Since I am a big fan of the Half-Life series, I went and picked up Half-Life 1 Anthology ( Team Fortress Classic, Half-Life: Opposing Force, Half-Life, Half-Life: Blue Shift ) yesterday to play the original just like I did about 8 years ago.  Or so I thought.

My Inspiron 1525 is where I installed the game. A quite modern piece of equipment, thus more than capable of running HL1. But alas, under Vista, the resolution is limited to only 1024*768 (or smaller.) The game doesn’t go into fullscreen and it runs terribly slow. Changing settings is futile.

But I didn’t give up so fast. I was quick to boot my workstation and just missing the boot screen to go into WinXP, I decided to try my luck under my favorite OS openSUSE GNU/Linux. So the first thing to do was to install Steam onto wine: wine msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi etc.. then installing HL1 trough steam. Steam itself is slow on my P4 1.6GHz 512mb GF2MX, but it gets the job done.

I have to note how little trouble it was to get HL1 running under Wine. Besides the .msi installer trick I had to once again google to figure out, it was straightfoward.

Running HL1: Right away it went into full screen mode and unlike under Vista, it let me set resolutions to match my hardware (22′). Speed was no issue here.

Just goes to show the level of quality and dedication in Wine. Im off to play some HL =D