[Bug 38115] Grandia 2: game crashes after videos are skipped

[WineHQ Bugzilla]

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38115

--- Comment #9 from Christian Wehrmeyer <c.wehrmeyer at gmx.de> ---
Well, it's been five years since I posted the original bug. I don't have access
to the hardware, the system or the game anymore; however I still remember a few
things from back when that I cannot reproduce right now.

As already explained the initial problem was with the file system on the CDs
using shortened DOS file names. The way I fixed that back then was by copying
the files from the CD into the install directory of the game, then fixed their
names and started the game. I'm not entirely sure in which order Wine or
Windows are supposed to search for files, but this fixed the crashes for me.

So why did I never follow up on this? Because it soon became very clear that
the rendering API that Grandia 2 uses - which may be DirectX 8 or something
like that - simply wasn't supported correctly by Wine, both in the 2D and 3D
department. In terms of 2D Grandia 2 uses alpha blending for the "Press Button"
text in the main menu to make it fade in and out, but on Wine all I got were
warnings about alpha not being supported or something on the console that
killed my FPS, whilst the text stayed more or less on the same alpha level. I
remember delving into the Wine source and adding the option in a switch-case
statement that would get rid of the warnings and made the text properly fade in
and out, but I couldn't tell you what I did exactly anymore.

As for 3D things were a lot more broken than for 2D. On the Wine version that I
initially advertised there was model flickering basically the moment I loaded a
save and the game switched into 3D mode; a flickering that would persist in the
field as well as in battle mode. I remember downloading an updated version of
Wine some time after this and, instead of flickering, was met with a black
screen instead (music still played). When I then read that the Wine devs cared
more about supporting DirectX 12 than making sure that older APIs worked
(Grandia 2 isn't the sole exception here by the way; in the original version of
La-Mulana the music didn't play because no one other than Microsoft ever
bothered to support DLS files) I sort of gave up on this ordeal and instead
decided to move on with my life. Because if the devs don't care about getting
this to run on older DirectX versions, then why should I?

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