Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace preservation project OpenPhantom adds

3 Sep 2026 at 9:33 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, the video game from 1999 is a bit of a blast from the past and now kept alive by OpenPhantom. An open source project that aims to be two things: a legacy patch to bring modern platform support and fixes, along with a reconstructed game engine as their long-term project to support modding and new features.

They just released version 1.4 of their installer, which overhauled it to work fully with Wine / Proton exactly the same as it works on Windows, including converting certain files as needed for you.

"The installer runs under Wine and Proton and does everything it does on Windows, including converting the cutscenes and the menu artwork. Tested on a Steam Deck under Lutris and on a Linux Mint desktop, both with Proton GE 10-32.

Two settings decide whether this works, and one of them fails silently.

• WINEDLLOVERRIDES must contain dinput.dll=n,b. OpenPhantom's loader is dinput.dll: it takes that name and forwards everything it does not handle on to the real one. Without the override Wine loads its own built-in dinput, the loader never runs, and none of the patches are applied. The game still starts and looks completely untouched, which is what makes this worth checking first.
• Point your runner at WMAIN.EXE, not TPM.EXE, which is the original 1999 launcher.

Nothing else needs configuring. The cutscene and controller behaviour adjusts itself under Wine. If the patches seem to have done nothing, check the override, then look for engine_fixes.log beside WMAIN.EXE: no log at all means the loader never ran."

Pictured - OpenPhantom - 4K rendering with expanded draw distance

Like most similar open source projects you do need your own copy of the game for it to work, as they do not supply the copyrighted assets.

🌐 External Sources: GitHub - OpenPhantom, GitHub - OpenPhantom - i1.4 Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Proton, Steam Deck, New Release, Open Source, Retro, Wine 10 Likes Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:Epic Games Store will get a Linux version sometime "soon"Bazzite Linux 44 for handhelds finally launches with some massive upgradesPortal: Alive & Kicking is a full remake and re-imagining of Valve's classic out now on SteamAsobi: Remote Play is a new way to play PlayStation games on SteamOS / Linux All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.