After you installed any of the games you may get a performance boost if you use the latest directX 9 version.

The easiest way to do so, is using winetricks:

winetricks directx9

Read more about winetricks, here:

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

There are some reports that DoW crashes in some situations when using specific version of ATI's fglrx driver.

It seems to be clear that fglrx version 9.3 and 10.12 are affected, while 10.10 seems to work fine.

 Crashes occur in (at least) these situations:

• DoW and WA: When a scout dies.

• Building a Tau Commander.

 There are several possbile work arounds:

• Use another driver (10.10 seems to work) or try your luck with the free radeon driver

• Disable glsl in wine's registry:

- Go to the console
- enter the following command: wine regedit
- The registry editor will open
- Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER
- Go to Software
- Go to Wine
- Go to Direct3D or create it,  if it does not exist: right click "Wine" and
create a new key named Direct3D
- Mark the new Folder(Key) Direct 3D, add a new "String Value" (Zeichenfolge
for german users) named UseGLSL
- DoubleClick UseGLSL and enter "disabled" at the content-field
 
Thanks to jost for the detailed information.
 If you are affected, you may want to have a look at the bug report as well:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19232

(This is an attempt to summarize the steps needed to run Dark Crusade and to compile a list of tweaks to make the game run as smootly as possible, if you have any additions, please make a reply with the subject "Extra tips for DOW:DA!" and it will be tested, and if verified, added to this howto)

1. Installing the game

Recommended: Wine 0.9.35 has been proven to run DOW with next to no issues, whereas later versions of wine exhibit a number of problems. It is highly recommended, that you compile and install wine 0.9.35 and keep this for running DOW, if done as instructed in the "Glitches" note further down, this install won't interfere with a distribution supplied version of wine.

Using wine >=0.9.28 installing the game should be fairly easy. You should simply mount the disk and run

"wine setup.exe". During the install you will be asked for your key and where to place the game. So far I've only tested with the default install location of "C:\Program Files\THQ\Dawn of War - Dark Crusade", comments on custom install locations are welcome.

2. Running the game

2.1 Audio

Contrary to many games, you may have stuttering sound if you're using the OSS wine driver. Sound tweaking seems to be highly system dependant, but a good place to start is:

1) Run winecfg, go to the audio tab:

Uncheck all audio drivers except "ALSA Driver", to make sure that this will be the selected driver

Then start off with

"Hardware Acceleration" Full

Default Sample Rate: 22050

Default Bits Per Sample: 8

2.2 A script to run the game
You can of course run the game by simply going to the directory and issueing "wine DarkCrusade.exe", however, I found this tweak in the gentoo world of warcraft guide and altered it a tad. Supposedly you get a little extra performance, it helped my sound a bit as well. But the best thing about this is that you can easily switch between the game and your desktop, as well as killing the game with [CTRL]+[ALT]+[BACKSPACE] without taking your entire desktop down with it.

#!/bin/sh

X :3 -ac &

cd ~/".wine/drive_c/Program Files/THQ/Dawn of War - Dark Crusade"

sleep 2

DISPLAY=:3 /bin/nice -20 /usr/bin/wine DarkCrusade.exe

/usr/bin/kill $(ps ax|grep "X :3")

What this does is launching a seperate X session on display 3 and running the program within that display. The last line kills the Xsession after use. (The last line could probably be written in a cleaner fashion with pgrep or so, but this works fine)

some report that for them the game runs better without the renicing of the process, so if the game is running at unacceptable levels, try altering the script and remove the "/bin/nice -20" part to let it run at it's default nice level.

3. Troubleshooting

Chances are the game runs perfectly. Chances are that since you're reading this, it isn't. Most of the time you should seriously think on whether or not your wine distribution is put together right or think about "rolling your own". Also, try creating a new user and run the game there, so that the .wine directory is fresh. It may simply be that a configuration setting of yours is preventing the game from running. This happened to me while I was testing Halo.

