Installing mod w/ custom EXE installer on Linux

aumars · 2020-10-02 22:16:49

In Empire: Total War, practically all mods are created for the Windows release and all of them have their own custom EXE installer, which makes mod management for the Linux release not very easy. The general method is to run the EXE through wine and install the mod as if you were in Windows. I'm looking to find a way to extract the data from the EXE directly. It doesn't seem to be a self-extracting archive (file shows up as "PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows"), I can't use unzip. Is it possible to run the EXE via wine and then have a script to automatically tab and press the buttons to go through the installer?

For example: Minor Factions Revenge, how would you efficiently extract the data from this exe?

Last edited by aumars (2020-10-02 22:17:35)

porcelain1 · 2020-10-02 23:02:37

I have no idea how modding works, let alone Wine, but I remember stumbling upon Nonfree applications package guidelines#Unpacking on Arch wiki, suggesting a few tools to extract data from installers. Perhaps it could be of interest.

progandy · 2020-10-02 23:32:16

In Wine you can also try uniextract. If that works, you can find out which specific extractor was used and then do that directly if you want to create a script or PKGBUILD.

Last edited by progandy (2020-10-02 23:33:21)

aumars · 2020-10-03 08:33:37

porcelain1 wrote:

I have no idea how modding works, let alone Wine, but I remember stumbling upon Nonfree applications package guidelines#Unpacking on Arch wiki, suggesting a few tools to extract data from installers. Perhaps it could be of interest.

Regrettably, none of these packages work.

aumars · 2020-10-03 08:46:00

progandy wrote:

In Wine you can also try uniextract. If that works, you can find out which specific extractor was used and then do that directly if you want to create a script or PKGBUILD.

uniextract times out pretty early when trying to run exeinfope.exe but when I ran it myself using Wine, it shows that the installer was made from createinstall.com but I'm unable to extract anything from the file since it's too large at 1.6 GB.

Last edited by aumars (2020-10-03 08:46:09)

aumars · 2020-10-03 08:56:16

I'm looking to see if it is possible to go through the installer via Wine automatically, as in, is it possible to write a script that can run through the GUI without human interference?

aumars · 2020-10-18 08:58:24

I don't think this problem is solvable. I instead just went through the Windows installer via Wine and hosted the extracted files on IPFS.

Arch Linux

#1 2020-10-02 22:16:49

Installing mod w/ custom EXE installer on Linux

#2 2020-10-02 23:02:37

Re: Installing mod w/ custom EXE installer on Linux

#3 2020-10-02 23:32:16

Re: Installing mod w/ custom EXE installer on Linux

#4 2020-10-03 08:33:37

Re: Installing mod w/ custom EXE installer on Linux

#5 2020-10-03 08:46:00

Re: Installing mod w/ custom EXE installer on Linux

#6 2020-10-03 08:56:16

Re: Installing mod w/ custom EXE installer on Linux

#7 2020-10-18 08:58:24

Re: Installing mod w/ custom EXE installer on Linux

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