Compatibility Report

Just use a Virtual desktop. Works perfect :)

I've not been able to work out how to force Proton to run one. I can do it with non-Steam integrated wine, but not Proton (which works much better, since I get crashes on non-Proton).

Here it's explained:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3502

Although this was a very useful article, I've now discovered that Proton gives some weird bugs when running a virtual desktop (at least with Pharaoh). I can't click the options menu on some resolutions, and on others, it won't let me choose any of the in-game top-bar menus, and it doesn't run at the resolution I give the desktop, whereas fullscreen Pharaoh ran on my monitor's resolution without any of these rather more major errors.

A better solution I found was this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=822513452

This explains a widescreen fix for the game that, when implemented, allows me to run the game both fullscreen and at 1600x900 with fixed scrolling. However, even this sparked two issues: there's a black box at the bottom right corner of the screen (minor issue, purely visual), and if I try to set it to windowed mode, it flashes between blackscreen and minimised then crashes.

Update to this thread

For the following, my screen has a resolution of 1600x900.
For references to a fifth of the screen, I am estimating, and have not measured with a ruler.

Following the release of Proton 4.11-1, Pharaoh will (very) occasionally not get past the opening cutscene.

Even when it does get past the cutscene, the display is moved down roughly a fifth of the screen (cutting a fifth of the display off and leaving the top fifth black) but the inputs are not, meaning you will always click a fifth of the screen below your cursor. This obviously makes the game unplayable. Disabling esync and fsync have no effect, and reverting to Proton 4.2-9 fixes this bug.

Using the widescreen fix referenced above has no effect, other than fixing the scrolling bug mentioned before (which is obviously useless since it's unplayable anyway). Another effect of this bug is that the menus cannot be accessed in-game.

Here's the log for when it does get past the cutscene

As far as crashing on the cutscene goes, I haven't encountered it after disabling d3d11/d3d9 (both were tried), even though I no longer have them in my launch options. I'm not sure what causes the crash, and it may be very rare, though I got it twice in a row before modifying launch options.

Another update here. The recent release of Proton 4.11-2 appears to have fixed the graphical error, btu for some reason the crash after the opening cutscene does seem to still happen very occasionally.

FYI, I own a non-steam version of the game and I launch it with Lutris. It seems that only wine versions using the "fshack" patch are affected by the scrolling bug. Standard wine version doesn't have this problem, but have to change the desktop resolution (The maximum resolution supported by the game is 1024*768).

Another update, now using 5.0-7.

The crash still occurs, but I think I've worked out what's causing it -- it only seems to happen when I try to skip the opening cutscene within the first 1-2 seconds of it. After that I seem free to skip without the crash.

Here's a link to a gist with the log for when it crashes this way. (which I am apparently now able to make again after the site being broken for a couple of hours).

Hi!
I do face the same scrolling problem :(
I have tried the link https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=822513452
Replaced Pharaoh.exe with no success whatsoever.
Is there any other thing to try?

Hi!
I do face the same scrolling problem :(
I have tried the link https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=822513452
Replaced Pharaoh.exe with no success whatsoever.
Is there any other thing to try?

Hm, this is odd. Here are some things to be sure of:

• Are you certain you downloaded the Cleopatra patch and not the Pharaoh patch? The .exe files in both are called Pharaoh.exe
• Did you use the file with the right resolution for your monitor, since there are several different files available for differing resolutions?

If it still doesn't work, you could try forcing it to use a few different versions of Proton and test those, but ultimately I'm afraid I don't know of any other workarounds. If you're okay with sacrificing fullscreen, I think that steam guide also has a windowed fix.

And here's my non-scheduled update that I give whenever I play Pharaoh again:

• Cutscene crash seems to have stopped happening in 5.0-8 or 5.0-9. Woo!
• The small black box in the bottom-right corner and odd placement of Deben and direction in the top menu are still there
• This is probably a bug that existed in older versions as well, but I noticed the Mission Editor menu is messed up. The actual graphics of the menu have a smaller resolution (I think the largest in the base game) and are up in the top left corner, but the text is moved over from them. The menu is still useable, but looks broken as all hell.

Scrolling with cursor at the right or bottom of screen does not work

I just made these games (Sierra Caesar III, Pharaoh, and Zeus) working with https://github.com/CnCNet/cnc-ddraw + fshack

Just thought I leave some info here: The game is expecting to receive a WM_DISPLAYCHANGE message after it called SetDisplayMode, it will then adjust some values (Don't know the details).

If the display resolution doesn't change then there is no WM_DISPLAYCHANGE message and the game is glitching and you can't scroll to the right/bottom.