GTA IV under Wine/PlayOnLinux

Question

I have tried playing GTA IV on PoL and Wine without luck. It works with every other game I have tried, including World of Tanks, Portal, Portal 2, Half-Life, BioShock, World of Warcraft, Garry's mod and more. In my tests I installed the game and then applied the 1.0.7.0 patch. Now I cannot get it to boot, always crashes with the only error message being the playonlinux one.

I also tried with Wine, to no avail. Whole install works fine, then will not launch from the desktop shortcut or the /home/.wine/drive_c/program files(x86)/rockstar games/launchgtaiv.exe

It actually almost worked with update 3, but couldn't start the game or even change screen resolution. Changing wine version to the one recommended in the wine directory caused an error saying GTA IV needs a sound card to run. Changing sound driver is not an option because it says that there are none, but only with anything but wine ver. 1.3.23

My Specs:

CPU - AMD A10-6800K
RAM - 4GB
GPU - 9600GT (2007 version) (512MB DDR3) (Proprietary Drivers)
HDD - 750GB hybrid drive

Solution

After following to the letter the How to install and configure Wine? guide including the part about making sure the WINEARCH is wine32 and using Windows XP as the default OS you need to install the following components using winetricks to have it exactly like my case:

d3dx10
d3dx9_26
d3dx9_28
d3dx9_31
d3dx9_35
d3dx9_36
d3dx9_39
d3dx9_42
d3dx9_43
d3dx9
directx9
dotnet20sp1
dotnet20
dotnet30sp1
dotnet35
dotnet40
gfw
mfc40
mfc42
msxml3
msxml4
msxml6
physx
quartz
vb6run
vcrun2003
vcrun2005
vcrun2008
vcrun2010
vcrun6sp6
vcrun6
wmp10
wsh56vb
wsh57
xact_jun2010
xact
xinput
xna40

After making sure all of this components are installed (Not all are needed for this game, but this are the ones I had installed already when I tested the game), you can install the game. In my case I used cdemu to install the 2 DVDs. After installing both run the Patch 1.0.7.0 then follow the instructions mentioned below in the comments in the WineHQ Comment Section to patch the Xlive DLL in order to avoid the Games for Windows - Live.

Note that the patch 1.0.7.0 actually disables the need for this by uninstalling the social part but you still have to put the DLL mentioned below in order for the game to actually start.

Here are some screenshots of the game in action:

And here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Juf4LC--g&feature=youtu.be

UPDATE: As mentioned by the youtube comments of Jean-Michel Beriault, the game works great on 64-bit, you still need to install dotnet30 and vcrun2005 but after that it should work. Thank Jean for the testing.

Comments

[DeepSidhu1313]

I am installing GTA IV ( steam ), using playonlinux . But i am getting Fatal Error. Any ideas ??

[Luis Alvarado]

Hi @DeepSidhu1313 sorry I could only test the PC version (Non-Steam)

[DeepSidhu1313]

Thanks for the reply. I will wait for a fix or new guide :)