Direct* Games (?) only showing grey screens on Wine

[Cobra!]

Hi, I am a newbie to Ubuntu/Linux, I recently got Linux Lite (Unofficial Xubuntu derivative), and I've been playing a couple of games through wine, but some games I've tried don't work at all. Som games just show a grey screen for a few seconds, then closes itself.

I'm not 100%, but all the games I've tried that have worked such as South park: Deeply Impacted (Original Acclaim Shooter) and The NewWolf source-port for Wolfenstein 3D, run on 3DFX Glide and OpenGL respectively, so I'm going to assume this is a DirectX/D3D/Draw issue, so I tried to install the latest version of everything with "Direct" at the start of the title onto my PlayOnLinux virtual drive, but that didn't help.

I don't think it's the games that are causing this, because one of them, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, is supposed to work flawlessly on Wine, but it doesn't start for me. Another game, Robot Arena 2, I've heard has mouse issues, but it should at least start up and show the menu, but it doesn't for me.

I've tried looking this problem up, but every question/forum topic I found was specific to the one game, and I didn't find any solutions in those that worked for me.

So what do I do now? How do I get these games starting up?

[dimesio]

PlayOnLinux is not supported here; this forum is for plain Wine only.

You didn't mention what graphics card/driver you are using. Most platinum or gold AppDB ratings for games are for tests run on newish Nvidia hardware using the proprietary driver. Anything else is likely to have problems with Direct3D games. (It doesn't matter whether the game ran on the same hardware under Windows--the graphics driver is not the same.)

You also didn't mention what Wine version you're using. If it's not the latest development release, you can try upgrading.

[Cobra!]

PlayOnLinux is not supported here; this forum is for plain Wine only.

Yeah, I understand that, but isn't PlayonLinux simply just a front-end of Wine that gives you the option to make virtual drives?

You didn't mention what graphics card/driver you are using. Most platinum or gold AppDB ratings for games are for tests run on newish Nvidia hardware using the proprietary driver. Anything else is likely to have problems with Direct3D games. (It doesn't matter whether the game ran on the same hardware under Windows--the graphics driver is not the same.)

Ah, I'm using an AMD E-300, and I couldn't find any Linux drivers for that last time I had a look online. Is there anything I can do about that, or am I SOL?

You also didn't mention what Wine version you're using. If it's not the latest development release, you can try upgrading.

I'm using the latest version (1.7.24).

[dimesio]

Yeah, I understand that, but isn't PlayonLinux simply just a front-end of Wine that gives you the option to make virtual drives?

If that's all you're using it for, with unpatched Wine, that's fine. POL also has scripts that install (often wrong and unnecessary) overrides and/or patched versions of Wine; those are not supported.

Ah, I'm using an AMD E-300, and I couldn't find any Linux drivers for that last time I had a look online. Is there anything I can do about that, or am I SOL?

You could try asking on your distro's forum if there is a proprietary driver for your card. Or just buy a cheap Nvidia card.

[Cobra!]

Yeah, I understand that, but isn't PlayonLinux simply just a front-end of Wine that gives you the option to make virtual drives?

If that's all you're using it for, with unpatched Wine, that's fine. POL also has scripts that install (often wrong and unnecessary) overrides and/or patched versions of Wine; those are not supported.

Oh right, I don't use those since I don't know what they do.

Ah, I'm using an AMD E-300, and I couldn't find any Linux drivers for that last time I had a look online. Is there anything I can do about that, or am I SOL?

You could try asking on your distro's forum if there is a proprietary driver for your card. Or just buy a cheap Nvidia card.

[/quote]
Okay, I have and I found a propriety driver and an open source one, the propriety driver doesn't do direct rendering at all, and the open source one works on some games, but the games mentioned in the first post still don't work. also, I'm using a laptop, so buying a card is out of the question. If I was to get one, It'd be an AMD one, after hearing an apparent scandal Nvidia were doing with publishers like Activision and Ubisoft to make them lie about requirements to sell more cards, I'm not buying another Nvidia card!

Anyway, I don't think the Driver is the issue, because I have one installed, but the problems still persist. Some games work perfectly, though, such as Rollcage 2 in D3D mode. It might still be a DirectX thing, though.

So what do I do now?

[Cobra!]

I think it's gotten worse, MOHAA now won't even start up! I tried reinstalling and in a new virtual drive, so no POL scripts are applied, and it made no difference!

