Hi All,
If you remember a while ago I tried to get AH to work on linux under wine (
http://www.winehq.com ) emulation.
It works mostly!
With a few hacks I was able to get the joystick working properly (even added POV support!) which was the only thing that prevented the game from being playable.
This works :
* Graphics -- perfect (see below for tips)
* Networking -- perfect
* Joystick -- perfect after my hacks to wine
* Sound -- some basic sounds (engine start, stop, running, gear up/down) work, but other sounds (firing guns) create buffer underrun errors and loop continuously. Also 3d sounds (doppler effect of planes going by, etc) are not supported by wine, and thus the sound is there, but no 3d effect == sucks.
Tips for getting AH to run :
* First, before even trying wine, make sure you get OpenGL to work with your setup. A recent distribution (RedHat 7.2) would have everything set up for this. Test OpenGL by running 'glxgears'. On an older distro you may need to upgrade to XFree86 4.x.x (
http://www.xfree86.org/). To do that you need a kernel 2.4.x -- try to get the latest (2.4.17) to get the best video driver for your card.
If you have an Nvidia card, you'll need drivers from nvidia, see their site.
* Once you have OpenGL, you need joystick support. Try the game "tuxracer" (
http://tuxracer.sf.net/) and see that OpenGL and joystick both work. (if it doesn't try 'modprobe joydev' as root). You may need to compile kernel modules for joystick support and/or USB support (if usb joystick).
* Get wine -- I'm using Transgaming's "winex" -- which is where DirectX development is being done. The main wine tree at winhq.com has an older version. There are 2 ways to get WineX -
a) Subscribe to TransGaming ($5/mo i think) and get binary RPM's
b) Pull the sources from CVS and compile them. (this option is not as hard as it sounds --- the compilation worked without a hitch for me.)
Instructions at :
http://www.transgaming.com/sources.php(You will need to do this if you wish to apply joystick hacks anyway)
You'll need a lot of disk space (300megs or so) for this.
* Configure wine -- there's a nice graphical config util for wine -- forget what its called. I just edited the config files to match my setup.
* Run a windows program (c:\windows\calc.exe is a good test)
* Run AH !
At this point your joystick will probably not work properly in wine -- you need to patch the joystick sources. I will post those patches soon.
For better performance you should run your X server at the same bit-depth as you want the game to run -- it will not switch bit-depth. So if you run with 16bpp in windows, start your X server with :
startx -- -depth 16
if you run at 24 or 32 your graphics card might be slow. (The Radeon's are).
Also, I hear that the Nvidia drivers for linux are much better than the ATI Radeon's. I get worse performance under linux with the Radeon.
wine will produce a lot of error messages about the sound. This in itself will eat performance. You should do :
wine aceshigh.exe --debugmsg -all
to turn off all the messages.
I hope to put all of this up on a website, please let me know if you're interested, or if you found this useful at all
me :
conway@inimage.com
