WON/Retail versions of GoldSrc games incorrectly detect memory under Proton

[jbmagination]

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Half-Life
• Steam AppID of the game: N/A

System Information

• GPU: AMD Custom GPU 0405
• Driver/LLVM version: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 22.2.0 (git-17e5312102)
• Kernel version: 5.13.0-valve36-1-neptune
• Link to full system information report as Gist: https://gist.github.com/jbmagination/aa18233bdc797405d5141e644ccc7060
• Proton version: Proton Experimental (1689268633 experimental-8.0-20230713)

I confirm:

• [x] that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• [x] that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

steam-13986811572144570368.log

Symptoms

The name of the game is listed at the top as Half-Life, since that's the most generic/popular game to put "all GoldSrc games" under, but I'm led to believe that this applies to any GoldSrc game that does a memory check, which only applies to WON/Retail versions of these games (as best as I can tell!)

• When running Half-Life: Uplink, I get an error that says Your system reported only -0.00K of physical memory, Half-Life requires at least 16MB.
• When running Gunman Chronicles, I get an error that says Your system reported only -0.00K of physical memory, Gunman Chronicle requires at least 16MB. (It does actually say "Gunman Chronicle" - the last S is dropped 🙃)

I'm going here to report this issue / ask for support because this has been incredibly hard to find any support for. This problem only happens to me under Proton.

Reproduction

1. Run a GoldSrc game from a retail disc a. Run the installer through a Proton-enabled non-Steam shortcut b. Change the target of the shortcut to where the game is installed (hl.exe/cs.exe/gunman.exe/etc.) c. Run the game through the same shortcut
2. See the error occur

[lichtmetzger]

If it helps with tracking the issue down, this also happens with the retail release 1.1.1.0 on Windows XP 64bit.

Here's an old forum post talking about this issue in the Steam release. https://gamebanana.com/threads/110062

Right click on Half-Life in steam games, click properties, and then Set Launch Options. Then, i typed in -heapsize 1048576

Maybe that works? :)

[lichtmetzger]

I was able to start the game on XP64 by limiting its max RAM usage to 2GB (putting /MAXMEM=2048 into the boot.ini).

So that seems to be the problem causing the game to report -0.00K of memory. I don't know if it's possible to do something like this in Proton, though.

[lichtmetzger]

Found a solution to get around this error. There's a "Half-Life WON Resolution FOV MP3 Patch" on moddb. This mainly enables widescreen resolutions for the old WON versions of HL1 and BlueShift.

It also gets rid of the error:

The patch also fixes the error about the game requiring at least 16 MB of physical memory that occurs on some systems.

https://www.moddb.com/downloads/half-life-won-resolution-fov-mp3-patch