DragonRiders: Chronicles of Pern

What works

Installation works fine, as long as the patch is used (check the HOW-TO below).

Once installed, the game starts flawleslly, without any no-cd patch or the like being needed.

All the intro videos work fine, as does the main menu. The game can be started and played without any lag or delay whatsoever, and all audio/music is perfect.

What does not

The main character and the dragon appear completely black except for their eyes, as if they had no texture applied (check the attached screenshots). From a bird's view of the village at the beginning, it looks like the sky suffers from the same problem. I couldn't verify whether this applies to other characters in the game as well or not, since I only played for a few minutes.

The same bug happens in Cedega as well.

I can only guess it's some kind of chroma key problem (as the one in Ultima IX), but the game cannot be configured with respect to that. The only hint is a debug error that floods the console:

err:d3d_surface:IWineD3DBaseSurfaceImpl_BltFast DXTC decompression not supported by now

but I don't know if it might be related. 

Nevertheless, this bug alone makes the game fall from platinum (everything else works perfectly) to bronze, since it heavily affects the user's experience.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Playing through the whole game.
Joypads/joysticks.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The installation shipped on the CD doesn't work, since the executable fails with recent CPUs. A patch, dr_patch_p4.exe, is needed in order to install the game (at the time of writing it can be retrieved here).

The patch makes some extra checks on the CD before installing. If you've a real CD with DragonRiders on it in your reader, it will work flawlessly. If instead you have the CD as an ISO image, you have to make sure that the /dev/loopX the ISO is mounted on is readable by the user who's launched the patch executable, otherwise the patch will complain about the missing CD.

So, assuming Dragonriders.iso is the image, /media/cdiso the path you'll mount it to, and /dev/loop0 the loopback device, you'll have to do something like this:

1. add /media/cdiso as a CD-ROM device in winecfg
2. sudo mount -o loop Dragonriders.iso /media/cdiso
3. sudo chmod 0666 /dev/loop0
4. wine dr_patch_p4.exe (this will extract the patch files, e.g. c:/windows/temp/InstallDR)
5. wine InstallDR.exe (the installation file once extracted from the patch)
6. sudo chmod 0600 /dev/loop0 (revert the permissions to what they were before)

This should do the trick.