Things I've had to use ACT Shims in on Windows (to varying degrees of unsuccess) I had not needed so under Wine, are you sure you need such things? It doesn't just run as-is under Wine?

I had no idea Wine even had the "AppCompat" thing implemented at all. GOG installers that try to install sdb's just end up failing that step but the game runs anyways.

DracoNihil wrote on 2022-03-11, 06:30:

Things I've had to use ACT Shims in on Windows (to varying degrees of unsuccess) I had not needed so under Wine, are you sure you need such things? It doesn't just run as-is under Wine?

I had no idea Wine even had the "AppCompat" thing implemented at all. GOG installers that try to install sdb's just end up failing that step but the game runs anyways.

I am doing a crazy experiment. The game I am trying to run is "MechWarrior2", one of the most incompatible Windows games now, which me and gho managed to run on Windows very recently but it requires the "IgnoreScheduler" shim which does

1    Includes the following hooks:
2    
3    SetThreadPriority: Normalize the thread priority to prevent some application synchronization 
4    issues.
5    
6    SetPriorityClass: Normalize process class. 
7    
8    SuspendThread:  Prevent a thread from suspending itself.
9    
10    ResumeThread: Prevent a thread from resumming itself.

Now Wine also required this him or else the game would freeze at a black screen on start up, as it always had. DxWnd managed to implement the shim incomplete, which allows you to load the game but not the mission. We also tried the EmulateCDFS shim in DxWnd and it worked fine on Windows and Linux. So I am confident that Windows shims work fine in Wine, but how do I implement them...

You can submit a bug report for the game to the Wine team so hopefully a user wouldn't have to jump through hoops to get a game working.

DosFreak wrote on 2022-03-11, 16:11:

You can submit a bug report for the game to the Wine team so hopefully a user wouldn't have to jump through hoops to get a game working.

The game was fixed in two ways, proxy files or IAT patching. I doubt Wine can legally do the former, and they should probably need a new hooking plan to do the latter. DxWnd manages most of it through it's hooked shims, but Wine afaik doesn't work this way, and I am not confident people will respond to such difficult request very well (GOG didn't release the Titanium Edition of the game for similar reasons), instead replying with "Hey just use dosbox or pcem".

Anyways I will submit it, hoping they don't give Installshield/winevdm questions.