Older Games and Newer Wine

booman

booman

Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming
Staff member
I'm finding that the newer 1.7.# versions of Wine and my older games are having problems.
Games like:
  • Quake 4
  • Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force
  • Sid Meier's Pirates
I don't know why, but they will lag, chop frames and slow down with animation and movements.
But when I tried older versions of Wine like 1.4.1 or 1.3.8 the performance is much better?

What is going on?
One would assume the newer versions of Wine would be compatible with new games and older games, but that is not always the case.

When I installed the above mentioned games, I didn't install any libraries but corefonts. These games install just fine and launch fine, but there is some major stutter while playing.

Let me know if you have also experienced the same symptoms.
 
WINE code will keep ageing, there's no doubt about that. Thing is... with regressions it's always unknown what broke or why unless you spend hours debugging WINE =/

Have you tried to change compatibility in winecfg? Does marking direct x DLLs natively helps?
 
Where is the compatability in Winecfg?

The only time I change DLL's is when the PlayOnLinux debug output complains about a library.
 
Here

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Compatibility as in changing windows versions.
 
Oh yeah, I knew about that all along, but never though of it as "Windows Compatibility"
Do you know if those difference Windows versions actually use different libraries?
I thought all they did was change the file structure such as:
Win XP - c:\documents and settings
Win 7 - c:\users

Anyways, I think I found the solution to my problem. Daerandin has been telling me all along and I didn't understand until now.
Disabling GLSL seems to fix the problem.
He has it disabled in most of his guides, but those are mostly older games (except batman, FEAR, etc)
I have been testing mostly newer games that require GLSL otherwise they get all screwed up.

I confirmed this morning when testing Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force and tested with 1.6.2 & GLSL off. It ran pretty smoothly.
I'll continue testing this with my other older games like Sid Meier's Pirates and Jedi Outcast
 
The WineHQ page for The Witcher 2 states that you should play with GLSL disabled. However the only difference I noticed in that game was that rain effects were missing from the game if I turned it off. No performance gain or graphical bugs were fixed. However, that may be something that applied to older wine versions, and it works properly in newer versions.

As for the windows versions, it is something I never thought much of, until I read somewhere (can't remember where at the moment) that setting it to win7 would help getting Far Cry 3 running. I might have forgotten to mention it before, but Far Cry 3 is high on my priority list of games I want to get working and do a guide for. If I get it working, I am thinking that the standalone expansion Blood Dragon should work too, and I am dying to play Blood Dragon. I might start looking into it this weekend.
 
Ok, so it is a "per game" setting and not as specific for Wine.
When playing Star Trek Voyager every version of Wine was choppy, but disabling GLSL all of a sudden it ran great.
Dude if you could get Far Cry 3 running, we would have the worlds attention!
 
Originally my problem was Quake 4, but after using the Linux binaries, its running GREAT!
Not to mention I've never played it before.... I LOVE IT!
Wonderful graphics! Great action and nice level design
 
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