Corrupt game graphics Intel 852/855G

[spapakons]

Hello!

I have recently installed Xubuntu (variant of Ubuntu) in an old laptop with is based around Intel 855 chipset and has Intel 855G builtin graphics. I know this is not the best card around, but I ask just in case there is a workaround. I have successfully installed Microsoft Office 2003 in Wine. All programs open and display correctly, no problem at all. I can even play some very old Microsoft games (such as Solus and Tetris). The problem arises when I try to play some newer games, like Popcap's Dynomite Deluxe, Cosmic Bugs etc. These are not very demanding games, but I suspect they use DirectX and my poor old Intel 855G cannot display them correctly. No matter what graphics settings I try, all I see is a Window with with a color pattern, instead of the game graphics. Is there a workaround such as forcing software rendering? As far as I know I have latest Wine and Intel graphics driver installed. I run Xubuntu 14.04 LTS. Please tell me if you need any other information (and how to obtain it). Could installing latest DirectX 9.0c help?

Thank you in advance.

[dimesio]

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... sing_units, your hardware doesn't support DirectX 9.0c, and only fully supports DirectX 6.0. You couldn't play newer games on it in Windows, either.

[spapakons]

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... sing_units, your hardware doesn't support DirectX 9.0c, and only fully supports DirectX 6.0. You couldn't play newer games on it in Windows, either.

Hello!

Thank you for your quick reply, but the same games play fine in native Windows XP or Windows 7 on the same laptop. I found the solution. All I had to do was to type winetricks at the terminal and then go to "Select the default wineprefix", OK, "Change Settings", OK and check the "ddr-gdi" and "glsl=disabled". Then OK to apply the changes and that was it! All games play fine now and they have not any performance penalty as they are very light anyway. We are talking about games with the same or less requirements as web flash games, not anything fancy! Since they play fine in Windows with the same hardware, they should also play fine in wine, with minor delay if any!

[lahmbi5678]

Regarding these really old intel chipsets the situation is bit more complicated. On windows the intel drivers emulate the necessary functions (vertex/pixel shader 2.0) in software, so that these chipsets are actually DirectX 9.0 compatible, even if the hardware is missing some functionality. Afaiu DirectX 9.0 does not necessarily mean that e.g. pixel shaders 2.0 are supported, not even in software emulation (whereas vertex shader 2.0 was a requirement), yet the DX9.0 applications under windows should cope with it. The difference to DirectX 9.0c is that it required at least shader model 2.0 in hardware and software emulation for shader model 3.0.

I still think, that your issue is a shortcoming in wine and the intel linux drivers. You shouldn't have to disable ddr-opengl and glsl, wine should cope with it (maybe disable these functions automatically, if absolutely not supported by hardware and drivers). There are still a lot of these old intel chipsets out there, I myself own a intel 945 chipset, which I'm using from time to time. It's a relatively slow system (1.8 GHz dualcore), stil it's fun to work (not play) with, but in the last few years I've been noticing that the linux (and opensuse) support for old hardware isn't getting better, which is sad.

I'm wondering if it would be worthwile to open a bug in wine's bugzilla. Or maybe add a wine wiki page, as there are still some people out there running into these issues.

[dimesio]

Or maybe add a wine wiki page, as there are still some people out there running into these issues.

It probably doesn't need a whole page, but it may be worth it to add an FAQ item for it.