[dimesio]

Your hardware is old and low end. It was never meant for gaming, even in Windows, and running games in Wine is more demanding. There's nothing you can do about that.

[Cobra!]

I understand that, but MOHAA and RA2 are 10+ year old games, you don't exactly need a high end machine to run them, do you? On Windows 7, it can run on the highest settings and run very smoothly. I would exact them to run on wine without issues albiet not as smooth?

EDIT:Okay, I tried running MOHAA through the terminal and I got this error:

Code: Select all

fixme:service:scmdatabase_autostart_services Auto-start service L"SecDrv" failed to start: 2

[dimesio]

Is that all the terminal output?

SecDrv is the SafeDisc driver. SafeDisc 1.x should work; whether SafeDisc 2.x works depends on the GCC version used to compile Wine. http://wiki.winehq.org/GccVersions However, since no one in the AppDB mentions copy protection as an issue for MOHAA, I doubt that's the problem.

What I did find from looking at the comments in the AppDB is that the game is affected by https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31730. The workaround is described in the bug report.

[Cobra!]

Okay, it's showing the splash screen, but it keeps saying it can't find the CD, when it's in my DVD drive. I downloaded a no-CD exe, and I got past the check and showed the console, but afterwards it was showing the grey screen problem I mentioned in the first post, so it's back to square one... So what now?

[dimesio]

Did you start the app with MESA_EXTENSION_MAX_YEAR=2003 as the bug report specifies?

[Cobra!]

Yep, I did. I managed to fix the problem I had before, now the game recognises the disk and shows the console before starting, but when it goes to change the resolution and try to play the game, I get nothing, not even a grey screen, just a frozen image of my desktop at a lower resolution.

[dimesio]

If you haven't tried running in an emulated virtual desktop, try that.

[Cobra!]

Whenever I try to play a game on a virtual desktop, the screen is always too small, sometimes it's as small as a 10th of the scren size, with a massive big border around it! This happens with every virtual desktop I tried, Virtual PC, VMWare player and VirualBox all have the same problem for me... So I'd prefer to not use an emulated desktop.

[dimesio]

I mean Wine's emulated virtual desktop. Set it on the Graphics tab in winecfg.

[Cobra!]

Oh right, I had no idea about that feature. That is awesome!

However, the problem still persisted. I've updated my game to 1.11 and the genuine exe works again, however, I'm still getting the grey screen problem. I've been looking it up online and apparently it's usually caused by an anti-virus blocking, so I made an exception to the game's exe in my comodo, but it didn't make a difference. I've also tried doing the opengl dll soltuion, but it didn't help either.

What do I do now?

[dimesio]

I've been looking it up online and apparently it's usually caused by an anti-virus blocking, so I made an exception to the game's exe in my comodo, but it didn't make a difference.

Did you also make exceptions for all of Wine's processes? I doubt that's the issue, but see what happens if you disable Comodo altogether.

If that doesn't fix it, then I think we're back to your graphics hardware and drivers. The fact that the game runs on Windows on that hardware doesn't mean anything; the hardware may be the same, but the drivers aren't. That's why my first suggestion was to try the proprietary driver, because the proprietary Linux drivers are generally closer to their Windows counterparts in the features they support. The open source drivers simply aren't adequate.

[Cobra!]

I've been looking it up online and apparently it's usually caused by an anti-virus blocking, so I made an exception to the game's exe in my comodo, but it didn't make a difference.

Did you also make exceptions for all of Wine's processes? I doubt that's the issue, but see what happens if you disable Comodo altogether.

Nothing changed, the game still didn't run...

then I think we're back to your graphics hardware and drivers. The fact that the game runs on Windows on that hardware doesn't mean anything; the hardware may be the same, but the drivers aren't. That's why my first suggestion was to try the proprietary driver, because the proprietary Linux drivers are generally closer to their Windows counterparts in the features they support. The open source drivers simply aren't adequate.

I've tried switching to a propriety driver, but it actually performed worse than the open source driver that was installed before. I've tried asking around at my distro's forum, but so far, I haven't got anything back.

So is there anything I can do now?

[dimesio]

I've tried switching to a propriety driver, but it actually performed worse than the open source driver that was installed before.

I believe you. Your hardware is old, and AMD's support for legacy hardware in Linux is poor. It's possible you had the wrong driver, or had installed it incorrectly, but that would be something for your distro to help sort out.

