wine users - Apr 2011 - Phantasy Star Universe Ambition of Illuminus install issue

Hello everybody,
  I'm actually very new to the forums, but I've used Wine for a very
long time, long enough to even see some of my games start working more and more
as the project has developed.

  Recently, however, I decided to try out one of my old favorites, Phantasy
Star...and the support is actually pretty good! So I went about through the
process of installing.

  Unfortunately, my installer failed through the desktop. Now, I'm using a
custom version of my operating system, so I figured it was with little support.
So I ripped it into an iso, and decided to run it on my laptop with Ubuntu (no
cd drive on the laptop). But the iso was having setup issues with regards to
permissions. So I resorted to the underworld of the internet, and obtained a
copy elsewhere.

  From this, stemmed more install issues. I checked all aspects of the new iso,
and I mean ALL aspects. Even used a sfv checker, and forced recheck after
downloading all the parts. Then I proceeded with installation, mounting the iso
with FuriousISO.

  Installation proceeded normally, giving me little-to-no issues. When
installing this game, the install lists things as "/data/xxx" xxx
being usually a long string of characters and numbers (e.g.
33dsk32j3k25lp6l79awq). About 3/4 of the way through, it said one was corrupt.
From there on, ALL OF THEM were corrupt, but you can hit the ignore key (or just
hold "I" on the keyboard) and skip right through to the end. So
installation completes...sort of. Directx 9 is also offered on there, but I
didn't bother installing it (and going back and clicking DXSETUP.exe said
"error bad file"). So I had the game, and tried starting it...but
GameGuard was updating, and it crashed immediatly. Going back to winehq, the
workaround was using a no-cd exe...*sigh* The things I do for this game. So I
place it in the folder, and run it. There was no GameGuard pop-up (and I deleted
the gameguard file and folder) and the window showed up! YAY! Except....it
crashed without actually showing anything. I suspect it was because of the long
string errors.

  I tried reinstalling, re-unraring the iso, rechecking all parts of the
download, and going through the sfv file and checking all the parts of that rar
file pieces. I even clicked the other launchers (options, online play, offline
play exes), but none of them worked. The closest was the workaround exe winehq
had, but that was only displaying the game mouse icon and a black screen before
immediatly crashing. Wine displays the crash as just a "program
error". So how can I get this game working? I'm tempted to just
reinstall my old XP and install the game, take the files and paste them into the
wine folders..would that work? And what's the root of the issue, the fact
that the installation for the most part misses a huge portion of files, or that
directx9 was never even installed?


Sorry for the long post, and thanks for all your help!

Wine version? Terminal output? You sure this game really doesn't use game
guard?