Paradox 9 for Windows under Wine 1.7.13

[Ian Balchin]

Back again, a year later, but determined to get this up and running as Paradox is our last remaining legacy windows application.

Running Mint 13. With the default Wine 1.4 we were up and running, but not really useable, across the network and all. Speed was slow and with other issues I then decided to upgrade to latest Wine.

Now I cannot get up and running at all. The splash screen appears, disappears, it dies. I have done a carefull install with Corel service packs including using wineboot where appropriate.

If I run from a terminal we get the following output

$ wine pdxwin32.exe
fixme:ole:RemUnknown_QueryInterface No interface for iid {00000019-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}
fixme:thread:start_thread Started native thread 00000025
err:twain:twain_add_onedriver Source->(DG_CONTROL,DAT_IDENTITY,MSG_GET) failed!
err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x7bcd1e80 "loader.c: loader_section" wait timed out in thread 0025, blocked by 0009, retrying (60 sec)
err:seh:raise_exception Unhandled exception code c0000194 flags 0 addr 0x7bc3d25b

Whereto from here?

Ian

[Ian Balchin]

Hold on, let me check things further before you expend time here.

Ian

[Ian Balchin]

Well we are up and running. I am not sure what caused the aforementioned isses, but they were real. I found that when I ran Paradox after an install it was fine, but when I had installed Service Pack 3 we were not. Whatever the cause, I seem to have worked around it and we are up and running, with SP3, both locally and across the network. SP3 is in two files to be consecutively installed with a reboot after each. Does the Corel install 'restart the machine' button work? In the end I used wineboot with a total fresh install and we were up, up, and away.

But in honesty I couldn't rate this at more than Bronze. There are a number of issues that I see on first familiarity with the wine installation and that I will cover here.

The smallest is a key combination Ctl-F11/F12 used to move to the first or last record in the display. F11 & F12 do their job as do Shift-F11/F12. A small issue, I see comment in the documentation, I can use other keys.

Printing seems an issue in my setup where my wine instance of paradox is connected to a network of Windows machines with the main Windows server also doing all the printing for each workstation. Since there seems to be only provision for printing through cups this might not be an issue on a network where each workstation is running an instance of Paradox under wine. But at present this would seem to preclude the use of mixed windows and wine machines, thus my laptop-wine-Paradox cannot function on the present network because it cannot print to the windows printer.

The largest issue and one that significantly affects the useability is the speed of scrolling in tables and forms. It is jerky and just not fast enough. If I hold the key down then on release it will keep going way past where it is wanted to get to. Even running the application with local data (ie not across the network) then it is still way too slow. On the win machines it zips along fine even across the network, and these are really old machines with nothing like the power of my laptop. This renders it near unuseable - ok for doing development but certainly not on the production line.

This last issue is something I need to fix. It can't be right. Any suggestions?

thanks, Ian.

[dimesio]

What's the console output when you're scrolling?

[Ian Balchin]

I start the program pdxwin32.exe from its directory with

$ wine pdxwin32.exe

there is some output at startup but when the app is running and I scroll there is no additional output generated.

Ian

[dimesio]

Various things you could try: running in a virtual desktop, disabling desktop effects, various combinations of allowing/not allowing the window manager to decorate/control the windows, a different window manager/desktop environment.

Link to the bug you filed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35713