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Age of Empires and the Age of Kings
Hamish Jan 12, 2011
Well, I saw my brother playing Stronghold: Crusader through Wine about a week ago, and that got me wondering how well Age of Empires and the Age of Kings were running in Wine now, with it having a somewhat turbulent history with Wine in the past. Unsurprisingly networking still fails because it utilizes DirectPlay, but the rest works surprisingly well.

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There are a few annoying glitches here and there, mostly audio related, but it does seem to mostly work and is fairly stable. One weakness that AoE reveals in Wine though is that it needs to get better Midi support, which could be done quite simply by giving it proper Timidity support. As it is, assuming you have Timidity++ installed, you can get some Midi support through Wine by launching a Timidity sound server from a terminal using the following command:

timidity -iA

But even then it is still not the best as there can be long load times between tracks. Still, an improvement on how it was from when I first was able to fully migrate over to Linux. :)
Rustybolts Jan 12, 2011
I also have my Stronghold cd running great through Wine with no noticeable glitches, don't play it much mind.
Hamish Jan 12, 2011
Yeah, Stronghold runs pretty well on most versions of Wine, though there have been some which have been variable. My brother still pines for one particular version of Wine which was able to load up Stronghold dramatically faster than it even does natively on Windows. Sadly those days are gone, and now it is only comparable to native. :p

I remember running the Rise of Nations trial through Wine back in 2007 as well, it also ran pretty well, though I never got the sounds working. I must add though that was more likely my Wine setup back then, Wine and audio needs a bit more work in my experience.
Liam Dawe Jan 12, 2011
Hmm i have AoE gold edition on cd somewhere, might have to fire it up and give it a crack :D

Once 0 A.D. is released i'm pretty sure that will fill a nice hole in my Linux gaming life.
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