Hello again Edward, List,
This is a really long shot, so it’s not worth a lot of time. My environment is openSuse 11.4 and LXDE on i586.
Recently I took possession of an old W98 PC with an installation of eGames on the hard drive. I lifted the folder off and tried to run it with wine. After getting wine configured, the games pop up a message box “Can’t Open Cards.FGI”.
Besides the exes and dlls in the egame folders, there are FGI files that I think stand for FastGraphicImages. Google thinks FGI is a DOS application.
On the PC HDD a graphics application MsGraph5 installed may be the associated with FGI files. Trying to run MsGraph5 produces a response to the affect that MsGraph5 is not a stand-alone app, but must be invoked from another program.
If I were able to “pick this lock”, I would have to introduce wine to an FGI application like MsGraph5 and create an association such that an internal reference to an FGI file would invoke the MsGraph5-like application.
Interestingly, XP does not know how to open an FGI file like CARDS.FGI, but XP will run say Pinochle.exe that needs to open CARDS.FGI.
Most likely my eGames need to go to the crusher along with the old PC. It does still run. Before I toss it however, I wanted to see what the chances might be of salvaging eGames. heboland
Replying back to myself for completeness, I made some progress with the eGames resurrection and in my last post I wrote some incorrect conclusions.
The FGI files are opened by eGames. MsGraph5 is something else that uses a different extension.
eGames will open it’s own FGI files if it knows where to find them. I found the installation log dated back in the 90s showing that game paths were written into a romtech section of the win.ini file. The paths use the notation Prog~1 for Program Files folder name, etc.
When I copied and pasted the romtech section into the wine win.ini, I thought I had the path problem licked, but the romtech section didn’t make any difference. Possibly the syntax has to be updated to Program\ Files, etc.
Empirically I discovered that wine invoked from the eGames game directory eg eGames/Pinochle would run Pinochle.exe and Pinochle.exe would open the FGI files in that particular game directory.
From that I was able to write a script that does a cd to an eGames game directory and execute that game directory’s game.exe.
The WAV files in a particular eGames game directory do execute. They contain dealing and/or pegging noises. Midi files MID don’t execute. They contain background music.
I’m able to invoke timidity from the script to play the background sound, but so far timidity keeps on playing after the game has ended. I’ll keep fooling with it.
Regarding the computer crusher, I discovered the old PC hdd is a 5-1/4" drive (size of a DVD drive), so I may hang on to that for somebody’s computer museum! heboland.