MikuMikuDance

What works

Displaying and loading models, manipulating a model, saving to a picture file, animating a model

What does not

Single-window mode has no interface. It shows up briefly, then becomes black or is copied from other parts of the screen.

Interface text in English mode displays as boxes, menu text in Japanese mode is mojibake. Menu text works in English mode, and interface text works in Japanese mode.

Recording video playback failed due to lack of codecs and a missing DLL error for 'AVI raw' codec. This continued to occur after installing Visual C++ libraries, with a different error.

UPDATE: With a new prefix, either 64-bit or 32-bit, English text (Latin characters) did not work on any locale, except in the menu for English mode and a few parts of the interface.

Workarounds

Switch to multi-window mode with menu View > separate window. This will cause the interface to show up.

Change locale to Japanese to fix text display: 

LANG="ja_JP.UTF8" wine MikuMikuDance.exe

UPDATE: For new locale, used 'winetricks eufonts', then 'winetricks droid' for the new prefix. The first might not be necessary. After this, English interface works for either locale, with different menu font for ja_JP.UTF8 that's better for Japanese text.

What was not tested

Saving and loading motions and cameras, displaying stages

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

When using Japanese locale to fix text display, the file dialogue and interface prompts are in Japanese. This could be controlled by Wine, not MMD. The window menu, by moving from file menu etc. up to corner of window or pressing Alt-Space, is also in Japanese and has an 'About Wine' link.

In single-window mode, if the main window's render area is not being updated such as when recording video which opens a new window, the interface will show up again.

A test report for some version of Cinema 4D mentioned a problem with a display viewport, and speculated that it was related to OpenGL and, I think, "cutting" and some other term. In MMD, even in multi-window mode, the render window has on its sides areas that are black, copied from elsewhere on the screen, or occasionally have unmoving noise. Resizing the window changes what's displayed there.

As explained in tutorials, to load a model you have to drag and drop onto the window, not use file menu > open.

Because the Japanese text worked in the interface, I didn't think that English text as boxes was due to a locale mismatch. I think many users would not expect this solution either. A previous test report suggested a clean wine prefix and winetricks, which I did not try. (Update: it works.)

32-bit and 64-bit MMD both worked, after downloading fonts for new prefix with winetricks. I'm actually using wine-2.18, not 2.0.4.