Any luck with wine?

[Ed Kolis]

Anyone had any luck getting this game to run with Wine on Linux lately? The best I can do is get the main menu, and then when I hit play I get a gray screen and then if I hit escape I get a runtime error 216... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

I hope SE5 works with Wine...

edit: ah, I found something in the terminal output which might be helpful:

err:xvidmode:ComputeGammaFromRamp inverted or flat gamma ramp (0->0), rejected

Looks like the game's default gamma ramp (not entirely sure what that is but I know it has something to do with translating brightness levels) is invalid... I wonder how to get around that...

[Suicide Junkie]

It uses directX.

There should be a wineX around that implements the directx stuff.

[Ed Kolis]

Supposedly wine supports old versions of DirectX and you only need winex/cedega for DirectX 9, though...

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

I am the starfury maintainer over at the wine appdb, and I have been working trying to get this game to run for a very long time, with very little luck at all. Wine should be sufficient to run it, as it uses direct8, cedega/winex is mostly used for directx9, but also for securerom support. Wine now has its own dx9 implementation, but is useless since starfury is dx8. I've tried about a dozen different wine versions and they all behave similarly, and it is even worse when in cedega/winex. I'm probably going to take a very hard look into debugging the problem over the march break next week, I'll keep you posted.

Edit: In fact, would be neat if a bunch of us met on irc and figured out what was going on. If we can arrange that I'll post on wine-devel and see if we can get some devs to join in.

[Thilock_Dominus]

Yup, I havn't any luck with Cedega either. To bad :/

[Ed Kolis]

Thank you Gandalf_greypilgrim!!! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif
Yes, let's arrange a meeting on IRC... who knows, maybe we could even get some input from Aaron Hall if we're really lucky? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Annette]

I'm curious...is anyone playing Space Empires IV Gold with Cedega? Or any of our titles?

[Thilock_Dominus]

I'll try when I get home from work with SEIV Gold

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

I play SEIV Gold all the time with wine, works like a dream! Some font issues, but as long as you use 1.91 it works a-ok. Older versions of wine had a problem with drawing ships, but that has been fixed. I've spoken a lot with Aaron Hall about how starfury was made, so I have a pretty good idea.
I usually create a room on freenode #nemesys , I usually hang out around there when I am doing work. I'll probably be in there Friday, maybe Saturday. I'll post on winehq again to see if we can get some devs to join in the fun.

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

Just to address the issue with the error you are getting Ed, Gamma Ramp is a function used to set the intensity levels of r/g/b . Looking at the source files, in wine this is handled via wine/dlls/x11drv/xvidmode.c . If ramp[0] >= 1 it causes this failure, I think, maybe this will work, if we bypass it by forcing that value to be 0. This will mess up the color intensity levels of course, but it might be a way to find out where the other problems are.

[Ed Kolis]

I was about to ask you about fixing that, then I realized that wine is open source and I can fix it on my own copy! All hail open source! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif
Oh, and if Aaron is reading this, thanks for being so willing to explain to Gandalf how SF was made - I know a lot of developers are very secretive about their design processes!

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

Euh, just to clarify, I don't know much, he didn't go into details or anything, I just know that he wrote it in Delphi 4, using dx8 , the rest of the information comes from my own euh, knowledge...

Yes, yes, long live the FOSS!

Edit: oh btw, which wine version are you running and under which distro?
I am 20050111 under gentoo.

[Ed Kolis]

I'm running 20050211 under Fedora Core 3.

Say, on the topic of wine and SE, do you have any idea what causes these 2 errors in wine with SE4? They don't occur in winex...
1. When the combat replay appears, the log window doesn't go away; it hides most of the combat window; you have to press escape to quit the replay and go back to the game. A similar thing happens in Stars! with the splash screen, though fortunately you can just start a game by typing the game name and hitting enter.
2. Minimizing or alt-tabbing SE4 and then restoring it causes it to appear in a really tiny window from which about all you can do is quit.

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

The best I can say, is to go back to an earlier wine. I just tried it out, and neither of those bugs occur with me with wine 20050111.

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

Is Saturday okay for everyone to meet on irc? If so, I'll put the post on wine-devel asking for people to help out.

[Ed Kolis]

Saturday's all right. What time?

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

I'll be on from about 15h00 UTC, I will make it a top priority and should be on for most of the day, or as long as it takes. I'll be in #starfury on irc.freenode.net .

[Combat Wombat]

So how did this go, get everything to work?

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

Too much work, not enough time. I will take another shot at it once I track down a regression that caused SE:IV to stop working.

[parabolize]

Ed Kolis said:
2. Minimizing or alt-tabbing SE4 and then restoring it causes it to appear in a really tiny window from which about all you can do is quit.


Don't minimize with the se4 button; use your window manager. Set your desktop to something higher then 1024x768, tell wine to load se4 in a 1024x768 vdesktop by adding this to your config
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
"Managed" = "Y"
"Desktop" = "1024x768" </pre><hr />
If you or your system isn't happy with high res. the only thing I can think of is to add the 2 lines above to the wine config, use enlightenment, set the window to borderless, center it, and alt+rclick-iconify. I don't know how to do this with any other window manager.

[Ed Kolis]

*I am Anubis Threadnecromancess, king of death and destruction* http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Any news on this front? I REALLY don't want to have to switch back to windows to play SE5 just because it uses an old version of directx... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif