Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

What works

Buying, selling, some dungeon levels on Jade Way

What does not

Dungeon transitions - hard crash happens much more often

Workarounds

What was not tested

Hall of Trials, standard in-shop buy/sell

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

This was better with wine 1.3.4 and recettear 1.106, with the same lowered game graphic settings. Invisible bosses and treasure chests are issues in both configurations. Install was completed under a prior wine 1.3.x (not 1.3.5).

Recettear uses DirectMusic for all of its in-game sounds, which was quite common for Windows games made in the late '90s, but was already deprecated by Microsoft for when the original Japanese version got released in 2007 (and essentially gone from the DirectX SDKs by 2010, when the initial English version shipped).

These are your options to get in-game sounds working - pick your poison:

1. Use native DirectMusic DLLs. You can easily install those via winetricks - install "directmusic" instead of just "dmusic", as DirectMusic actually requires several DLLs (including DirectSound - you MUST use native DLLs for this too, and) and this verb will pick up all the needed dependencies.
   • Pros:
     • All music and sound effects will work as intended, just like in Windows.
   • Cons:
     • Sound effects will play with some lag.
     • The opening movie will BREAK (how broken? Depends on which quartz.dll implementation is being used, but no matter if native or internal, the movie will not play properly. You may delete recet_op.wmv from the game install dir if you don't care - the game will skip the movie if it doesn't exist)
     • DLL overrides may break other games in different ways, so it's strongly encouraged for the user to create app-specific overrides only for recettear.exe.
2. Upgrade to at least Wine 8.18. Historically, Wine's DirectMusic implementation has been poor, but it finally started improving favorably in late 2023, and 8.18 is the first version where Recettear has working sound out of the box... mostly.
   • Pros:
     • No need for DLL overrides at all - you can use a completely stock prefix!
     • Opening movie (recet_op.wmv) will play correctly (install gstreamer-libav from your distro for movies to work - WMV9 runtimes or Win32 codec packs are no longer needed!)
     • Sound effects have no lag.
   • Cons:
     • Sound effects may not play sometimes - it's a relatively uncommon occurrence, but from time to time a single sound effect may skip playing.
     • Music playback is severely bugged: tracks will not loop, tracks will not stop playing when switching scenes (often ending with many different tracks playing at the same time!).
     • Sound volume controls do NOT work at all - all sounds and music will play at the default volume, and this also means you can't silence the bugged music either!

FWIW, Recettear is known to have compatiblity problems with Windows 10, and amazingly it works fine on 98SE/Me (despite the minimum requirements stating XP or later!). Such is life with quirky niche Japanese games like this one...