Age of Empires II

What works

Everything in the game except multiplayer, all UserPatch features except windowed mode.

What does not

1. The game pauses for some time (depending on computer speed) when switching between screens:

• before the introvideos
• when (re-)entering the main menu
• when entering the game itself
• when entering the game settings screen
• possibly others i forgot

2. Multiplayer not working.

3. Textboxes flickering.

4. Intro videos not working, they get skipped.

5. Windowed mode

Workarounds

For 1:

launch wine with the environment variable WINEDEBUG=+relay .

This does not completely fix the issue but makes it less apparent. (on my PC 5 instead of 30 seconds) note that this hack does not work if you pass the output to /dev/null. "2>&1 | true" does work (a little bit worse than terminal output) and not use (as much) resources as the terminal showing the log.

For 2:

winetricks directplay

This does not make all multiplayer modes available (they are afaik obsolete anyway) but allows "Local (LAN) Tcp/IP Connection" to work, which is enough to play the game on LAN and over something like an VPN over internet.

For 3:

The chat box flickering can be fixed via an option in the UserPatch installer that gets available after pressing F5. All other text boxes stay bugged.

For 4:

winetricks icodecs

For 5:

simply enable virtual desktop for the same effect.

What was not tested

Never tested "Internet Tcp/IP Connection For DirectPlay"

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: AMD
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

If you get only a black screen upon starting a game

• after wine 2.13, fix it with winetricks ddr=gdi (see https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43627)
• after wine 3.2, fix it with winetricks csmt=off (see https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44796)