[Wine] Grand Theft Auto 3 & VC Discoveries.

[Chief Whosm]

hi,
This is just a post of some discoveries i've made with the games and a small 
request for assistance:) If this has been mentioned all before then I 
apologise but it might give ideas for people to help sort it all out, with 
that statement I continue my post...

First off I better post my specs and distro so people know what i'm using :)

Knoppix 5.01 DVD installation
Wine 0.9.14 (latest at time of posting- built from source)
Pentium M 2.26ghz
2gb DDR2 533 RAM
NVIDIA 7800GTX using latest NVIDIA Linux32 drivers.
Audigy2ZS Notebook Card

Okay now on with the game information...

GTA 3:

Okay, now like everyone else seems to have had, the first thing I noticed 
was the audio (it's pretty hard not to notice this ;)) so after much 
tweaking of settings within GTA3 I managed to get the audio performing as 
good as in windows (albeit with a 1second delay - eg. press the horn button 
count to 'one' and then the horn actually goes off.

The apparent cause of the audio problems many users have been experiencing 
with GTA3 is down to their DISPLAY settings (I can admit I wasn't expecting 
that to cause the audio problem).
If you run the game with ANY 16bit resolution, and trails ON then the game 
will play as it does in windows, however there are drawbacks:

1) The audio out by 1 second.
2) The trails (for myself at any rate) are an upside down reflective image 
of the main game, layered over it, which although isn't too bad is rather 
annoying at times as you get the dark road layered over your view ahead 
making the game somewhat difficult to see at times on default brightness.
3) The FPS is pretty low at higher resolutions (1920*1200 res = 7-8 FPS).
4) The beginning game movie takes a long time to load and when it does the 
sound is completely out of synch with the movie playing.

Now although you cant change resolution mid-game you can enable and disable 
TRAILS. If you disable trails while playing, back comes the choppy audio.

Also if you run the game at any of the other colour ranges (besides 16 I 
also get 32 and 0) then whatever you do with trails the sound is always 
choppy.

When you run the game without trails, although you get the choppy sound the 
FPS increases to 28-33FPS at 1920*1200.

With that all said,I hope that this may help the problems with GTA3 be 
easily sorted with wine, and now I move on to GTA Vice City.

GTA VC:

Okay, GTA: VC was built on a slightly modified GTA3 engine from as far as I 
can gather, now I couldn't test out my trails theory as yet because the PC 
version of VC had it hard coded that you couldnt enable or disable trails, 
there is however a modification out for Vice City called 'GTA XBOX 
Graphics'.

This modification uses a custom D3D8.dll file with additional settings, 
which besides many enhancements to the PC version, allows the user (through 
use of an INI file) to once again turn on and off TRAILS.

Download link is: http://gregval.phpwebhosting.com/uploads/dexxspec.zip

My problem however was this modification will display a warning message from 
Microsoft, now this is normal for this modification, and does happen on 
english versions of windows according to people at the gtaforums, however 
for windows users they click okay to the warning messages, their game will 
load but minimized in the taskbar, and all they have to do is maximise it 
again.

However in wine, after clicking 'OK' to the messages, wine then stops 
loading Vice City, therefore if anyone out there would like to have a go at 
making it load, then maybe we can get good audio in Vice City under wine. As 
another point, I'm hoping because it's an add-on mod, the trails wont be 
upside down reflections as they appear in GTA3, and also that they wont 
affect performance too much. And now my final short message on GTA:SA.

GTA:SA:

This is where I give my final plea for help, whenever I try to load the game 
it complains that it wants DirectX9 installed, now the app database has 
people saying it works, so i'm guessing there's a work around that I have 
yet to discover on the web?

Thanks :)