Dino Crisis 1 and 2 arrive on Steam but they need tweaks to run on Linux / SteamOS

After arriving on GOG early in 2025, Dino Crisis 1 and 2 are now available directly on Steam but they have issues running on Linux / SteamOS. The Steam page also notes they both come with "The Enigma Protector" DRM.

They're pretty old, so it's not really surprising that they have issues, and neither of them will work at all out of the box. You'll end up seeing an error like this:

For Dino Crisis 1, we at least have a workaround.

You'll need to install a program called protontricks which is available on Flathub (or via KDE Discover / GNOME Software). We need to use this to manually add the Windows registry file from each game, which is available in their installed folder.

Open up the game install folder that will be somewhere like this for Dino Crisis 1:

/steamapps/common/4249130_DinoCrisis/

Inside there you'll see a file "dc1.reg", you should copy that to your /home folder to make this next step simpler.

Once protontricks is installed: open regedit on each game. You can just do this real quick command in terminal (like KDE Konsole), the ID number in this example is for Dino Crisis 1:

protontricks 4249130 regedit

You'll then be given a UI screen that looks like this:

Select Registry from the top left menu, import key, and select the "dc1.reg" file mentioned earlier and it will register it. Then you can just close the registry editor.

Finally, in the Steam game launch options pop this in the box:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ddraw=n,b" %command%

After that, Dino Crisis 1 works fine. Screenshot below in Dino Crisis taken just today:

How about Dino Crisis 2? Well, so far no luck on that one. The registry file included with the Steam release of Dino Crisis 2 is mostly empty, and adding it the same way as for Dino Crisis 1 doesn't help it launch.

Hopefully Valve will be able to update Proton soon to make both games launch properly without workarounds. If not, eventually we'll look to do a proper even clearer guide in our fancy guides section once we figure out the issue with Dino Crisis 2.