Shadows of the Empire

What works

Launcher.

It's almost playable in software mode.

What does not

Hardware rendering is unplayable on modern hardware.  Really old hardware (i.e. original Athlon or Pentium 3/4 because Wine overhead on single-core systems) or serious underclocking might make it behave better.  Forcing vsync from the driver might help, except there's no easy way to do that in Xorg.conf or driconf.

The performance test option on the launch screen.  It starts a demo and freezes a few seconds in.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Full playthrough.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: AMD
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Applying cpulimit after the game starts messes up its timing and causes really bad lag and stutter.  If you want to control the game's available CPU time, you need to mess with it before it starts (i.e. underclock in the BIOS, or use powersave/performance cpufreq governor).

The following was extracted from a user comment made on 2016-10-09 and may not be relevant to current Wine:

There is a free windows program that adds another layer of compatibility to old games, called DXWnd. It works on wine v. 1.9.19 and is available on Sourceforge.

I have got the game running well with just minimal configuration:

-Created a profile for Shadows of the Empire

-Added "Shadows.exe" (resides in the Sdata folder in the game folder) to "Path" and "Launch" of the profile configuration in DXWind

-Launched the game through DXWnd → Success.

For a more detailed article on how to use DXWnd, visit the following link:

www.play-old-pc-games.com/compatibility-tools/using-dxwnd/

++ Make sure to use the "Shadows.exe" binary in the Sdata folder, not the SOTE.EXE binary in the root folder.