I know that there is always the push for the latest and greatest games to be working under WINE, but it's always been a little irritating to me, that as the owner of systems that tend to not be up to par to playing the latest and greatest, that older DirectX 7 and below games really don't feel like they've been giving the TLC that they may deserve. I've been an ongoing quest for quite a number of years now, to see the entirety of the Wing Commander game series running perfectly under WINE, and in that particular case, WINE is ALMOST there... The two big sticking points for me are Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV (Kilrathi Saga version, and Win95 patch, respectfully) Where the games play, and video runs, but they each have odd issues with the sound. Wing Commander III, the sound 'skips' in the main FMVs, which are a big part of this game... whereas in Wing Commander IV, the music while in the flight engine displays similar 'skipping'. Interestingly enough, using a native dsound.dll out of the DirectX 9.0c runtime package clears up the skipping in both cases, however it impacts the FMV playing performance on both games to be quite unwatchable. Unfortunately, demos of both games, if available, would likely only be for the MS-DOS versions, and both are long since out of print (The Kilrathi Saga which is Win9x versions of Wing Commander 1-3, in fact being a very rare game set to find that I fortunately found on Ebay for a reasonable price) The problems there seem relatively minor though, but I know how things go with software, what appears minor can actually end up being big. Another game I've been struggling with is Thief: The Dark Project, and Thief II: The Metal Age, both DirectX 7 games, The first game, runs fine under Software Rendering, but if I try and use the hardware rendering, it tends to bomb out after a few seconds of perhaps 2fps play, no matter what resolution I use. Thief II displays a similar problem, and includes no Software Renderer. Any advice on how to get some useful information to you about any of these issues would be appreciated. I've heard that Thief and Thief II should theoretically be working just fine these days, however, I suspect it may be the fact that I am running with an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card that is the problem. I'm using the 6.9.0 drivers from x.org with it, and the stability of this driver and the previous 6.8.0 version seems to be a grave step back from the 6.6.3 version I had previously used. I'm running WINE 1.1.10, on X.org 7.3.0, with upgraded ATI drivers (6.9.0), kernel 2.6.24.5, on a Slackware 12.1 system (WINE installed via the Slackware packages available on winehq.org) My current test system is an Intel Celeron 2.0Ghz machine, with an Creative Sound Blaster Live 5.1 sound card, ATI Radeon 9250 PCI video card w/ 256 MB Onboard RAM, and 2GB system RAM. OpenGL games run quite well enough, which includes OpenGL enabled WINE powered games, such as Wing Commander: Prophecy, and Warcraft III
Magamo wrote:> > however, I suspect it may be the fact that I am running with an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card that is the problem. >Probably. The best way to tell if a game is really working under Wine is to test with a nvidia video card. Some dx5 games I know work almost flawlessly with nvidia hardware and on ati they are complete garbage. 9250 is quite old, sounds like you're due for an upgrade, just don't go ati this time.
jeffz <wineforum-user at winehq.org> at Dec 9, 2008 6:14 AM (MST) wrote about [Wine] Re: WINE and older games> > >Magamo wrote: >> I'll be honest, it seems a little silly to have to 'upgrade' vid cards just to play games that are 10-15 years old. It's obviously a driver issue, and that's something for me to take up with the DRI folks, really. I may upgrade, I may wait 'til I have a new, worthwhile rig. I may just keep this around to try and hack around on the ati drivers at some point. >> >> However, it doesn't address the sound issues I mentioned, which other users of those games have reported before. > > >consider the cost of employing x driver developers for y months to improve the quality of your video drivers, vs spending minimum $25 to buy a nvidia card. >Also, keep in mind that some folks cannot 'upgrade' there video system. The cost may be too much or as in my case, I cannot as I use a laptop computer. Thus the arguement is null and void. AMD/ATI need to get their drivers fixed and now. That is why we buy their products. I went through this with OS/2 and they responded once they realized how big the target audience is. AMD/ATI gets a great deal of support from Microsoft to build their Windows drivers. If we, the community, could get around the propriatary portion of the driver, we might be able to help improve them. Doing nothing but complaining actually moves things in reverse. James McKenzie
Hello, I frequently play Thief Gold in Wine and it runs pretty well. I have an nvidia geforce 7600gs and hardware 3d works fine, Thus the problem must be with your video card drivers. I used to use an ATI card too, and the situation with those cards is not good. Basically you have the open-source drivers and the proprietary ones. They've removed support for any of the older cards below a radeon 9800 from the proprietary ones (I think). The open-source ones work, but the performance is not as good as the proprietary ones. I run Thief in 640x480 hardware 3d because if I use a higher resolution the framerate is a little choppy. At 640x480 it runs great and fast though. As for the WC games, i've never played them, so I have no experience there.
I know that up until about 6 month ago, ATI drivers were not considered as good as NVidia ones. Then ATI seemed to make big leaps forwards and there now seems a view (in some quarters) that ATI may even be slightly better than NVidia. I own a laptop with an ATI card built in and believe that it plays Morrowind under Wine better than my desktop system does with an Nvidia graphics card under Windows. The laptop graphics should be better than the desktop being newer but only marginally. Does anyone have views based on current real data or is it all just the collected wisdom of the ages - and therefore potentially out of date. I do not work for ATI!!!