Playing Age of Empires 2 with Wine 0.9.30

I am absolutely not a gamer, but today I was sick at home and wondered what I could do, so I decided to try whether I could run Age of Empires 2 + the Conquerors expansion with Wine.

According to the Wine APP DB [1,2] this should be possible – and it was. Installation was straight forward and worked perfectly, just mount the cdrom and execute the setup with wine. Because wine doesn’t yet support the required copy protection (safedisc2?) the game needs a no cd crack in order to run. This isn’t a problem either since all required information can be found on the APP DB site. At first performance was really bad but then I disabled the sound (via winecfg) set the game resolution to 800x600 and reduced graphic detail. With this configuration the game was playable on my P4 2.8 GHz, however a DIB engine wouldn’t hurt either ;)

There is a strange thing which I noticed, if I start the game then switch back to the terminal, kill wineserver and restart the game it is quite a bit faster. Haven’t yet investigated further in what’s actually going on.

Thanks to all Wine developers for their work, you made my day :)

Marc