[Wine] Re: SimCity4 wants to do a VGA display, but wine gives me an HD

[A Nonny Moose]

[quote="vitamin"][quote="A Nonny Moose"]I realize that wine couldn't do this deliberately or probably by accident, but you need not be so defensive.[/quote]
I'm stating the fact that Wine is a 100% user space application. It does not talk directly to hardware, it has no kernel drivers. Thus Wine can not lockup / crash the entire system.[/quote]
Agreed, however a bad call, however generated, to the graphics driver can.  It is not a wine problem, I say again.

However, the wine team should be aware of it, because I am not the only person out here with this machine.  Most, if not all the others, are running garbage produced by Microsoft.

The more I think of this, the more I think there is some initialization call that is incorrect for this chip set and it defaults to mother, in this case HD mode when it should be in VGA mode.  When I can reproduce this problem outside the SC4 game, I will have a better handle on it.  However, I haven't done any serious programming in over thirty years, so I am asking the communities for clues and assistance.

You see, here is the sequence of events:

Everything is perfectly normal VGA.
Using the wine loader, call SC4
SC4 forks off its decryption daemon that checks for the CD in the drive and decrypts the .exe and displays a correct warm-feelings VGA frame.
SC4 now goes through its loading process, and in doing so, displays its greeting panel and this is where things fail.
However, the game continues to load, and eventually the trash changes to what would be the Region frame and the region music comes on.
But the display is illegible HD raster, and the machine has locked up.  This has something to do with the chip set, but I have no tools, yet, to find out what.

Now the game hasn't completely locked up the machine.  It is executing happily, but the user (me) can't even get an interrupt in to change to another desktop where some diagnosing could be done.  The system is ignoring both the mouse and the keyboard, which is only about half a lock up, but from the point of view of the user, you are locked out.  Whatever is going on at this point, it even ignores Ctrl+Alt+Delete and the only recourse is low-level kernel requests.

Considering that the machine behaves normally in all other instances, I do not think this is a case of bad hardware.  It is a software problem, and I haven't identified the point of failure, but I guarantee you that I will.  I spent over 40 years of my life in computers, mainly software, and I won't let this illegitimate thing grind me down.

AMD sent me some stuff to research, and I'll be doing that over the next few days.  I hope I won't have to take my rusty programming skills out of mothballs, but I would even do that.  I have a perfectly good IDE, and if necessary I will write a program that simply causes the problem, but it is going to be a long learning curve.