Half‑Life (1998) on Wine

Nearly 20 years after release, I wanted to replay it and see if it still felt the same.

Since I’m on macOS, the obvious choice was to use Wine.

After setting up Wine and installing the game, it did start — but it was unusable. Only about one‑third of the screen was visible, and there was no way to change the resolution:

$ wine hl.exe -startwindowed

The trick is to start the game in windowed mode.

Then go to Game Options, set the resolution to the maximum available, uncheck windowed mode, and quit.

Next time, just launch it normally:

$ wine hl.exe

Happy gaming.