How to play HOMM3 in 2026
It's been more than 15 years that I've touched Windows. I don't even know how to obtain a CD, and if Windows XP is still a beautiful, all-around-backwards-compatible thing it were in its heyday. I got a HOMM3 distro from GOG and now, being a cheap ass I am, looking for a PC to borrow and play a bit. A new one on Amazon is like 200 euro for absolute bonkers specs. There's a 100 euro refurbished one with okay specs (didn't know Intel Celeron is still being actively sold, thought it's all i3 and i5 and what's their numbers now). Anyway, I treat it as a journey in itself: finding a machine to borrow. This is gonna be so 1999.
[upd 2026-01-06] TIL from the comments under this post that HOMM3 can run on VCMI (engine), which, in turn, can run on several OSes, including Linux and Mac OS with Intel chip. I run both Linux and a very old Mac with OS X El Capitan on it, will try out both and report back whether and how it all worked. Be back in a few days. Love y'all!
[upd 2026-01-22] VCMI runs on my old MacBook Pro perfectly, I've already spent about 10 hours playing. The only problem is that the game hangs every time a campaign was lost or won. That's no biggie, because my primary setting to run HOMM3 is actually as a one-off game on a big-ass map, hot seat multiplayer, with a bunch of neighbors and kids. Which, to be frank, I haven't had a chance to test yet, but soon will.
[upd 2026-01-27] Now playing on a big screen. This feels so much like childhood, to be frank. The game still hangs sometimes at the end of a campaign, and it seems like it repeats for the same campaigns, while not occurring (consistently) for others. Weird, but okay.
Jan 06 · 4 months ago · 👍 benk, dsp
8 Comments ↓
I was also recently looking for a way to play HOMM3 again, and came across this https://vcmi.eu/ which seems to tick all the boxes (and available in BSDs ;) )
The GOG version of HOMM3 runs fine on linux with wine on lutris
@dsp Yeah, I tried out vcmi a bit at one point also. Pretty cool. It's also available as a flatpak
i don't know what is homm3 and gog (: but can't vm solve your problems?
i run, when really necessary windows in a vm. and for each task i have separate vm.
i created one empty image, and when i need to use windows for other, new purpose, i copy that empty windows vm image, and install something on it.
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · Jan 06 at 17:09:
I really appreciate all the work people have done to make these games run on linux systems. It's fantastic work. There's very little reason, imo, to be paying for games-as-a-proprietary-spyware?-service when there are still so many good games from the last decade that I haven't played. That said, I get around this by a history of refusing to create e-waste. You can run these things on bare metal, if that's still an option for you.
🐝 pirkka [OP] · Jan 06 at 20:46:
Holy crap, I didn't know about VCMI! I have purchased the HOMM3 Complete on GOG and therefore own the data files. VCMI runs on Linux, can be installed via Flatpak, this is amazing. Guess there goes my upcoming weekend :D btw @norayr HOMM3 = Heroes of Might and Magic (a fairly old game, gonna be turning 266soon, I think)), aand GOG = Good Old Games (a website that sells DRM-free distros of old games)
for future reference, you might enjoy Heroic Games Launcher which automatically configures Proton (valve's wine game-oriented fork) to run many windows games flawlessly on linux, so you can just click to play. you can connect it to your gog account too to manage downloads and installs automatically :D available on flatpak, too
🐝 pirkka [OP] · Jan 07 at 21:47:
I'm gonna check Heroic, the summary on their website sounds promising! Guess I'll be slightly busier on Sunday than I was originally planning, with both VCMI and Heroic. Curious which one is more convenient (or, alternatively, which one is gonna run even)!