Spore under Wine 1.5.8

[Axis710]

Hello all,

I am attempting to run Spore under Wine in Xubuntu 12.04. It opens perfectly, and installs correctly, but when I try to open Spore as a normal game, the intro video works, but the text is replaced with black boxes and the galaxies are invisible. Are there any ways to fix this? I can post screenshots if requested.

Thanks, any help would be appreciated.

Also: Don't tell me to update my wine. I already tried on 1.7.15 and it crashes immediately.
Sorry.

Specs:
Acer C7 Chromebook with Xubuntu Linux 12.04
Intel Celeron 847 1.1Ghz Dual core
Intel Graphics Card (Model name not specified.)

-Axis710

[dimesio]

The current development release is 1.7.28, but I doubt upgrading will help you. Your problem is most likely the Intel graphics.

[Axis710]

Is there any way I can get it to work without replacing my graphics card?

[Axis710]

*bump*

[lahmbi5678]

Hi,

would the game run under Windows on your laptop? The minimum requirements I found googling are 2Ghz Pentium4 and 128 MB graphics card (Pixel Shader 2.0).

There are some issues in wine with older intel chipsets. Even if they were advertised as DX 8.0 (Pixel Shader 2.0) or DX9.0c (Pixel Shader 3.0) compatible, they couldn't do some Shader 2.0 (or 3.0) operations in hardware, so intel substituted the missing functions in the windows drivers, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... sing_units . But I don't think that's an issue in your case.

If your notebook is comparable to this one
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Cele ... 835.0.html
it should have the graphical capability to run the game. One thing you could try is to assign more memory to the graphics chip. If it still wouldn't work, file a bug in wine's bugzilla. This won't solve your issue in the short run, but from time to time the wine devs do spend some time looking into issues with intel chipsets.

[Axis710]

And how would I add more memory to the graphics chip?

Also you did guess correctly with the graphics chip.

Another thing: I tested Spore on my friends laptop with Windows XP (he has the exact same laptop as me, just his is not a Chromebook) and it worked perfectly.

Thanks for all of your help, I hope to get this resolved soon!

[Axis710]

Ok... so after attempting to debug this Spore problem, one error message stood out to me:

err:d3d_surface:surface_download_data >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> GL_INVALID_ENUM (0x500) from glGetTexImage @ surface.c / 2201

If anybody could help me fix this problem, it would be very appreciated, as I cannot change my OS, and I have been trying to get this to work for some time.

Thanks

-Axis

[lahmbi5678]

Hi,

sorry for being imprecise, I meant the video memory option usually available in your computer's BIOS. There's also an option in wine's registry regarding video memory, the easiest way to accomplish that should be running a command like this: "winetricks videomemorysize=128". You can try both, though I doubt it will help.

There are already some other bugs about intel graphics chipsets in wine's bugzilla, still it might make sense to file another bug, so please file a bug. As I explained before, even if this bug can be fixed, it might take some time.

[Axis710]

Finally, this problem has been fixed. After Googling for quite some time I came across a forum post on the Sporum talking about this same issue. The person who fixed it said that he installed driconf, which if a mesa config library for Intel chipsets. I followed his instructions, installed driconf, applied the force s3 textures to true, and Spore started working flawlessly.

Thanks for all of your help, and I will appreciate it very much

I am leaving this post open for future discussion as needed.

Thanks again,

Axis

[lahmbi5678]

Nice to hear, that it finally works for you. Didn't think of S3TC, the proprietary drivers (amd, nvidia) probably support it out of the box. It might be good idea to add a comment about that (intel/S3TC) in the AppDB entry for spore.

I still think, it might be a good idea to file a bug for current wine (1.7.28+), as this seems to be a typical regression. In the AppDB entry for spore there's some workaround mentioned for the game locking up at start.