LEGO Chess

What works

Installs (I ran the installer in a 32-bit prefix; WINEARCH=win32 set).

Game plays (but only after using the 'chesscdfix' program). I have a CD image mounted in cdemu, but a real CD also works (tested). Just tell Wine where the optical drive is mounted in winecfg if further problems are encountered.

Some additional crashes can be avoided by also installing the 'Legochessupgr.zip' file's contents from the same site as above.

After setting up and running Timidity (See the wiki page about MIDI), music plays, too.

To get much better graphical quality, I was able to use 'winecfg' to set the Windows version to Windows 98; doing this followed by invoking the executable (Lego chess.exe) with the '/video' parameter gets to a drop-down box with a 'D3D 4MB+' option. Select that. I was only able to select 'D3D' when reporting Windows 98 or 95; 2000 did not work (I was stuck with the bad 'krisalis' driver, which is the one in use in the game screenshot on this page).

What does not

When choosing to start a game of Chess (and during capture cutscenes), hanging MIDI notes occur that did not under Windows. Playback resumes after captures, but whenever the MIDI music changes the hanging note does not go away. See workarounds.

"Advisor" animations have wrong colors and broken transparency; I suspect this is a video playback/directshow
bug in Wine, or perhaps just a general color-space conversion issue. See workarounds.

Workarounds

Turning off animated advisors in the settings works around the weird colors issue with advisors in game.

I wrote a script to manually send "channel off" messages to each MIDI channel, but this is an ugly hack… I run it from a TTY as needed so as not to interrupt the game. This isn't really a "workaround" as much as a blunt hammer.

#! /bin/sh
# turn off all channels on a MIDI device
# Function to get port number of my Timidity software synth
TEMPFILE='.temp_mid.mid'
getmiddev()
{
  aplaymidi -l|grep 'TiMidity'|grep -- port\ 0|sed 's/^ *//'|awk '{ print  }'
}
genabc()
{
  echo 'X:1'
  echo 'T:All Off'
  echo 'M:4/4'
  echo 'L:1/128'
  echo 'Q:1/4=360'
  echo 'K:G'
  I=1
  while [ "$I" -le 16 ]; do
    echo '%%MIDI channel '"$I"
    echo '%%MIDI control 123 0'
    I="$(echo "$I"' + 1' | bc )"
  done
}
genabc | abc2midi /dev/stdin -o "$TEMPFILE" > /dev/null
aplaymidi -p"$(getmiddev)" "$TEMPFILE" >/dev/null
rm "$TEMPFILE"

This depends on 'abc2midi' (from abcmidi on Debian) as well as aplaymidi (part of alsa-utils on Debian).

What was not tested

Network play.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

wine-6.0-271-g24b9203d354 (Staging), ironlake GPU (i7-640LM integrated graphics). I built Wine from source myself.