Master of Orion 2: Battle at Antares

What works

everything tested, especially:
sound
starting a singleplayer game
saving and loading
­

What does not

­no errors were found ­

Workarounds

What was not tested

multiplayer

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

With wine 1.3.30 this game works considerably well for the first time. The sound and the mouse pointer sutters in exactly the same way as in Mircosoft Windows XP (tested with game version 1.31 and unofficial mouse pointer patch, unplayable without on Windows). Even the occasional graphics corruption looks the same (someone did a great job here - even Microsoft's glitches are now simulated by wine). However, you need to disable wine's hardware pixel shader support (in winecfg's graphics tab) when used on a system with the Intel i915 driver (it looks like a known bug or incompatibility). Closing the game through it's menu crashes the game just like in Windows. The game needs approximately three times as much CPU compared to Windows, but wine amazingly creates multiple threads so even a slow (but multicore) Intel Atom CPU can run the game at decent speed (and wine performs way better than dosbox for this game). It looks like the expensive graphic operations are now handled by D3D surface blitting, which unfortunately floods the console (messages can be suppressed with WINEDEBUG="-all").

Although playing Moo2 on wine is possible, the game is best played on dosbox

 It would be best if you patch the game using this; PATCH

 The patch only provides an updated dos executable, and you can use the dosbox built in ipx to tcp/ip emulator for multiplayer (which is very quick for turn processing).

 To put it in perspective, Moo2 on wine is silver rating, game would get platinum on dosbox.

Since Wine 0.9.16 there are serious input (mouse+keyboard) problems in several menus that make the game practically unplayable.

As a workaround, Wine you can compile Wine 0.9.15 yourself and use that version.

Due to a different bug, a virtual desktop has to be used when running Master of Orion 2 with Wine 0.9.15: Run "winecfg" and enable "Graphics/Emulate a
virtual desktop".

If the window is too small, it can be made fullscreen by starting Master of Orion 2, and then in a different shell "xrandr -s 640x480". The resolution can be changed back with "xrandr -s 0".