What launchers and other wine related is managing your wine version and taking care of some wine variables, so you can rapidly switch between versions. I'd say unless you find different instructions, the current stable release is always a good starting point.

For the games you really want to run them in windowed fullscreen (or windowed), that way they dont mess with your desktop resolution.

Last edited by dvd on 30 September 2023 at 2:37 am UTC

Quoting: Arcadius-8606Is there anything else outside of Wine that I should be installing and learning how to use to get my games to run without issue?

I know you said Lutris seems to fail you, but I'll recommend it anyway. It makes managing Wine a lot easier, and bundles a bunch of separate tools usually used with Wine for you, like DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and dgvoodo. I'm not at all familiar with emulation, but I know Lutris has an easy way of installing/managing emulators like MAME.

You should install Wine system-wide. WineHQ has a guide for Ubuntu, but the instructions might be different for Pop!_OS: https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

Quoting: Arcadius-8606What version of Wine should I be installing?

The Wine-Staging branch has the latest patches and is generally recommended. Wine Development has some of the same patches but is missing some of the latest ones due to insufficient testing or other reasons. Don't use Wine Stable.

Use Wine-GE Custom if you're using Lutris. This version of Wine is specifically designed for games.

Quoting: Arcadius-8606How can I set it up so that when I run my Mugen games - the resolution on the desktop restores back to what it's suppose to be?

I'm not familiar with the Mugen games, but if you're having windowing issues like resolution, I always recommend Gamescope. It is a micro-compositor that creates a dedicated "space" for the game without affecting your desktop. If you want to use Gamescope, you should install the Flatpak version of Lutris and the Flatpak version of Gamescope. That's the easiest way.

More info here: https://wiki.comfysnug.space/doku.php?id=visualnovel:problems#fullscreen_is_broken_and_other_windowing_issues

Quoting: Arcadius-8606If what I'm asking for require further modification as time goes on then let me know.

The nice thing is that once you have this stuff setup, you're pretty much good. At least, that has been my experience over the past 2 years.

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Using Wine From The Terminal

You mention you never had any luck with Lutris or other game managers, so I guess that means you wanted to try Wine from the terminal. I don't recommend this for anything other than debugging for most people, but it's definitely possible.

If you want to manage Wine from the terminal, install Winetricks. First order of business is creating a Wineprefix:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/wineprefixes
WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/mame WINEARCH=win32 wineboot

A Wineprefix is a directory that contains all of the files and directories a Windows program expects, like many of the system libraries, the Program Files directory, and the Users directory. 32-bit is more mature than 64-bit, so we use 32-bit by default.

The WINEARCH variable can also be set to win64 if you want 64-bit.

With the Wineprefix created, it's worth installing DXVK, which is a Direct3D➜Vulkan translation layer. It works better than Wine's default graphics translator in most cases. That's pretty easy with Winetricks:

WINEPREFIX=~/.local/share/wineprefixes/mame winetricks dxvk

That's probably all you need at a minimum.

If you want to use Wine via the terminal, you'll need to build Gamescope from source. Instructions are here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope#building

It's fairly simple, but if you're missing dependencies...it can be tricky. That's why Lutris or Bottles is easier.

You can run MUGEN games natively on linux apparently.

https://appuals.com/run-mugen-fighter-natively-linux-environment/

The file is available here but you need to register so I can not say if it works.

https://mugenarchive.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=33995-m-u-g-e-n-ver-2002-04-14-linux-elecbyte

I did manage to download the file from here which looks to be a fan site

https://mugenguild.com/forum/topics/shin-ryukens-official-mugen-guide-54352.0.html

Can not offer any help with wine as I find it a tad confusing. I use Lutris for any older games.