How To – Installing Black Mesa in Crossover Games / CXoffice

Sometimes, workarounds for playing native Windows games on Linux can be dodgy. Some will play well on plain WINE implementation, other times, helper software, such as Crossover, Wine-Tricks, or PlayOnLinux get you to the finish line with a feasible amount of frustration. One such game is Black Mesa, a modification on the original Half Life title, consisting of a set of modifications to the Source SDK 2007 base engine. So how do you install the title? Read on for more!

Pre-requisites

First, make sure you do the following pre-requisites

Installation of Steam under Crossover’s suggested installer:
Source SDK 2007 Base
1. Once Steam (WINE) is installed, download the prerequisite “Source SDK 2007 Base” tool from the Library > Tools section of Steam’s main interface.
2. Once installation of the “Source SDK 2007 Base” is complete, exit Steam completely, ensuring also it is not still running from the notification tray of your Linux distribution
Download the Black Mesa file set:
1. Visit http://www.blackmesasource.com/ and download the necessary file set. Do not download the automated installer, but the “Black Mesa Archive“
2. You will need the 7z compressed archive with the 3 files necessary, blackmesa.7z blackmesa.md5 and blackmesa-setup.exe
3. Open your 7z archive with the archive manager and extract the 3 files mentioned above. If you wish do this via the Terminal:
```
sudo apt-get install p7zip
7za e blackmesa.7z
```
4. Place the 3 extracted files in an easy to reference download location for a later step.

Installing Black Mesa

Open up the Steam bottle from Crossover’s “Manage Bottles” toolset:
Navigate to the “Advanced” tab of your Steam bottle and click “Browse C: Drive” :
This will open your local machines file browser. Navigate to “users/crossover/Desktop” Copy all the 3 black mesa files you extracted from the original blackmesa.7z archive referenced in the first section into the “Desktop” folder.
Now, navigate to the “Bottle” tab of the Steam Bottle. Select “Run Command”
In the next screen, click Browse and navigate to “users/crossover/Desktop” and choose the “blackmesa-setup.exe” installer file. Click “Run”
The Black Mesa installer should kick off, and detect the other 2 necessary files needed to install Black Mesa:
After installation is complete, do not run Black Mesa. Instead, exit the installer.
Finally, run Steam and Black Mesa should show up as an installed game