As I blogged yesterday, I had some trouble with Wine while trying to play Total Annihilation: Kingdoms.
Today I want to blog about the solutions of the troubles I exposed yesterday.
The first problem is the one with PulseAudio, as I said I hit a bug already opened in Bugzilla about the ESounD wrapper that didn’t work. I fixed this today in Portage with 0.9.8-r2 and -r3 (respectively standard and experimental baselayout 2 init script). I prepared the patch to be applied to the upstream repository too but I want to discuss it with Lennart first. So if you want the ESounD wrapper for PulseAudio, make sure to use a new enough version of it. Older versions (0.9.7 series and earlier) aren’t affected by the problem as far as I know.
The other problem was with TA:K fullscreen not working natively, and the map scrolling not working properly when using the windowed mode. The solution, as I foresaw yesterday, is to change the X settings so that Wine’s virtual desktop is ran fullscreen. To do this I decided to simply start the X instance with just xterm running, and then run wine on TA:K executable, after setting the virtual desktop to my desired resolution (1280×1024). I actually had to change the X resolution too, as I’m using two monitors and thus I had to switch from 2560×1024 to a single monitor duplicated.
When playing the game at the same resolution as wine’s virtual desktop and of Xorg itself, you get a “virtual fullscreen”that is 100% working: it’s fullscreen so I can’t move the mouse outside the game window, and thanks to the fact I am fullscreen I don’t even get distracted while playing.
Unfortunately I’m afraid I won’t be able to enjoy it for long, I need to start working on another project now (for my job), even if I’m quite tired, and today I really didn’t feel well.
I hope the Wine trick can be useful to other people too. Maybe I’ll be able to make a script that actually sets that up and runs the game you ask it to.
why the hell do you want to play TA:K? seriously, that game is terrible and a horrible smudge on the TA name. play the original TA or its expansion packs, or play the new SupCom games or its expansion packs. TA:K made me want to kill myself it was so bad.
You might want to check Spring for a TA substitute: http://spring.clan-sy.com/
Simply because my sister has my TA’s disks 🙂 if I had them at hand I’d be playing *that*.I also looked up spring, but it is too much modern of a game for me I’m afraid, I don’t have that good hardware.. But I will try it out when I’ll have the disks.
I had a script that started things under a new X,basically for two reasons:let me to switch from the app back to desktop (alt-tab doesn’twork very well with most fullscreen wine games)and to start the X server with a slightly different configuration (I had composite enabled from the X commandline in kdmrc, so that when I started new X without parameters, the new X instance had composite disabled, …)but I found myself just typing startx `which wine` prog.exe — :7completely forgetting the script ;))