Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

What works

Tested the basics:

• Running the game
• Starting a new game
• Doing the shopkeeping basics (buy, sell)
• Visiting the dungeons (so far with the Hall of Trials)
• Configuring the game (custom.exe)

The game can be played normally without crashes, as far as I've tested it.

What does not

Sound is quite the problem on Recettear, just like in many games that relied on the long deprecated DirectMusic API for its sounds.

See the application notes on the AppDB for the gory details, but suffice to say: either you get lag-free sounds and broken music, or laggy sounds and perfect music, depending on your choice of DLL overrides.

Workarounds

See the application notes for the possible workarounds to get sounds and music working on this game.

What was not tested

Completing a game in any mode - just played enough to test the basics of gameplay, which is basically the bulk of the core game experience.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Tested using the retail English version bought from Steam, then patched with Carpe Fulgur's final 1.108 patch for non-Steam versions to remove the Steam requirement (as that version uses CEG to protect the executable), to make it more Wine-friendly.

Note that Carpe Fulgur (the publisher of the English version) went out of business a few years ago, so there is no way to get any kind of support for Recettear's English localization, and the game has been delisted from all online stores but Steam (dunno who holds the rights for it, maybe EGS themselves?).

While playing the OP movie, the console will get spammed with a barrage of the following messages:
0:02:02.997023290 26589 0x67218d80 ERROR                   WINE dlls/winegstreamer/unixlib.c:242:push_event: Failed to push qos event 0x67c05288 to pad qz_sink_0.
This seems to be harmless - movie plays fine anyway.

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...