Monday, October 27, 2008

Wine Falls Out A Window

In anticipation of the imminent release of Fallout 3, I decided to replay Fallout 1 & 2. Since I am dumb, I decided to (try) to play them with Wine under Linux. Fallout installed, and it ran OK. The ingame cursor was a bit sluggish, but it was no big deal. After beating it, I installed Fallout 2 and went through the usual process: pop in CD, click on Setup.exe because Autorun fails with permission denied, wait ~20 minutes for it to install (how long does it take to transfer 650 MB?), wait another minute, realize the preview is not going to load because DirectDraw failed, etc. Then, I tried to run the game itself. The Interplay and Black Isle logo/videos played; the two Fallout intro videos played; the main screen came up; the select character screen came up; I selected one of the default characters; the prologue video played, and finally the main game screen appeared. However, all through this, THERE WAS NO FUCKING SOUND!!!!!

It's okay, maybe, Fallout 2 could be a bronze or silver rated game, and maybe the devs have been busy developing newer broken functionality to run newer games crappily and just have not gotten around to polishing older titles, or maybe they just spent their time jury rigging another open source browser to run in Linux. Let me check the rating. Yep, just what I thought, it's ... PLATINUM! Just how fucked up can you be? For those of you who don't know much about Wine, a Platinum rated application should run exactly the same as it does in Windows. Well, in Windows XP/Vista, sound probably works! I know you will say "it says to update to the latest version." I did; it still does not work.

Well, now that is out of the way, let's look at the other issues Fallout 2 has under Wine:

To avoid slow fading in/out use "emultaion a virtual desktop", or renice wine process later.

ALSA soundsystem may randomly crash wine with fallout games. Try choise OSS (works fine) or ARts (not tested).


WTF? Even if sound worked, how could an application which ALSA randomly crashed achieve Platinum status?

Now, to be fair, this might not be (entirely) Wine's fault. It could be the fault of downstream fucking things up, or it could be the fault of Linux's shitty audio stack. But fuck those reasons; I wanted this damn game to work!

Sure, maybe I could compile random Wine snapshots, install random Fallout 2 patches, and dick around with my Wine configuration thereby breaking every other application it halfway supported. Instead, I will just reboot to Windows and play it there. Problem solved!

16 comments:

thepld said...

Haha, I just went through this exact same thing(same game and everything). The ratings are completely disconnected from reality. If a platinum game doesn't work, how shitty must a bronze game be?

morphles said...

I have two versions of fallout 2 and both of them work, check your wine versions and/or settings.

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain man, but we all know nothings meant to be simple in Linux. Have you tried the latest version of wine? I haven't had any problems with this game yet (I'm about half way through) and I have a P.O.S. PC. Try a nice long break and a fresh build of wine, it might ease your suffering. As for me I'll be beating my nicer computer with a hammer until it runs fallout 3! Die you crappy dell!

Anonymous said...

Wine is not a be all and end all solution. There would be no rpoblem if the people who make games made a linux version of it. UT2004 runs in linux natively so its not that hard. Dont abuse the wine developers unless your prepared to do it for them better.

Anonymous said...

Definitely didn't have any problems running the older fallouts in wine. It only took me about 10 minutes to install both of them, and I didn't even have to mess with any of the wine config settings to make it run.

Can't get fallout three to run though.

Anonymous said...

WINE is not a emulator! Yes it's what you get drunk over then see Linus Tolvalds in the same bed as you!

Anonymous said...

dogshit..

Fallout 2 runs fine with the latest stable wine version. NO additional configuration, dowloads or patches needed. Is your cd-rom fubar'd ? Haven't got any problems at all.

Probably you should just stfu and use windows XP.

Anonymous said...

Why is this man running games on linux if he doesn't like it? Why didn't he just run it on windows in the first place, if he prefers windows? If he's not prepared to set up wine properly (as his article confirms) then he should just run windows, instead of emulating windows, shouldn't he? seems pretty obvious to me.

Anonymous said...

I've randomly gotten your blog in google searches a couple of times, and having read some of your diatribes, all I can say is I hope you're not a brain surgeon; I'd hate if I ever had a tumor or something to see you charging at my head with a chainsaw.


That being said, being a Linux user myself I usually find I have little to bitch about: it didn't cost me a damned penny and man, it sure comes in useful. The apps that do work, work well and I rarely venture onto my M$ partition unless, like most others, I feel the itch to play a pretty game. Which sort of puts M$ in perspective, no?


But, to each their own: hate on, hater. And good luck with that.

Anonymous said...

This guy needs to stop whining and not use an OS he doesn't understand. You shouldn't flame Wine or Linux for your inability to comprehend them. Go run back to your kiddie-OS, Windows. I have thus far had no problems with Linux/Wine/Fallout 1, 2, and 3. It's called effort.

moopet said...

Fallout 2 doesn't give me sound in XP. Presumably it's just written badly.

Roman Werpachowski said...

On the other hand, Fallout 1 has major video problems under Windows XP (screen doesn't get refreshed properly).

Anonymous said...

Dude, u are freaking dumb. Fallout 1,2 work just fine with sound and everything. They work GREAT. Moreover, they worked just outside of the box. So, I suggest u try patching your hands =)

Anonymous said...

It just sounds like this guy is bitching because he's an idiot that can't figure an OS out. Wee, good for you. You can cry and moan like a baby about an OS, because you're too dumb to get it to work. You remind me of a spoiled little teenage girl.

Unknown said...

Actually The Fallout Series has terrible hardware support...some people's audio could work others could not....the reason could be a few things....you could have unsupported hardware which is common...you could also be using pulse audio which is fail....or you could try checking to see if wine itself is outputing through the right channel (optic sterio surround so on) or you could have another app stealing priority of sound if you have an onboard card

Anonymous said...

Quite many "works for me" answers ;)