wine users - Dec 2010 - Re: Wine 1.3.1 X_CreateWindow Error

After coming back to this after a while, I discovered this page which solved it:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Voodoo3doesnotdo3d

Basically, you have to install libglade3 and then create an Xorg.conf (recent
Ubuntus do not have one by default) to prevent anything else other than 16bpp
and nothing larger than a mode of 1024x768. Now, I'm playing Total
Annihilation like the old days, on hardware that's almost as old as the game
:-)