Star Wars: DroidWorks

What works

The major features including the droid workshop, the missions, InDex, and sound (through pulseaudio) work on my Dell Latitude D620 with an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 graphics card using the "nvidia" driver.

What does not

­
• ­Most of the UI is subject to a severe graphical glitch: the display flips back and forth between the current frame and a previously rendered frame, and the cursor leaves trails. The glitch made it very hard to read the "Part Info" when selecting parts in the workshop.­
• ­Some slopes were hard or impossible to climb when running the game on one of my 2 GHz CPUs. I found this post suggesting slowing down the CPU. To accomplish that, I set SpeedStep to "Off" in the BIOS setup, which limits the CPU speed to 1000 MHz and also (despite the name) makes speeds as low as 125 MHz available for CPU scaling. I limited the first CPU to 375 MHz by running the following as root:

  echo 375000 >/sys/devices/sy­stem/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq­

  Then I ran the game bound to the first CPU (other applications could still use the second CPU at 1000 MHz):

  taskset -c 0 /PATH/TO/DroidWorks.exe

  This fixed the slope problem. It is almost certainly a defect in the physics engine not being prepared for frame rates higher than those achievable in 1998, and not a bug in Wine.­­

Workarounds

What was not tested

I probably didn't exercise all minor features of the game.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I had to do a maximum install, otherwise the game would not start.