Steam Forum

Installing Steam into a Windows 7 64 bit bottle. Installs and runs successfully, but Steam detects that it is installed on Windows XP 64 bit. This does not occur with latest staging build of Wine.

Steam still believes that it is in a winxp environment when you use our CrossTie to install it because of some registry key settings. These were necessary to make Steam run well in the past, and we are in the process of making sure that everything will run fine with the adjustments removed (and fixing anything that may break with the changes). The CrossTie and any other necessary changes will be updated before Steam stops supporting XP.

Thanks,
Anna

Thanks for the response. That begs a couple further questions though. Does that impact which version of Windows gets reported to software installed in games? I ask because there are games that fail to run that require Windows 7. I am trying to narrow down the cause of failure. If they simply think they are running on Windows XP, then there really isn't much to troubleshoot. If that's not the case though, then they are failing for some other reason that may be worth some more digging.

Also, is there an easy way to bypass the Crosstie for Steam for testing? I have tried to manually install the app to a custom built bottle, but the Crosstie still detects that Steam is being installed and makes the registry change. Or is the registry change documented somewhere so I can play with the setting?

Yes that impacts which version of Windows the games detect as well.

You are correct about the two ways to bypass this:

1) Bypass the Crosstie entirely as you suggested. When you go to install software using the CrossOver software installer, you first have to type in your application name and choose the correct app from the drop down menu. When you choose one of the suggested application titles, it tells CrossOver to use the corresponding CrossTie for that application; choosing the "Unlisted application 'steam'" option from the bottom of the drop down menu will install Steam (or whatever other application) as an unknown program without using any CrossTie. I would not recommend this method in this case because there are a lot of things in the CrossTie besides the winxp registry keys and you would be missing everything.

2) I would recommend changing the registry keys manually. This can be done through "regedit." There are instructions on how to get to this feature here. The two keys you have to change are HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\steam.exe and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\steamwebhelper.exe. As you will see in regedit, these are both currently set to winxp; deleting those keys will cause Steam to detect the OS as the current bottle type.

Thanks,
Anna

Before I reinstalled, I was able to change the version of Windows for Steam by going to the wine configuration panel, clicking on Steam, and then setting that to "Windows 7", which was the bottle...

From the start, I had created a Windows 7 bottle, but Steam still registered as "WinXP". I was able to change it using the wine configuration panel, in the Applications tab. I clicked on steam.exe and changed the Windows version to Windows 7. The next time I start Steam, it downloaded another binary. I'm not sure what other repercussions this might have had...

Anyways, due to an unrelated issue with connectivity, I had to reinstall steam in a new bottle on 17.5.1. under the default settings.