castle of the Winds, an old 16-bit Windows application, in Wine. I've put the application in .wine/drive_c. I've added it as an application in Wine, and I've tried setting the Windows version to 3.1, and I've also tried Win XP. Each time I try to run the app, Xubuntu freezes. I can do a Ctl-Alt-F4, and then a Ctl-Alt-Del to reboot. This application is not a DOS application, so I don't think DOSbox will help.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Updated answer for 2020-2021

Here are the steps to run this 16-bit App:

1. sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
2. wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
3. sudo apt-key add winehq.key
4. sudo add-apt-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ focal main' I am using 20.04, but change focal to groovy if you are using 20.10.
5. sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel Change winehq-devel to winehq-stable if you would like to use the stable version instead
6. Run winecfg once so it installs all required packages to work correctly like gecko. In some cases as mentioned below, it would be needed to set the Windows version to XP.
7. Visit the Castle in the Wind folder. For me it showed both versions inside of it:

8. Go to Castle1 for example and on the terminal type wine CASTLE1.EXE to begin

For Castle2, type wine CASTLE2.EXE in the terminal, inside this folder to play it

NOTES

• I am playing in Ubuntu 20.04
• I did not install any additional packages via winetricks.
• There are less steps to do now with the latest wine version, which at this time is Wine 6.0-rc3
• There was no need to changing the Window version inside winecfg since it worked with Windows XP, 7, 8 and 10 (In my case). The default one was windows 7, which is the one used for this test. But as noted by Adrian, he needed Windows XP (Like the previous version of this answer) to make it work.