LOTR BFME II - play without having to load CD

General Discussion
1

Hello all -
I am new to Lutris and am still figuring things out. I happen to still have my Lord of the Rings - Battle for Middle Earth CDs, but was wondering if anyone has figured out how to run the games on Lutris without needing to have the CD in the drive?
(I was able to get it working in Windows using virtual drives on Windows 11 - but I’m committed to being all Debian now - don’t want anything to do with Microsoft anymore.)

Thanks in advance if anyone knows how to do this. I have only installed the base game and the 1.09 patch.

Regards

2

you can installl it with the BFME all in launcher:
click + search lutris website for installers type battle for middle-earth
select bfme allin launcher

select bfme 2 to install. you have to select the bfme2 executable manually ( right click on game in lutlris library configure)

3

Thanks!! That worked.
Next question - have you been able to get Rise of the Witch King to work?
I have tried all of them, none seems to install successfully - they all close with some error or another.
I looked on WineHQ - they have this game classified as “garbage” now. So it appears it won’t run under WINE at all now.

4

Looks like that needs more tinkering. I have an issue that if fails to parse some ini file. I will answer when i find solution for it.

5

If I switch to 2.02 version it starts for me. (in the bfme all in launcher you can change installed patch version it should be in the desktop folder)
do you also run it with wine 10.2?
you can install latest wine with wine-staging
debian/ubuntu…
sudo apt install wine-staging
arch/manjaro
sudo pacman -S wine-staging
and you can change in preferences or runner options

6

okay i figured out the vanilla version too. If you want to run that you also have to change the base game to vanilla

7

w/r/t wine - I am on Debian 12 (bookworm).
wine version in the stable repo is wine-8.0 (Debian 8.0~repack-4), so I am not on wine 10.2.
Debian is always behind, but it is stable. I will try what you suggest w/r/t wine and see if I get it upgraded.

8

Tried to install via sudo apt install wine-staging… E: Unable to locate package wine-staging

9

To be clear, to run bfme all in launcher in Lutris, do I first need anything copied to hard disk?
I tried before with the game CD in my DVD / CD drive, about half-way through the install, it just died. Don’t recall the exact error message though.

10

BTW – thanks for your help on this ! Very much appreciated. I really love that game.

11

I just tried works with wine 8 too. Can you check the logs:
right click on game on lutris show logs.

not needed to have the cd.

12

To be clear, this is from trying to install 2nd from top after searching for “rise of the witch king” BFME 2.22 patch, which has at the bottom of its panel " ALL IN ONE LAUNCHER 2.22" if that is not the one you are referring to, please advise. Below is a dump of the error I get trying to install it.

Command exited with code 256

Traceback (most recent call last):

File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lutris/exception_backstops.py”, line 79, in error_wrapper
return handler(*args, **kwargs)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lutris/util/jobs.py”, line 127, in wrapper
repeat = func(*a, **kw)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lutris/installer/commands.py”, line 447, in monitor_task
raise ScriptingError((“Command exited with code %s”) % command.return_code)

lutris.installer.errors.ScriptingError: Command exited with code 256

Lutris log:
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:46:21,269:application]: Starting Lutris 0.5.18
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:46:21,502:startup]: “card1” is NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (10de:2486 10de:147a nvidia) Driver 535.216.01
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:46:21,642:startup]: “card0” is Intel Graphics (8086:4c8a 1028:09c5 i915) Driver None
[WARNING:2025-03-04 09:47:53,666:moddb]: The moddb library is not available, though the installer is attempting to install a file hosted on moddb.com. The moddb.com URLs will not be transformed, and rather passed as-is.
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:48:01,754:file_box]: Download completed
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:48:01,754:files_box]: All files available
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:48:01,754:installerwindow]: All files are available, continuing install
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:48:01,754:installerwindow]: Launching installer commands
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:48:01,852:wine]: Creating a win64 prefix in /home/randy/Games/lord-of-the-rings-battle-for-middle-earth-ii-rise-
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:48:01,852:wine]: Winepath: /home/randy/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine/wine-ge-8-26-x86_64/bin/wine
[INFO:2025-03-04 09:48:06,348:wine]: win64 Prefix created in /home/randy/Games/lord-of-the-rings-battle-for-middle-earth-ii-rise-
[ERROR:2025-03-04 09:48:08,991:errors]: Command exited with code 256
[ERROR:2025-03-04 09:48:08,991:exception_backstops]: Error handling timeout function: Command exited with code 256
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lutris/exception_backstops.py”, line 79, in error_wrapper
return handler(*args, **kwargs)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lutris/util/jobs.py”, line 127, in wrapper
repeat = func(*a, **kw)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lutris/installer/commands.py”, line 447, in monitor_task
raise ScriptingError((“Command exited with code %s”) % command.return_code)
lutris.installer.errors.ScriptingError: Command exited with code 256

13

This log does not tell much
looks like the all in launcher had some issue.
[ERROR:2025-03-04 09:48:08,991:errors]: Command exited with code 256
[ERROR:2025-03-04 09:48:08,991:exception_backstops]: Error handling timeout function: Command exited with code 256

you can still try with other wine version:

14

Thanks. I will give that a try.

15

Thanks for all your help. I updated Wine to version 10, tried again. Same results. Oh well, it was worth a try.
My PC is dual boot. I’d rather never look at Windows again, but it seems for as long as I want to play this game, I will occasionally need to boot into Windoze. I can live with that.
I have tried all the other installers and they all bomb out. Seems they have been abandoned.