As some may have noticed,
Fallout 3 GOTY
Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion GOTY
have been released on GOG.
Since it's the first DRM-free version of New Vegas ever, I bit the bullet and bought it although WinXP isn't officially supported (unlike the Steam version).
Apparently, GOG's silly client is breaking XP compatibility, there is a workaround though for which - ironically enough - you'll need a steam_api.dll.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_fallout_new_vegas_ultimate_edition_1c381/post153
If you wan't to play with WinXP, pick a steam_api.dll from any game and rename it as GalaxyWrp.dll.
According to a GOG Team Member, Fallout 3 and Oblivion are not affected.
While not getting that it's about Galaxy and trying to get it to run on Linux instead, I found out, that the user adamhm has made a lot of scripts for perfectly working WINE wrappers for some games I would never have expected to run that flawlessly on Linux, including Fallout 3 GOTY, Oblivion GOTY, New Vegas, Mirror's Edge, Hitman 1 to 3, Witcher 1, etc...
https://www.gog.com/mix/adamhms_linux_wine_wrappers
You can also let it make a nice tar.gz or tar.xz archive for your backups for easy future installation on Linux via the command extension -gz or -xz like for example when it comes to New Vegas
Making the tar.xz of such a huge game took about 2h on my system but worked.
New Vegas is now running with a very high framerate on high settings on my ancient system via Linux DRM-free and totally legal.
I never expected to see the day.
On this occasion, I also updated my WINE from the ancient version in MINT's standard repo to the current stable one with Winetricks via a PPA and now I don't even have to boot XP for my playthrough of "The Book of Unwritten Tales" anymore either.
It didn't work via PlayOnLinux so I may get rid of that.
Code:
Installing the Recommended Stable Wine version (from PPA)
In the terminal type the following to add the Wine PPA, update repositories, and install latest Wine & Winetricks version:
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key && sudo apt-key add Release.key && sudo apt-add-repository -y https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ && sudo apt update && sudo apt install wine-devel winehq-devel winetricks
or you could include the Wine 32-Bit Arch (Better support) and configuring winecfg (This should only be applied to new installations since it will move the existing Wine installation to a folder called winebck):
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 && wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key && sudo apt-key add Release.key && sudo apt-add-repository -y https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ && sudo apt update && sudo apt install wine-devel winehq-devel winetricks && mv ~/.wine ~/winebck & export WINEARCH=win32 && winecfg
Source:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/316025/how-to-install-and-configure-wine#316029
Linux has just become way more fun again for me.
I don't mind using the terminal if I just have to copypaste something.