What works
Without tweaks:
- Singleplayer
- Movies
- Saving/Loading
With tweaks applied everything works.
What does not
Without tweaks, there are 4 problems:
- (In some cases) In fullscreen mode player "scrolls" the screen picture in any game state. In the game it scrolls together with the map. Wine complains about X11 being unable to set video mode.
- In windowed mode the player can't scroll map. It is possible to move the map by using map view or by double clicking on part of the ground (in-game).
- Cursor is flickers and performance is degraded.
- Multiplayer doesn't work at all -- Wine complains about initialization failure of DirectPlay OLE object.
Workarounds
Solutions solve problems, described in "What does not work" section, according the numbers they were introduced.
- It seems that Wine always trying to use 60Hz screen update rate when changing resolution even if your computer doesn't support it. In my tests one of my computers had only option of 59 Hz and 75Hz in 640x480 mode.
If you change resolution to 640x480 correctly using command line utility: xrandr (by hand or using script), before running a game, the problem will be gone.
- This issue will be automatically solved by using workaround 1 ...
Or by enabling "Desktop emulation" feature, setting the resolution to 640x480 (or higher) and enabling fullscreen mode in the game settings.
- Disable the CSMT feature in the Staging tab, in the winecfg utility.
- Using winetricks, install the directplay library:
winetricks directplay
What was not tested
Multiplayer in modes other than TCP/IP.
Hardware tested
Graphics:
- GPU: Nvidia
- Driver: proprietary
Additional Comments
- EAX feature never caused a crash for me. You can enable it in winecfg to enable.
- Use BGMain2.exe to run the game. Make sure you are in game directory before launching the game.
- If workaround 2 was used and then game window was set to "Fullscreen mode" from Linux side (Alt+F11 in Xfce or right-click on title bar -> "Fullscreen mode"), the game window will move to 0;0 screen coordinates and lose borders resulting in better scrolling (I believe the same improvement can be achieved, if window borders removed by some other way or window style set to "non-resizable".). Also in this mode, you don't need to be very accurate to scroll the map -- just move cursor outside the window and map will scroll easily.
- Windows XP SP3 fails to find LAN servers automatically. In Linux-Linux scenario autodetection works. Maybe you also want to add "AsyncEnumeration=1" into "[Multiplayer]" section in "Baldur.ini" file to make join operations more reliable (according to official README section 3b "Known problems").
Tested on two computers:
Notebook:
- CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3120M CPU @ 2.50GHz
- RAM: 4GiB
- Video: Nvidia Geforce GT740M
- Max screen resolution: 1366x768 (Monitor vendor is unknown)
Usual "tower" PC:
- CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor
- RAM: 4GiB
- Video: Nvidia Geforce GTX 650
- Max screen resolution: 1680x1050 (BenQ G2200W)