Age of Wonders

What works

Installer, campaign, scenarios, loading/saving games, graphics (see note below about mouse cursor). Sound effects were only audible after checking the "Use Direct Sound" box in the in-game Sound Options menu, but were then fine. Music worked fine most of the time, but occasionally on loading a game it would be silent. This could be fixed by turning the sound off and then back on in the in-game "Sound Options" menu - although this seemed to make the audio slightly louder - or alternatively by quitting and re-starting the program. This was using ALSA sound - OSS was not tested.

What does not

Intro movie (just gives a blank screen that can be clicked to dismiss): the game_dir/Images/Scenes/Intro.avi is the movie file and can be played fine outside the game by, e.g., KMPlayer. A checkbox exists in the in-game settings to disable the intro movie on subsequent runs, avoiding the blank screen.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer, full game play-through.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Tested whilst using a No-CD crack. I was unable to get the game to go full-screen initially, but solved this by running on a separate X display. The X mouse cursor was also visible over the game cursor: this was fixed by creating a blank cursor file (using "bitmap" from the terminal, save the initial blank image as "empty.xbm") and setting this as the mouse cursor for the game's X display. These two fixes were implemented by a script, which I have posted in the Application comments below.

Currently Age of Wonders installs and runs out of the box on recent versions of wine.

winecfg settings (for older wine versions)

This isn't needed on wine 1.2.0 or more recent wine versions.

 In order to get Age of Wonders working in wine 1.1.X or lesser you need to follow next steps:

In a terminal run winecfg.

Press "Add and application"

Navigate until you find AoW.exe (usually found at /home/user/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Age of Wonders/AoW.exe ) and press open.

And with AoW.exe selected in Application Settings, go to the Graphics tab and uncheck the "Allow the windows manager to control the windows"

Press Ok and should be done.

Age of Wonders intro movie is enconded with Indeo3.2 video codec [IV32] which can't be found in a standard wine prefix, in order to fix this, IntelVideo codec needs to be installed.

Google for a copy of iv5setup.exe and run:

wine iv5setup.exe

When asked about which type of install do you want, select Custom (this is because Indeo5 codec fails to install and the installation is dropped), then select only, Indeo Video 3.2 codec and Indeo Audio Codec, press next.

If the installer asks about searching for backups press No.

This should fix it and the intro movie will show without problems.