Age of Empires II HD Success!

[HappyPandaFace]

Wasn't sure where to post this, but I finally got Age of Empires II HD (Steam version) running on Debian and wanted to post my method and thank the devs at Wine for their hard work.

CPU:
Intel core 2 quad 6600

Graphics Card:
ATI Sapphire x1650

Wine Version:
1.7.x

I updated my wheezy installation to jessie with this:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... ing-jessie
This takes quite a while, but I was able to keep all my data through the update without having to backup. But I didn't have anything really important. To those using this method, you should back things up, especially if installing graphics drivers. Or atleast have a live OS on a USB or similar to recover your data if you destroy your OS.

Drivers:
PROBABLY OPTIONAL (and very vague):
I've tried a lot of stupid things to get this to work on my computer and in the process I installed a few different graphics drivers. In the end I found the mesa drivers to work fine, but first I had to purge the old ones doing this:
$ dpkg --get-selections | grep ati
and then doing 'apt-get purge' on everything in that list. This is different if you've installed an nvidia graphics card and it's drivers.
Then I installed the radeon drivers. This page helped:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver
I forget where I found exactly the names of the driver packages, but I ended up doing this to get them:
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core libgl1-mesa-glx
NOTE: I've done a lot of things to my computer so I can't guarantee these steps will work or not brick your computer. You should definitely make a backup.

Then I used PlayOnLinux (installed with apt-get) and navigated through their gui to find Age of Empires II HD and ran through their installation process. Installing worked fine for me, though there was some funny business as the automated process only installed steam and I had to download and install Age of Empires through the steam GUI myself.
IMPORTANT: This is not the linux version of steam, it is the windows version of steam running through wine. The linux version does not let you launch Age of Empires from their GUI.

After installing you still have to modify the steam files to get it to work right. My AoE files were located here:
~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/AOE2HD/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/SteamApps/common/Age2HD/
You have to mv Launcher.exe to Launcher.exe.bak (not entirely necessary)
Then you cp "AoK HD.exe" to Launcher.exe
IMPORTANT: delete _CommonRedist (otherwise AoE will take forever to start)
Then in steam (should be launched through playonlinux) you right click age of empires and goto properties and in the "launch parameters" you add "-nostartup"
Then should should be able to run it by hitting play in that same steam GUI you launched through PlayOnLinux.
This last step I found here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/di ... 270250345/

I hope this helps others. I'm going to test out League of Legends with the same system.

[HappyPandaFace]

League works with the same system. Got it working shortly after posting that, just came back.
There are a LOT of bugs with league and this system.
This may not be the latest version of wine. It's 1.7.x
If needed I can run more tests and give the exact version/hardware
League runs at a slower framerate than when using windows 7 on the same machine (nbd)
But it also makes the text and related menu items (and the menus themselves) very buggy.
The game is "playable" but only if you know exactly what all the items do, and are already comfortable with the interface (which I happen to be).
Also I imagine it would be difficult to check the scoreboard (forgot to try that)

I would be happy to conduct further tests if asked.