URU: Ages Beyond Myst

What works

graphics, sound, mouse support, full screen & windowed modes, gameplay, installation of the 1.2 patch

What does not

The 1.0 installer (on the original CD) crashed unless the corefonts package was installed first.

After that it worked, sort of, but I could not use it at all on my external monitor due to erratic screen updates. On the laptop screen it worked better, but still with some shaky or incomplete screen updates.

The 1.0 installer also had no mouse support.

The desktop (screen and keyboard) tended to become unresponsive if a screen locker/screen saver took over while the game was running in full screen mode. Situations like that proved hard to get out of, and might require an emergency reboot. This could be a general Wine issue - I've seen it in other games, too.

Workarounds

Install corefonts before attempting the 1.0 install - to make the installer run without crashing.

The 1.0 installation was quite difficult - I often had to use "massage" with Alt-Tab and Meta-Tab ('Meta' is the "windows key") to get the install wizard to display anything at all. I found that I could repeat the procedure, though, on a fresh prefix -- so it's doable.

To get around the lacking mouse support issue (in the 1.0 installer), use TAB to navigate the installer controls and SPACE to press buttons etc. -- once you get to a point where you can see the controls. It may help to tab through them all; this sometimes makes them visible (if they're not).

It seemed to be a good idea to stick with the laptop monitor's native screen resolution -- again, while running the 1.0 installer. The game itself, once installed, had no graphics issues at all.

When running the game in full screen mode, do not leave it unattended and in control of your screen - unless you are certain that no other process (such as a screen locker) will attempt to take over. (You can avoid this situation by pressing the Meta ("Windows") key before you leave, to transfer control back to your desktop.)

What was not tested

Haven't played the game to its end.

URU Live (the multiplayer version) seems to have left this world, so I did not test that.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

I used a 32-bit wineprefix. (If you have a 64-bit system, do WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine wine wineboot in your bash Konsole - assuming the wineprefix you want to create is in ~/.wine, and that it's empty.)

I set Wine to emulate Windows XP. Don't know if that is important.

Results may depend on your hardware, particularly your graphics adapter.
The game runs well with my on-board Intel Skylake GPU, but refuses to load to the external Nvidia GPU. Likewise it won't run in newer versions of VirtualBox - since version 6.1, I believe - due to graphics incompatibilities.