Escape Velocity: Nova

What works

Installation

Gameplay is limited. Animations are very slow, and sound effects and the intro music stutter incessantly and are interspersed with painful popping and static. This is about the same regardless of what audio drivers and acceleration settings I have tried. Gameplay animations are slow in general, particularly the main menu screen, and while the game generally "works" it takes a lot of patience to play.

Registration of the game is problematic. The registration program doesn't draw properly, so it requires knowledge of where to click and what to type from Windows or Mac OS to register an installation in Linux. If you are able to figure things out, however, you can indeed register.

What does not

See above for descriptions of shortcomings. The game works and could be played all the way through, but the audio problems render it impossible to play unless you are for some reason deaf to painful-sounding buffer underruns.

The audio errors are accompanied with output that looks like:

fixme:dsound:DSOUND_MixOne problem with underrun detection (mixlen=10928 < primary_done=15856)

This will scroll by many times every time a sound is played.

Workarounds

What was not tested

In-game cutscenes (which as far as I know are limited to some pointless fluff and which can be disabled in the game options)

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Moving the DirectDraw framework in Wine to a hardware-accelerated base should help with the graphical slowness. I have seen that this is under way, so the big issue to address is probably that of the DirectSound buffer underruns.