Question about Wine and AOE II: Directdraw?

[BEND IT 7]

I recently setup Puppy Dingo on an ancient laptop for someone else, and I have been impressed by the performance, which, although slow, is about as much as we can ask for on a 96mb 4 gig HD and super slow processing laptop. Anyway, I configured Wine successfully and got AOE II fully installed (and the no-CD patch so it can be played on multiple computers and to compensate for the poor CD reading ability of the laptop). When I went to play it, it started to load but then it said something like, "Error: The graphics card is not DirectDraw capable." I was wondering if there is any feasible way to fix this problem. I know it could actually just be an error because the graphics card is truly to old to run Age of Empires, but I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions before I uninstall everything.

[Pizzasgood]

Just throwing out ideas:

There may be a registry setting you can change, or a switch you can use when running AOE that would tell it to use something other than Direct X. Digging around on Wine's AppDB might help there.

Or maybe you need to adjust your Wine settings with winecfg.

Maybe you need to have OpenGL installed and working for this to run properly. AOE II isn't a 3d game, but Wine could still be trying to imitate the DirectX stuff with OpenGL.



I doubt this part is related, but it would almost certainly improve things if you could get DRI (hardware acceleration) working with whatever graphics chip that machine has. There are packages in PETget that should take care of that, assuming you have a chip that can do DRI. I don't have much experience with this, just with the three computers I have. But if you can get it working, it would take some of the strain of the CPU and put it on the GPU, which might make things more usable.