Looking back, the one question you never answered is whether that single line of console output you posted earlier was all there was. If there's more, post all the terminal output.

[Cobra!]

That was all there was, I forgot to mention, sorry. I fixed that issue anyway by installing the 1.11 patch.

I recently got Men of Valor for the PC, and I tried that, and it actually ran, albiet slow and choppy, but that's expected given my hardware. I expected MOHAA to be the same, but that sadly isn't the case. I had a look at the requirement of both games, and MOHAA requires way higher end hardware, despite being 2 years older. So perhaps it is just my hardware, but I would've thought the wine would at least try to run it...

[Cobra!]

I just tried Robot Arena 2 in a Virtual Desktop, and it starts up, although the mouse is sensitive and delayed, it also doesn't move when I open a menu that loads on top of the actual meny, if that makles sense, any ideas how to fix it?

[Cobra!]

I just tried running Robot Arena 2 through the command line, and this was what came out:

Code: Select all

fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {37d84f60-42cb-11ce-8135-00aa004bb851}!
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {8e1c39a1-de53-11cf-aa63-0080c744528d}!
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {f90a6130-b658-11d2-ae49-0000f8754b99}!
fixme:gstreamer:GST_Connect Could not make source filter, are gstreamer-plugins-* installed for 32 bits?
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {f90a6130-b658-11d2-ae49-0000f8754b99}!
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {8e1c39a1-de53-11cf-aa63-0080c744528d}!
fixme:gstreamer:Gstreamer_FindMatch Could not find plugin for audio/mpeg, mpegversion=(int) 1
fixme:ole:CoCreateInstance no instance created for interface {00000000-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} of class {728dcf55-128f-4dd1-ad22-becfa66ce7aa}, hres is 0x80004005
fixme:msacm:acmFormatEnumW Unsupported fdwEnum values 00100000
fixme:d3d:state_lastpixel Last Pixel Drawing Disabled, not handled yet

I also ran MOHAA again in the console, and this time, this was what came out:

Code: Select all

wine: Call from 0x7b83f1c2 to unimplemented function mscoree.dll.CorIsLatestSvc, aborting
wine: Unimplemented function mscoree.dll.CorIsLatestSvc called at address 0x7b83f1c2 (thread 0018), starting debugger...
Application tried to create a window, but no driver could be loaded.
The explorer process failed to start.
fixme:dbghelp:i386_stack_walk new PC=7ed96147 different from Eip=7ed843d5
fixme:x11drv:X11DRV_desktop_SetCurrentMode Cannot change screen BPP from 32 to 16
err:seh:setup_exception_record stack overflow 1488 bytes in thread 0038 eip 7bc49ce3 esp 01400d60 stack 0x1400000-0x1401000-0x1c00000

Sorry for all of these bumps, but I can't edit my posts after a certain time after posting them...

[dimesio]

Code: Select all

fixme:gstreamer:GST_Connect Could not make source filter, are gstreamer-plugins-* installed for 32 bits?

That's one problem you have to fix.

I also ran MOHAA again in the console, and this time, this was what came out:

Code: Select all

wine: Call from 0x7b83f1c2 to unimplemented function mscoree.dll.CorIsLatestSvc, aborting

According to https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31688, that means you have incorrectly installed native .NET (failed to set the override for mscoree and remove the wine-mono registry keys). You should have mentioned installing native .NET, as well as any other native dlls. In any case, reinstall to a clean wineprefix; there is nothing to suggest MOHAA needs native .NET, or any other native dll.

[Cobra!]

Code: Select all

fixme:gstreamer:GST_Connect Could not make source filter, are gstreamer-plugins-* installed for 32 bits?

That's one problem you have to fix.

Okay, what do I do to fix it? I've tried installing the latest gstreamer plugins I can find, and the game still has the same problems... Here's what came out of the terminal:

Code: Select all

(process:15812): GThread-WARNING **: GThread system no longer supports custom thread implementations.

