Wine Falls Out A Window

In anticipation of the imminent release of Fallout 3, I decided to replay Fallout 1 & 2. Since I am dumb, I decided to (try) to play them with Wine under Linux. Fallout installed, and it ran OK. The ingame cursor was a bit sluggish, but it was no big deal. After beating it, I installed Fallout 2 and went through the usual process: pop in CD, click on Setup.exe because Autorun fails with permission denied, wait ~20 minutes for it to install (how long does it take to transfer 650 MB?), wait another minute, realize the preview is not going to load because DirectDraw failed, etc. Then, I tried to run the game itself. The Interplay and Black Isle logo/videos played; the two Fallout intro videos played; the main screen came up; the select character screen came up; I selected one of the default characters; the prologue video played, and finally the main game screen appeared. However, all through this, THERE WAS NO FUCKING SOUND!!!!!

It's okay, maybe, Fallout 2 could be a bronze or silver rated game, and maybe the devs have been busy developing newer broken functionality to run newer games crappily and just have not gotten around to polishing older titles, or maybe they just spent their time jury rigging another open source browser to run in Linux. Let me check the rating. Yep, just what I thought, it's ... PLATINUM! Just how fucked up can you be? For those of you who don't know much about Wine, a Platinum rated application should run exactly the same as it does in Windows. Well, in Windows XP/Vista, sound probably works! I know you will say "it says to update to the latest version." I did; it still does not work.

Well, now that is out of the way, let's look at the other issues Fallout 2 has under Wine:

To avoid slow fading in/out use "emultaion a virtual desktop", or renice wine process later.

ALSA soundsystem may randomly crash wine with fallout games. Try choise OSS (works fine) or ARts (not tested).

WTF? Even if sound worked, how could an application which ALSA randomly crashed achieve Platinum status?

Now, to be fair, this might not be (entirely) Wine's fault. It could be the fault of downstream fucking things up, or it could be the fault of Linux's shitty audio stack. But fuck those reasons; I wanted this damn game to work!

Sure, maybe I could compile random Wine snapshots, install random Fallout 2 patches, and dick around with my Wine configuration thereby breaking every other application it halfway supported. Instead, I will just reboot to Windows and play it there. Problem solved!