When Microsoft announced Windows 7 I went to my favorite retailer and pre-ordered my copy of Ultimate. Of course the more versions of Windows we get the less older games we can play on them.

Dungeon Keeper 2 was always one of my personal favorites. Seeing my lovely girl playing it on Windows Vista made me want to play a game so I dug it out from a pile of old discs and installed it on Windows 7. It would not start. I tried compatibility modes, sacrificing a dog, and a third thing. It simply, positively would not start. So I thought “screw this, I am going to Linux.”

These are the steps I took to get Dungeon Keeper 2 1.7 working on Ubuntu 9.10 x64:

• Prepare Apt: In a terminal type sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
• Update Apt: In a terminal type sudo apt-get update
• Update Wine: In a terminal type sudo apt-get upgrade
  (Note that this will upgrade everything. You can use System -> Administration -> Update Manager to upgrade only the related Wine packages.)
• Fire up regedit and set the following keys: In a terminal type wine regedit
  

  HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Bullfrog Productions Ltd -> Dungeon Keeper II -> Configuration -> Video -> EngineID = 4
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Bullfrog Productions Ltd – >Dungeon Keeper II -> Configuration -> Video -> ScreenHardware3D = 0
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine -> DirectInput -> MouseWarpOverride = “disable”

  If any of these keys do not exist create them. Running the game and using Alt-F4 to exit it will create most of– if not all of– these. MouseWarpOverride had to be created in my case and I set it as a string.

• Run the game: In a terminal browse to the Dungeon Keeper 2 directory and type wine DKII.exe

One might note that I never actually installed the game. I had it installed on Windows and I simply moved the files over to my EXT4 partition (running them off of my NTFS partition probably would have worked just as well). I also grabbed a no-CD crack so I would not need the disc (buy the game because it is damn well worth it). I have not yet gotten the mouse perfect but I am pretty happy with it right now. All the applications I had open at the time seemed to disappear but were still running. I do not know why this was and I currently have no idea where to look to fix it.

[Source]

Update 2011.04.22
As of Ubuntu 10.10 there is no need to add the Wine repositories (the Prepare Apt step).