Running 7H on Linux

[ChthonVII]

I thought I'd revisit this topic, since it hasn't been discussed here in a long time. Yes, 7thDeck exists, but it's opaque, internally convoluted, and wholly dependent on Steam/Proton being installed.

As of late 2025, the following should get 7H working with minimal hassle:

1. Maybe wine-staging. At some point in the past, you needed a branch of wine with the "wine staging" patch set. I'm not sure if that's still true, and I don't presently have a version of wine without it to do a test. I do know that official wine-staging from WineHQ works. So do Kron4ek's tkg builds. At least some versions of Proton work (probably anything remotely recent). It would be nice to know if plain, non-staging wine also works now.
2. DXVK. Steam/Proton installs/uninstalls DXVK automatically at runtime. To manually install DXVK into a wine prefix outside Steam, download from github, drop the 64-bit binaries into system32, drop the 32-bit binaries into syswow64 (yes that's correct, not the other way around), run winecfg and set an override for each of the libraries you just overwrote (native, builtin). If you want to use the dx12 backend, also install vkd3d-proton in the same manner.
3. Dependencies via winetricks: Use winetricks to install dotnetdesktop9, vcrun2022, and dinput. (Yes, a dependency on dinput is weird and surprising, but 7H definitely needs it.) If Steam, use protontricks instead.
4. Create a file named dxvk.conf in the same directory as 7th Heaven.exe with the contents d3d9.shaderModel = 1. This fixes the problem with drop-down menus being blacked out.
5. If you have the PC98 edition, create a virtual CD drive inside your wine prefix to pass the CD check. Run winecfg, go to the "drives" tab, click "advanced," pick a drive letter, point the destination to an empty folder, set the label to FF7DISC1, and set the serial to 44000000. (You could populate the folder with the contents of your actual Disc 1, but the contents are never checked, so an empty folder works just as well while saving space.)

A couple other things worth noting:

• FF7 + 7H works fine with the new WINEARCH=wow64 mode. So you can run it on a pure 64-bit Linux system (without biarch) if you please.
• FF7 + 7H works fine with the new NTSYNC. (Though I'm pretty sure FF7 itself is single-threaded, so I'm not sure if we're getting any performance benefit out of this.)

[julianxhokaxhiu]

I do understand that you might want to use a different stack that Proton, but the main source of the game nowadays is Steam for everyone, only very few people have the 1998 edition of the game ( which requires the CD anyway ). That's why we made 7thDeck.

Personally I don't think there should be some effort spent in any other way as the solution works in tandem with Steam and Proton which is what the game will use officially one installed via Steam. But if anyone wants to pick up any other pathway is more than welcome to contribute. The more, the better :)