Age of Mythology

What works

Graphics - both opaque and transparent worked without a hitch. Ground, clouds, fog of war, regular fog, water, all beautiful.

Text - in-game text (tooltip help and whatnot) worked out of the box. I needed to supply it with the M$ core fonts (I'm not sure which specific font it uses, I just copied the Transgaming MS Core Fonts package into C:\windows\fonts\) to get menu text and cutscene subtitles.

Triggers - every single-player campaign scenario would move forward without a hitch whenever the proper conditions were met. I've played through it on bothWin and WINE.

Input - in a virtual desktop, perfectly fine. Without the virtual desktop, see below for details.

What does not

I've read reports of a memory leak - I didn't experience this myself, but I only played for roughly half an hour, maybe 45 minutes. Not long enough for a minor leak to become noticeable.

Sound - first off, I'm running ALSA, I didn't test OSS. After playing for a while I experienced a brief moment of choppy graphics, which is pretty much normal for a 3D game. However, afterwards, the sound bugged out. It seemed like an issue with the buffer not completely flushing after each sample - maybe the game explicitly flushes a certain number of bytes from the buffer, and that number of bytes is smaller than the actual size of the buffer. Whatever the cause, the effect was an echo every (roughly) 200-300ms. The buffer would move forward maybe 20-30ms per iteration.

Input - outside of a virtual desktop, there were issues with input focus. When first running the game, it would work fine. However, if I removed focus from the game (i.e. switching to a browser window), the game would cease to respond to keyboard/click input (cursor events still worked fine). If I were running another WINE app simultaneously and gave that focus, I could switch back to AoM with no problem.

Window management - without the virtual desktop, the window was unmanaged. Simply a Direct3D viewport painted into the screen at (0,0).

CD authentication - as expected, a NoCD crack was required. Not really a major issue. Dealing with the CD is a pain, so I probably would've cracked it anyway.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Installation - I ran the installer through Cedega a few months ago. With it already installed, I didn't need to try that. With the MSXML installer in there though my guess would be it still only partially works.

Multiplayer - everyone I know who used to play AoM quit, so I didn't try it.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Running X11R7.2 rather than the R6 that came with SuSE 10.1. Running nVidia proprietary drivers, version 9755. Other than that most of the distro is all either stock with 10.1 or updated normally. I can't really give it a gold, because of the large number of minor issues.

The following was extracted from a user comment made on November 2, 2016:

As a workaround, look in the gfxconfig and gfxconfig2 folders and replace the contents of the i845.gfx files with the context of the geforce3.gfx files. This should work with both nvidia and amd gpus.

After that, you should be able to use higher resolutions are 32bpp, and the fog of war issue and water glitch should be fixed.