[Wine] WINE and older games

[Magamo]

I know that there is always the push for the latest and greatest games to be working under WINE, but it's always been a little irritating to me, that as the owner of systems that tend to not be up to par to playing the latest and greatest, that older DirectX 7 and below games really don't feel like they've been giving the TLC that they may deserve.


I've been an ongoing quest for quite a number of years now, to see the entirety of the Wing Commander game series running perfectly under WINE, and in that particular case, WINE is ALMOST there... The two big sticking points for me are Wing Commander III and Wing Commander IV (Kilrathi Saga version, and Win95 patch, respectfully) Where the games play, and video runs, but they each have odd issues with the sound.  Wing Commander III, the sound 'skips' in the main FMVs, which are a big part of this game... whereas in Wing Commander IV, the music while in the flight engine displays similar 'skipping'.

Interestingly enough, using a native dsound.dll out of the DirectX 9.0c runtime package clears up the skipping in both cases, however it impacts the FMV playing performance on both games to be quite unwatchable.

Unfortunately, demos of both games, if available, would likely only be for the MS-DOS versions, and both are long since out of print (The Kilrathi Saga which is Win9x versions of Wing Commander 1-3, in fact being a very rare game set to find that I fortunately found on Ebay for a reasonable price)

The problems there seem relatively minor though, but I know how things go with software, what appears minor can actually end up being big.

Another game I've been struggling with is Thief: The Dark Project, and Thief II: The Metal Age, both DirectX 7 games,  The first game, runs fine under Software Rendering, but if I try and use the hardware rendering, it tends to bomb out after a few seconds of perhaps 2fps play, no matter what resolution I use.  Thief II displays a similar problem, and includes no Software Renderer.

Any advice on how to get some useful information to you about any of these issues would be appreciated.  I've heard  that Thief and Thief II should theoretically be working just fine these days, however, I suspect it may be the fact that I am running with an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card that is the problem.  I'm using the 6.9.0 drivers from x.org with it, and the stability of this driver and the previous 6.8.0 version seems to be a grave step back from the 6.6.3 version I had previously used.

I'm running WINE 1.1.10, on X.org 7.3.0, with upgraded ATI drivers (6.9.0), kernel 2.6.24.5, on a Slackware 12.1 system (WINE installed via the Slackware packages available on winehq.org)

My current test system is an Intel Celeron 2.0Ghz machine, with an Creative Sound Blaster Live 5.1 sound card, ATI Radeon 9250 PCI video card w/ 256 MB Onboard RAM, and 2GB system RAM.  OpenGL games run quite well enough, which includes OpenGL enabled WINE powered games, such as Wing Commander: Prophecy, and Warcraft III