Getting Halo CE on Linux

With Halo Campaign Evolved, the second remake of Combat Evolved, having been announced and the subsequent wars on social media, I was reminded of my times playing Halo Reach and 4 a long time ago on my Xbox 360. I wanted to try CE (henceforth referring to the original) again.

Getting the game

I found a modded version of CE with enhanced graphics, on par with the console CE edition, over on https://gofile.io/d/sfJl6z so I promptly downloaded the zip file, extracted it, and tried running the game's exe in Proton. I was hit with some interesting issues which I will go over here, in the hopes it might help someone in the future.

First was the executable file finding a version mismatch. The error probably stemmed from Chimera, one of the mods. I was able to patch it with rcedit, which you can get here: https://github.com/electron/rcedit/releases/tag/v2.0.0

Afterwards, I ran the following to set the version properly:

wine rcedit.exe haloce.exe \
  --set-file-version 01.00.10.0621 \
  --set-product-version 01.00.10.0621

Now, running the game in Proton did not work, between segmentation faults and errors initialising something about DirectX? I forgot how to speak Windows, and it has been 15 minutes since I did the fixes, so naturally, I forgot.

Alex from the future here. I saw some mentions about it in the Twitter thread where I found the game but I haven't yet tried this with Proton. I might try it out if I would rather spend more time in the terminal than playing the game today. Here's a screenshot if you want to try it yourself.

However, running with wine haloce.exe worked fine, save for audio issues which are a problem with me and not Halo. I fixed that with the resources here, if that's helpful: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=135032

Now, I had tried running the game from Proton, so already had the compatdata folders. For the sake of consistency with my previous Halo CE install, I moved the game files to the Program Files (x86) directory though this is not necessary. The game stores saved files in the users directory. So for me it was steamapps/compatdata/3939493027/pfx/drive_c/users/alex/Documents/My Games/Halo CE where Documents is mapped to my actual Linux user's Documents.
This let me transfer my save file.

I think this is all the information you need to get Halo CE (modded) running, and play an actual piece of art and not whatever slop 343 vomited up now.