School Days HQ

What works

Everything from what I can tell. Played for an hour approx.

What does not

Black screen instead of the menu, and in-game.
Lags, especially severe on load/save screens, or when hovering for the top menu

Workarounds

For the black screen problem, install wmp11 via winetricks. Otherwise it'll complain that it can't play back ASF videos.
Disabling CSMT in winecfg, if using wine-staging, or installing dxvk makes it run smooth.

What was not tested

The entire length of the game

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: AMD
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Runs fine in a 64-bit WINEPREFIX.

0verflow games are infamously known among other things for being flat out buggy, even on Windows itself, and School Days HQ is not the exception. Even with the official 1.2 patch installed (which already comes integrated in the latest JAST installers, and in some unofficial non-English translations), a bunch of flaws and bugs remain on the game, for both the Japanese and English retail releases.

Following is a short list of bugs to expect while playing School Days HQ under ANY OS, Windows included - these are NOT Wine bugs:

• Broken lipsync on some scenes
• Repeated scenes
• Broken navigation through the route map
• Unusable Skip function (that comes disabled by default!)
• Unpredictable behavior when using fast forward buttons
  • Black screens with subtitles only
  • Random hangs or crashes at some route points
• Overflowing affection meter at both ends
• Game playing nonsense or completely unrelated scenes to a specific route (broken flags handling)
• Instability when using playback speed controls (x2 ~ x32)
• In rare occasions, corruption of saved flags, impairing or deleting game progress.

Under Windows, the game has been reported to crash specific video drivers too.

Video playback is a particularly tricky one. If only a few scenes fail to play from time to time, then you've hit a game engine bug, but if NO video plays at all from the very moment you start a game session, then you need to check your Wine install (as of Wine 8.1x~9.0, you should not need to install codec packs or DLL overrides of any kind - just gstreamer-libav or its equivalent on your distro). If unsure, try installing the game into a clean prefix first.

Ensure to save your game progress often (the game only prompts to save at the end of each episode!), keep a backup of your saves (Config.dat and the entire Save/ directory under the game install path) just in case, and run the main executable from a terminal so you can quickly kill it with Ctrl+C if it ever hangs. The game can be completed normally with relatively minimal trouble normally on most installs, but be prepared for experiencing the 0verflaw Kwality™ when you least expect it.