A6: Linux, Wine, Black Window

[Matt Morgan]

Hi, just getting back to Avernum after playing a while back.

 

I run Ubuntu 10.04 right now and A6 worked fine in Wine out of the box. A few weeks later I'm getting the black screen issue (that seems not to be particular to wine) but having trouble resolving it. Right around the time I was wrapping up the demo and planning to move on to licensing the game.

 

The advice I've seen says uninstall/reinstall, and that uninstall is necessary.

 

1. When I try to uninstall using the menu option, I actually get the installer it runs through its business and nothing changes.

 

2. When I try to uninstall manually by deleting program files, and then reinstall I must be missing something; the installer seems to know that Avernum was previously installed and offers to "repair" my installation. And then I still get the black screen.

 

Any advice, either on uninstalling or on other ways to attack this black screen problem?

 

Thanks

Matt

[Matt Morgan]

OK, I found some registry keys to delete and that made a difference; the install progressed as if unaware that I had previously installed.

 

Unfortunately, I still get the black screen. Nice theme song though!

 

If anyone has any ideas, I appreciate them, but I may be seeking new ways to play to the game.

[Micawber]

If running under an emulator (wine) doesn't help, have you tried a virtual machine (e.g. virtualbox)?

[Tyranicus]

Try launching the DirectX version. The executable should be named Avernum 6 DX.exe. If that doesn't work, I don't know what to tell you. I just tested it in Wine on my Mac, and it works. Not that I need to run it in Wine on the Mac of course.

[Matt Morgan]

Yes, same thing in DX version. Thanks, though.

 

It worked for a while, I'm actually most of the way through the demo I think. Funny thing is, I noticed the black screen first when coming out of suspend, but in that case it would come back eventually. You know, I'd wait 30 seconds and the window would display properly. Then all of a sudden it just started happening upon launch of A6.

[Tyranicus]

You might want to try completely uninstalling Wine and starting over.

 

Originally Posted By: Micawber

If running under an emulator (wine) doesn't help, have you tried a virtual machine (e.g. virtualbox)?

Wine is not an emulator in the strict sense of the word. It is a compatibity layer that translates Windows instructions into something Unix can understand, but it does not emulate any hardware. VirtualBox does, and can definitely be considered an emulator. I'm not sure that it would work very well with A6 though. The graphics acceleration in VirtualBox is quite limited. VMware would probably work though.

[Micawber]

Apologies if I mis-used the terminology.

 

Wine is a reverse engineered rewrite of the windows OS functionality - as such, it imitates windows. Last time I checked (10 years ago, I admit) Wine was an abbreviation for "WINdows Emulator".

 

Virtualbox provides a VM environment under which you install an actual windows OS (from whatever disc you have lying around).

 

That's the difference I was trying to convey.

 

Edit: Just tried to read the wikipedia entry for Emulator. Got about 3 paragraphs in and decided it's TLDR. Guess I will never know the difference.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Micawber

Wine is a reverse engineered rewrite of the windows OS functionality - as such, it imitates windows. Last time I checked (10 years ago, I admit) Wine was an abbreviation for "WINdows Emulator".

It's actually an abbreviation for WINE Is Not an Emulator. :v