Particle Illusion

What works

I ran Particle Illusion 3.09 on my main system with Wine Devel 5.5.  It correctly installs and comes up, but it fails to show any working graphics.  Wine Devel 5.6 totally failed, except for installing.  Wine Devel 5.7 most likely works, but I know it would have the same issue as Wine Devel 5.5.  I just removed it from my system at that point.  It remains working on my older MacBook system with Linux Mint 19.3 that uses Wine Devel 5.5.  I think it might work on that older MacBook with Wine Devel 5.7, but I don't remember trying.  The updates to Active Directory with Wine Devel 5.6 seemed to break many Windows apps, but Wine Devel 5.7 successfully fixed all of those issues.

Particle Illusion 3.09 appears to absolutely require OpenGL 1.0 compatibility.  This is a problem with all modern graphics hardware, since they all support OpenGL 1.1, which does not work at all with 1.0.  The recent fixes to OpenCL with in Wine seemed to drop hardware support for OpenGL 1.0.  While good for modern apps, this shows that only old graphics hardware from the past will support the much older graphics software.  This will eventually break all 32-bit apps across the board, but Linux should be fine in some regard with its persistent support for older hardware.  All other operating systems come to Linux for hardware drivers after all.

It's very possible that graphics hardware from 2012 or prior should still allow Particle Illusion 3.09 to continue correctly working.  Any graphics hardware with OpenCL support will not support Particle Illusion 3.09.  The few exceptions that exist have had virus infection issues in the past, so please, be careful in that respect of where you get your firmware for your graphics hardware.  You may find your system thoroughly infected.  This especially holds true if you download something from RARBG.  You have been warned. McAfee will not protect you at all, but Norton might slightly.  How ever, the virus related to those "compatible" drivers has been known to take Norton down.  Even Eset struggles in some regard.

At this time, it appears older MacBook systems with Linux Mint 19.3 will give you the best compatibility with running this software if you have the need.  Keep in mind that you absolutely need a natively internal DVD or CD drive to install Linux Mint 19.3, although the kind you can swap are fine.  Just keep in mind that you should not "hot swap".  You need to re-boot your computer after swapping such a drive.  Connecting a USB storage device or your own external DVD or CD drive will end in failure for trying to install Linux Mint 19.3.  This is a protection built in to older MacBook systems, and it helps reduce the possibilities of a virus over-writing your system's BIOS.  Please, consider this sort of thing when you purchase such a device off an auction site, like Ebay.

What does not

2012 and newer devices with OpenCL support do not work with Particle Illusion 3.09.  OpenCL requires 64-bit support, so older graphics hardware with only 32-bit support should work fine.

Workarounds

Use a MacBook from 2012.  Even if the processor supports 64-bit, the graphics hardware may not.  It's important to specifically target a MacBook for this purpose.  Since some specs are not available on-line any more in regards to older MacBook hardware, this is the recommended way to go.  It's possible you may not find a necessary lack of OpenCL support, until you test Particle Illusion 3.09.  Linux Mint 19.3 drivers may still report OpenCL compatibility even if the hardware will not at all, so please, take this in to your consideration.  It's possible that Linux Mint 19.2 will fail for you from its graphics firmware support.  Those issues were resolved with Linux Mint 19.3.

What was not tested

Every thing was tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Wine Devel 5.7 should work fine with Particle Illusion 3.09.  Graphics hardware is the issue.  Updating your firmware will almost never fix your problem.  It's possible that future versions of Wine may fix the issue as Vulkan support goes up.