(wine:15812): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

(wine:15812): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

(wine:15812): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2enc.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2enc.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

(wine:15812): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxvid.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxvid.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
[08/20/14 12:54:54] - Running wine- Robot Arena 2.exe (Working directory : /home/cobradabest/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/RA2/drive_c/Program Files/Infogrames/Robot Arena 2)
fixme:msg:pack_message msg 14 (WM_ERASEBKGND) not supported yet
fixme:win:EnumDisplayDevicesW ((null),0,0x32f798,0x00000000), stub!
fixme:winediag:AUDDRV_GetAudioEndpoint Winepulse is not officially supported by the wine project
fixme:winediag:AUDDRV_GetAudioEndpoint For sound related feedback and support, please visit http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1960599
err:ole:apartment_getclassobject DllGetClassObject returned error 0x80040111
err:ole:CoGetClassObject no class object {da4e3da0-d07d-11d0-bd50-00a0c911ce86} could be created for context 0x1

(process:24369): GThread-WARNING **: GThread system no longer supports custom thread implementations.

(wine:24369): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

(wine:24369): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfaac.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

(wine:24369): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2enc.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2enc.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

(wine:24369): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxvid.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxvid.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {37d84f60-42cb-11ce-8135-00aa004bb851}!
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {8e1c39a1-de53-11cf-aa63-0080c744528d}!
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {f90a6130-b658-11d2-ae49-0000f8754b99}!
fixme:gstreamer:GST_Connect Could not make source filter, are gstreamer-plugins-* installed for 32 bits?
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {f90a6130-b658-11d2-ae49-0000f8754b99}!
fixme:gstreamer:GST_QueryInterface No interface for {8e1c39a1-de53-11cf-aa63-0080c744528d}!
fixme:gstreamer:Gstreamer_FindMatch Could not find plugin for audio/mpeg, mpegversion=(int) 1
fixme:ole:CoCreateInstance no instance created for interface {00000000-0000-0000-c000-000000000046} of class {728dcf55-128f-4dd1-ad22-becfa66ce7aa}, hres is 0x80004005
fixme:msacm:acmFormatEnumW Unsupported fdwEnum values 00100000
fixme:d3d:state_lastpixel Last Pixel Drawing Disabled, not handled yet

I also ran MOHAA again in the console, and this time, this was what came out:

Code: Select all

wine: Call from 0x7b83f1c2 to unimplemented function mscoree.dll.CorIsLatestSvc, aborting

According to https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31688, that means you have incorrectly installed native .NET (failed to set the override for mscoree and remove the wine-mono registry keys). You should have mentioned installing native .NET, as well as any other native dlls. In any case, reinstall to a clean wineprefix; there is nothing to suggest MOHAA needs native .NET, or any other native dll.

Okay, I've done it, but it still doesn't work, here's what came out this time.

Code: Select all

fixme:process:SetProcessDEPPolicy (1): stub
fixme:wer:WerSetFlags (2) stub!
fixme:heap:HeapSetInformation (nil) 1 (nil) 0
fixme:process:SetProcessShutdownParameters (00000380, 00000000): partial stub.
fixme:service:QueryServiceConfig2W Level 6 not implemented
fixme:service:QueryServiceConfig2W Level 6 not implemented
fixme:service:QueryServiceConfig2W Level 6 not implemented
fixme:service:QueryServiceConfig2W Level 6 not implemented
fixme:service:QueryServiceConfig2W Level 6 not implemented
fixme:x11drv:X11DRV_desktop_SetCurrentMode Cannot change screen BPP from 32 to 16
err:seh:setup_exception_record stack overflow 1488 bytes in thread 0046 eip 7bc45b6f esp 01400d60 stack 0x1400000-0x1401000-0x1c00000

I noticed the first line mentions "DEP", some windows games stop working because of DEP, so maybe DEP is the problem, or part of it? How would I resolve it on wine?

[dimesio]

Code: Select all

(process:15812): GThread-WARNING **: GThread system no longer supports custom thread implementations.

That's https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30557. I thought the Ubuntu Wine packages included unsupported patches to work around that, but perhaps I was wrong. The workaround for plain Wine is to disable winegstreamer and install native quartz, possibly devenum, and whatever Windows codecs are needed.

Code: Select all

(wine:15812): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so': /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmplex.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

FYI, this means you installed only the 64 bit plugins. For winegstreamer, you would need the 32 bit ones. If you disable winegstreamer, don't bother.

I noticed the first line mentions "DEP", some windows games stop working because of DEP, so maybe DEP is the problem, or part of it? How would I resolve it on wine?

SetProcessDEPPolicy is unimplemented, so if that's the problem, there's nothing you can do about it. https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24125