Oh hey look, new versions of Genesis. It's been a while since I tried it, so let's see....
What's a "modloader"? It looks like some sort of custom Microsoft Windows program. I'm guessing it edits the raw files and then launches DF. OK, well, maybe I can run that in Wine and then simply drop the Linux Dwarf Fortress binary & libs on top of the genesis stuff, and then run it myself, like I've done in the past.
OK, so, download the thing... it's archived & compressed in RAR format. Joy. Well, I've got unrar installed, so I can extract that. OK. There's this "Genesis Modloader.exe" file. We'll try that... "wine Genesis\ Modloader.exe" => "install the Windows version of Mono to run .NET executables". Ugh. You've gotta be kidding.
OK, google, winehq forums, etc. It says I need something called winetricks, in a clean wineprefix (whatever THAT is), and it talks about how mono never works, and some poor guy who tried this with wine 1.2 was derided for having an "old" version (it was a year old at the time -- this is considered "old" in the Wine world?!). What version am I using... oh, I've got Wine 1.0.1. That's what Debian ships in the current stable release. Well, I suppose I'll have to upgrade that.
WineHQ, download, it says there are packages for Debian Lenny and Squeeze -- cool beans. But when I follow the link it says it's only got packages for Debian Sid (unstable development work-in-progress). OK, back to WineHQ, source, grab source for wine 1.2.3. Download that, rename it, extract it. Before trying to build it, let's do an "apt-get build-dep wine" to make sure we'll have all the prereqs. OK, had to do an "apt-get install libsane-dev" too. Oh, and this is building with -g -O2, and it's gobbling up disk space like it's a masterwork elephant meat roast... OK, suspend that, find a blank CD, burn this old ISO to it to free up some disk space. Let it continue building, let it install. Remove the wine 1.0.1 package... oh, have to remove wine-bin and wine-utils also, it seems. OK, I have wine 1.2.3 now.
Now this "winetricks" thing... I don't have a program by that name. Google, wiki... apparently it's a third party script. Download that, try to figure out how to run it... I need a clean wineprefix? OK, what do I have in ~/.wine right now... oh, I see. Old Dwarf Fortress stuff (DF 0.31.04 or so). That can go -- rm -rf ~/.wine. Now run winecfg... all right. Now I have a "clean wineprefix", I think. So run this "winetricks" script... dlls list... it says "dotnet35". Maybe I can install that? Try it... it says .NET doesn't work yet... then it installs .NET 2.0 or something... then it downloads .NET 3.5... and blows up with an error message.
Back to the Genesis directory... "wine Genesis\ Modloader.exe" again... now it says "To run this application, you must first install one of the following versions of the .NET Framework: v4.0.30319 Contact your application publisher blah blah". Ugh. So even if dotnet35 HAD worked, it still wouldn't have worked worked. 'Cause apparently I need something higher than 3.5.
OK, last resort -- mount the Windows file system (/dev/sda1) and copy the Genesis directory to it. Then reboot into Windows. Then try to run it... I get the same "You need .NET 4" message. Well, Wine is faithfully producing the failures at least! OK, I have a web browser, right? Where's firefox... nope, I have MSIE. OK. Run MSIE, go to Google, type in "install .NET", click, click, click ... "Sorry, you don't have the privileges to do this. Log in as an Administrator and try again."
Total dead end. I do not have Admin rights on the Windows OS on this machine, and there's no way I will get it for installing something to run a game.
Is there any conceivable way I can just copy files around by hand, and edit them by hand, and just run the game, without this modloader thing? Or am I going to be stuck playing "Older non-modloader versions (for 0.31.25)" forever?