File Forums is a community that deals with creating game backups and CD/DVD Conversions. It's a friendly community with an easy registration and it offers a wealth of information about the nuts and bolts of how game installers work. Go ahead and join now so the following links will work for you.
What we want for this discussion is the PC Games-CD/DVD Conversions forum. There, user Joe Forster has listed links for applications needed for editing the databases for game installers. Download those applications. There are three versions of Orca, which is the GUI editor for editing game install databases. These are MS-Windows apps of course, and I will need to get them working in Codeweaver's Crossover.
If you need some step-by-step instructions on a particular conversion, this page acts as the index of conversions for the site.
Install Orca.msi into a new Windows 7 bottle using WINE, PlayOnLinux or Crossover; I choose Crossover. Since there is no Crossover Crosstie file for this to tell WINE what extra applications are needed to run this program, we need to do some detective work. After the installation of Orca, we discover that it won't run. What could be the problem? Using the newly-created Orca bottle, select "Run Command" to run Orca.exe; tick the "Create log file" box; then run the application and the app will again fail to launch, but now we have a log file to examine. Check the log file and you will see that it can't find mfc4u.dll. That file is part of Visual Studio Service Pack 6 (that package contains asycfilt.dll, atl.dll, comcat.dll, mfc42.dll, mfc42u.dll, msvcirt.dll, msvcp60.dll, msvcrt.dll, oleaut32.dll, olepro32.dll and stdole2.tlb in case you need any of those), so install that non-package package. It's also easy enough to find a download of that file on the Internet. If you do, just place it in the windows/system32 directory of the Orca bottle. Now Orca now runs!
In the thread about Orca, there are links to apps that will convert .reg entries into an Inno script. Inno Setup is a free (source code available) installer for MS-Windows applications. Being free, you can use it to create your own installer and distribute legal software to your friends, or you can create custom installations of your games that include all the extra files you like. For Linux, you can create functionally the same thing with makeself.
Another excellent site is CD-2_DVD. While registration is required, it is at no cost. That site also supplied downloads for several utilities used for CD to DVD conversions, as well as DV9 to DV5 conversions. What are those? DV9 is a dual layer format that holds roughly 8 GB of data; DV5 is the more familiar 4 GB DVD.
There are some interesting tools for "splitting" archives so that they may fit the size of the medium. One such tool is UltraARC. That page provides links to download the application.
Now to start using some of these tools. I have the 6CD version of Call of Duty 2. It would be nice to have this on a single DVD. Looking in the Games Converted Index I found the link to the conversion recipe for COD2. It seems there are 2 ways, one way combines the install disks, the second makes an installer from the installed and patched game. Let's do the first way.
From the more detailed directions from the forum and adjusted for Linux, we proceed:
1. Create a temporary directory in your home directory with a specific name.
$ mkdir ~/cod2
2. Beginning with CD6 and continuing in reverse order, copy the files from the CD to the temporary directory allowing them to be overwritten if need be.
3. Change permissions on ~/cod2/ to change it from read-only to be as accessible as possible. It will become read-only again when you burn the DVD.
$ chmod 777 ~/cod2/COD2.msi
5. Launch Orca from its Crossover bottle, then navigate to ~/cod2 and click on COD2.msi to open it in Orca.
Scroll down to "media" in the left-hand pane and click on it. In the right pane, click on the second row and delete it and do likewise for all rows except the first so that all that is left is the media named COD2DVD which will be the Volume ID of the DVD we will create.
To be honest, I had difficulty successfully modifying the .msi database. After posting a request for assistance on FileForum, the moderator supplied me with a modified version to use. Thanks, Grumpy!
5. Create a directory to contain all your updates, patches, mods and so on so they will be handy when you install the game. You can find "no-cd" patches at GameCopyWorld. Just get the version that matches the version of the game as updated (or not, as long as they match).
6. Burn the contents of ~/cod2 to a DVD with the label "cod2dvd".
$ growisofs -Z /dev/sr0 -r -J -V COD2DVD /home/username
It works nicely, but Crossover needs to launch setup.exe and not launch.exe to begin the install.
RESOURCES
There is another site that can provide useful information. CD-2-DVD is dedicated to converting CD-based games to DVD and offers the necessary software to do that.
Regshot
Another useful application is the open-source Regshot that can compare a snapshot of the Windows Registry before and after installing an application, so you can see what is changed. Some installers require you to re-insert the first CD and then make changes to the Windows registry. Regshot will allow you to see what those are. It might be possible to examine the files generated with the meld application, an excellent application to compare two or more text files. It is also available for MS-Windows.
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