Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic

What works

The game installs and runs with no need for cracking.

The 1.3 patch also just works.

The tutorial and the first campaign missions work (I haven't played any further yet).

Saving and Loading worked fine.

What does not

Quite a few small annoyances have stopped me from giving this game a platinum or gold rating.

In Windowed mode:
Intro movies and the game work fine except the keyboard and mouse input is too lagged and/or erratic to be enjoyable.

In Fullscreen mode:
Intro movies must be disabled or the game proper will not start because it fails trying to change bit-depths.
The in game HUD flickers (but not the main game window)

Workarounds

What was not tested

Nothing

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

To run the game: wine AoWSMSetup.exe disable "show intro" set "cursors" to black and white For windowed just select windowed... For fullscreen the resolutions are being reported without their bit-depths. Select the last 1024x768 resolution in the first group of 1024x76s to get 1024x768x32

Network Play can be fixed using one of two methods:

1)  Install Microsoft DX9 using the winetricks script.

http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks

The game seems to require registry entries created by the DX9 installer in order to initialize network play.

2) Install native directplay dlls 

 http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectPlayGames?highlight=(directplay)

Set the overrides for these using wineconfig, but make sure to set them up in the global container, not for the game itself.

Register all the dlls using the command regsvr32 dllnamehere

Hosting a game seems not to work, however you should be able to join a network game.