[Wine] How do I run a 32 bit windows game on a 64 bit ubuntu machin

[jobsworth6912]

How do I run a 32 bit windows game on a 64 bit ubuntu machine?

My favorite operating system is Ubuntu Linux.
My favorite game is Soldier of Fortune 2 which runs on Microsoft Windows.

I tried wine about 5 years ago and it totally corrupted my system.
I partitioned my hard drive into 2, C: and D:
I installed Windows XP on C: and Ubuntu 9 on D:.
I installed wine on Ubuntu and tried to install my game which destroyed C:.

So I have been somewhat reluctant to try wine again but this time I was impressed.

I run Ubuntu 10.10 32 bit on a 32 bit laptop
and with wine my game works but rather slowly. The laptop is old and slow.

I run Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit on a 64 bit amd pc
and with wine my game does not work.
Something about a page fault on a 32 bit instruction.

There are some complicated instructions about how to compile a 64 bit version of wine which accepts 32 bit applications.

Do I really need to do this or is this something that the kind developer is working on?

Any comment at all would be gratefully received.