Running older games

askfor · 2026-07-09 19:18:33

I'd like to run some older Windows games on Excalibur 64 bit. Wine is the obvious option. Most of the games are 32-bit, some are 64-bit. For now, I have proprietary NVidia drivers working fine. I guess I am going to need some 32-bit libs.

I have installation media for all the games, not planning to download them from Steam.

What advice can you give me before I start ?

rations · Yesterday 03:41:50

I've had luck with winehq-staging and winetricks from their github repo. This is the nvidia driver version I've got 610.43.02 Instead of making different wine prefixes for a game that does not work. I use steams add a non steam game and try different proton versions.

Calamity · Yesterday 15:23:53

Hi! Unfortunately I cannot help with the Nvidia side of things, but regarding Wine:

Yes, you will absolutely need to add 32-bit architecture before installing Wine and its dependencies if you want to run Win32 games/programs:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386

After installing Wine, do not launch winecfg or Windows applications straight away. Instead, create your own 32-bit prefix that will be your default $WINEPREFIX (it's probably more convenient as many old games are Win32 applications).

$ WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine winecfg

Now create a separate 64-bit prefix for your Win64 games:

$ WINEARCH=win64 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine64 winecfg

Since this second prefix is not the default, you will need to define it via the WINEPREFIX variable every time you need to use it. It should look like this:

$ WINEPREFIX=~/.wine64 wine game64.exe

Note that while you can use 64-bit prefix for 32-bit applications, with earlier versions of Wine - including Wine 10 that is in the Excalibur repositories - you will run into many bugs. So it's highly recommended to keep a separate 32-bit prefix and use it as default (any prefix in ~/.wine folder is always considered to be the default).

Another option is to enable WineHQ repositories and install a newer version of Wine. These have added proper WoW64 support, which means the 32-bit stuff is no longer needed and everything can be run in the default 64-bit prefix. I have not tested this personally but I imagine it should work fine.

From general experience, games from the early-mid 2000s (think American McGee's Alice, Deus Ex, Rune, ZanZarah, No One Lives Forever, The Punisher, FlatOut 1 and 2...) run great in Wine. Especially true of 3D titles if you got the driver support sorted out. I found that some 2D games and programs actually run worse.

Regarding drivers - I play on Intel, so it was an easy ride for me. For Nvidia I wish you lots of luck, since you got the driver working I think there should be no issues.

See these threads for some Wine-specific tips and tricks:

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7676
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7685

I recommend reading the Wine manual and FAQ pages to get familiar with Wine registry, DLL overrides and uninstaller. It should be pretty straightforward, but feel free to ask for any advice. Winetricks is now in the repositories and is useful in certain specific cases. It's probably not as necessary if you opt for Wine 11+.

As I also don't use Steam, I recommend installing Lutris to manage your game collection (but not to install your games, see this post). You may also want to install gamemode, disable screensavers, display power management, Spectre mitigation (in GRUB) and increase ulimit if you haven't done so already.

Oh, and you may also find the bchunk and iat tools very handy when working with disk images.

Last edited by Calamity (Yesterday 16:14:26)

askfor · Yesterday 19:14:40

Thanks. This is a lot to read and I'll maka sure to read all of it before I even start. There is one more thing. I have installed Devuan from minimal 1 CD media. I wonder if there might be something crucial missing because of it. I caused me some minor problems with other things. As far as NVidia, I have no problem with it, so for.

It might also be worth mentioning that I am running IceWM as window manager. That means no compositor and other fancy stuff. I'd expect it to be a bonus, but it might not be so.

Calamity · Yesterday 19:52:16

The package management should be able to take care of all the missing dependencies. It can take a while to download and install all the stuff especially if your install is minimal (wine can be quite a heavyweight), but the process should still be automatic for the most part. I installed Devuan from LiveUSB and had no issues getting and setting up Wine. I only made sure to enable the i386 architecture first.

Yes, regarding the compositor - your assumption is generally correct. Not having it enabled is actually a good thing in many cases. Lutris has an easy switch for this called Disable desktop effects. I'm on Xfce, and I encountered an issue with at least Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal and FlatOut - in both games the polygons and textures flickered annoyingly at random times. The xfwm4's compositor was to blame for this. Interestingly, I experimented with picom, and it also caused flickering, but at much lesser intensity. With most games, it can't hurt to keep compositing disabled - if anything, for added performance.

However, I did encounter one game where the compositor actually helped me. It's a fairly obscure title - Faery: Legends of Avalon. Without the compositor, I'd get awful tearing, and the only way to get proper vsync in the game was to keep it running. So it may still vary from game to game - but this situation seems far more rare.

Some games may also refuse to give your display resolution back after the exit. Lutris has an option for this as well.
But it does not have one when a game changes your gamma settings, so here's one more fix you may need:

Create a new registry string value:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\X11 Driver]
"UseXVidMode"="N"

This will stop Wine from messing with display gamma settings. As a side effect, the in-game brightness settings will probably stop working, but you can of course adjust them at system level instead, if needed.

I'd say take your time, go slowly. You are right - this is indeed a lot of information, but it feels so rewarding when you finally get it all working! Wine is great for old games, oftentimes it runs them even better than the native platform.

Last edited by Calamity (Yesterday 21:04:35)

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#1 2026-07-09 19:18:33

Running older games

#2 Yesterday 03:41:50

Re: Running older games

#3 Yesterday 15:23:53

Re: Running older games

#4 Yesterday 19:14:40

Re: Running older games

#5 Yesterday 19:52:16

Re: Running older games

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