It was okayish…I remember playing ultima 9 for some time with early wine versions. You had to deal with some glitches (ultima9 for example showed the mouse cursor below the bag what made selecting items interesting ;)) but even that not for all games. Diablo 2 was flawless for example (just not my type of game)…so was master of orion 3…
Was also nice to have for some simple windows gui apps…I think the first time I tried wine was for winrar to open a password protected file I couldn’t get to work otherwise.
edit: corrected sentence I started differently than I finished it ;)
I’ve been using Wine since 2004 when I began to use Linux (Ubuntu Warty). I really wanted to keep playing Dungeon Siege, but support was spotty (some graphic and control glitches). Despite this, I was hopeful that it would be playable and Wine kept me running Linux daily supporting other games like Total Annihilation, Oblivion, Guild Wars and productivity software. Through the early years development seemed slow, but once “Staging” and alternative builds became a thing, those improvement really sped up overall development. Having the project supported by Valve and incorporated into Proton combined with DXVK and other compatibility projects has been a huge boon to development as well. I now mostly use Wine in the form of Proton mainly out of convenience.
I think the most fascinating thing was people using Wine on Windows for running older games.I used it around the same time to play Starcraft online with my friends. In game is was perfect, but batle.net was mostly invisible until you moused over everything.
One thing I remember that was very different back then was that you had to crack almost every game…about no copy protection worked in wine. And that you had to deal more often with the wine config. Divine Divinity worked perfectly once you changed the backbuffer I think…but for finding that out you spend much more time on appdb and reading comments/suggestions ;)
In my feeling wine was actually not bad at all around 0.9, it worked for a surprising large amount of programs back then. It was later when directx 10 and above became available that wine fell back and only caught up for games just recently again. But that can be a very biased view as I already bought the few games I played back then with wine in mind and after checking for compatibility.
For Dungeon Siege, you could mount the ISO and point a wine drive to that. Cracks helped if you did not want to go through that.
I remember playing ultima 9
Oof, I can imagine the disappointment
hahaha…well, I for sure played it longer than ultima 8…nothing can be worse than that game!
Ultima 8
The platforming, OH GOD the platforming! Only good thing about Ultima 8 is spoony’s review, it’s wonderful :)
Hmm, dunno. I remember it as not being worth the trouble until 2015 or so.
