Getting Heroes Of Might and Magic 3 running on Retro handheld

You can run the classic game Heroes Of Might and Magic 3 on many retro handhelds. Or rather, you can run VCMI, an engine-remake of the original, provided you have the original game files. However, at least in my case, just downloading the port from PortMaster and following the README did not result in a playable game. Here’s how to install it correctly.

  1. Buy the game from gog.com. Once you have bought it, download the two files that begin with the word “setup”. One of them is .bin, the other is a .exe. Don’t worry, you don’t need Windows for this.
  2. Install VCMI on both your desktop computer and your handheld (using Portmaster).
  3. Use VCMI on the desktop to extract the data files from the .bin and .exe files you downloaded in step 1, making sure to take note of where they are extracted to. Do NOT install the VCMI extras mod, it is not compatible with the Portmaster version.
  4. (optional) Find the newly installed data files. Convert the mp3 files in the Mp3 folder to .ogg. Once you have extracted the data files and located them on your PC, you can do this step to compress the sound files slightly without any loss of quality. Something like for f in *.mp3; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a libvorbis "${f%.mp3}.ogg"; done
  5. (optional) Find the fonts.json file in the Config directly of the data files, uncomment the small fonts in the TrueType object and increase the font sizes. It makes a big difference to playability on a small-screen device.
  6. On your handheld SD card, go to your roms/ports directory and find the vcmi directory. In there, create a new directory called data.
  7. From the data directory that VCMI created on your PC, copy the folders called Data, Maps, Mods, Mp3, and Saves into the data directory on your SD card. You should thus have roms/ports/vcmi/data/Data/ and so on.
  8. Enjoy!