That was the general part, here comes a couple of problems that some users have reported having:

3.1 Game/Sound is stuttering

This is most likely your sound settings. It seems that wine gets bogged down by incorrectly configured drivers. That said, refer to the earlier part of this guide and do post if you find extra tweaks for this. Rumors are that wine processes cannot get the same priority as they would under windows and that this was a major stumbling block for cedega. Also keep in mind that sound settings also depend on your sound card.

This is very much hit and miss! Using the exact same computer and game/wine installation I experience heavy sound stuttering in Fedora Core 6 with Wine 0.9.29 but a significantly improved execution under Slackware 11. => If gaming is your life, you may want to try a different distribution !

3.2 When starting the game I get asked for my CD keys but they turn up invalid!

If you only install Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, then this shouldn't turn up. The first time you attempt to run either Dawn of War or Winter Assault however, registry keys are created and then the game seems to expect you to input these serials as well.

I will continue to experiment with this, but I copied over my Dawn of War and Winter Assault and patched the game to 1.50 .. But I have noticed two new registry keys being created in the Dark Crusade directory which is supposed to handle the new keys. Go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\THQ\Dawn of War - Dark Crusade

and if you see the string values W40KCDKEY and the other WXPCDKEY, try putting your Dawn of War key into W40KCDKEY and your winter assault key into WXPCDKEY. You can see how the Dark Crusade key is intered in the CDKEY string value, just duplicate that layout.

3.3 Patching the game / Circumventing the copy protection

Some report being unable to use the ingame patcher which automatically appears inside the game after you've created an online profile. However, it worked for me when emulating windows 98.

It is important that you get the game updated to 1.50 as they have removed the cd-check with this patch, this allows wine to run the game without a no-cd crack thus allowing you to play online!

The patching mechanisms are the same for the games. Download the patches needed from sites such as fileshack.com .I f you run the patches without containing them in a virtual desktop, you may risk having a black screen so therefore try running them like so:

wine explorer /desktop=foo,1024x768 dow-140-141.exe

This example runs the DOW 1.40 to 1.41 patch in a virtual desktop with the resolution 1024x768.

Changes made to the guide since last update:

* removed the part about which Windows version to emulate, as the default setting of Windows 2000 works fine with newer versions of wine such as 0.9.35.

* Added a glitches note to the bottom and recommended 0.9.35 for running DOW as both users and I have experienced, that this version of Wine works best for DOW.

Earlier changes:

*Based on user input a suggestion about removing the renicing part of the script has been made for those who may experience problems with this.

* Fixed incorrect command syntax for running the patches, before it would run windowed, though it wouldn't accept the specified resolution, this has been fixed.

Installing DC without DoW/WA - Full 7 races in Multiplayer

If you want a problem in accessibility the 7 races in Multiplayer - you must realzie  guide from  this  site:
http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?p=1827182#post1827182 Maybe Iron Lore change this in new addon Soul Storm - but in now one must use a this trick in registry.

Versions of wine and their DOW compatability 

Some users report that using versions of wine newer than 0.9.35 gives severe perfomance penalties which usually takes the form of stuttering graphics - This is confirmed by amaintainer using both 0.9.39 and 0.9.40

Solution: use Wine 0.9.35 for optimal performance, to compile this for yourself on Debian/Ubuntu, you can do the following:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine # to get the needed dependencies for building wine

CFLAGS=-fno-stack-protector ./configure --prefix="/home/[USERNAME]/.winebuilds/0.9.35/"
make depend && make
make install

This should install wine 0.9.35 in your home directory.

You can now run this version of wine by issueing:

'~/.winebuilds/0.9.35/bin/wine' instead of 'wine'

and '~/.winebuilds/0.9.35/bin/winecfg' instead of 'winecfg'

Which windows version should I emulate ?

With older versions of wine, such as 0.9.28, it was recommended to emulate windows 98 for optimal performance (read: the game had difficulties even starting otherwise!). As of at least wine 0.9.35, this is no longer an issue, the default version of 'Win2k' will work fine.

If you have problems with completely corrupted textures the problem might be that your systems lacks a library that is used for texture compression in Dawn of War.

Under Debian based system install the package "libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0" and try again.