BenV's notes

Seems like they released a new patch for World of Warcraft, increasing the version to 4.3.3 build 15354.
Obviously this broke on my wine64 installation of the game:
* Start wine64 Wow-64.exe
* Login
* “Patch required” -> OK
* “Downloading Update” -> OK

The console had an explanation for this:

wine: Bad EXE format for D:\wow\wow-4.2.1.2706-enUS-tools-downloader.exe.

benv@wowmachine:/storage/wow$ file wow-4.2.1.2706-enUS-tools-downloader.exe
wow-4.2.1.2706-enUS-tools-downloader.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows

Jup, that’s 32 bits indeed. Sad. Instead of firing a bunch of people you could have hired some to improve your product, Blizzard. Although it’s claimed the WoW team is left alone.

Anyhow, after chrooting to my old slackware32 partition and updating my wine there to version 1.4-rc6, the patch ran fine.
After the patch I had to get an updated 64 bit client as well, since the old one complained:

Fortunately they have the new 4.3.3.15354 client for x86_64 for download, only 7.2 megabytes zipped.
Amusingly they include a MovieProxy.exe, which is a 32 bit executable.
Do you know what the very best feature improvement the 64 bits wow client has over the 32 bits client?
IT DOES NOT RUN THE FUCKING CINEMATICS!!!!
It’s fantastic to not have to smash my escape button a million times (and try to click yes in some confirmation boxes with an invisible mouse pointer) to get rid of garbage cinematics that you’ve seen a million times aready. Can’t believe this is not the default, or at least an option somewhere.
Once they buy the brain capacity to distribute a 32 bit movieproxy I’ll certainly sabotage it.

Anyhow, the new 64 bit client works fine with the latest wine version, so all’s good for now 🙂
(although my enchants don’t show on the character selection page *grrr*, which is funny since they do show ingame) 😉