Wine: game that ran fine 10 days ago now gives black screen only

[MarkTheMorose]

Here's a curious one. I have just the two games installed through Wine: Age of Empires (the original), and Sniper Elite: Berlin 1945.

10 days ago I was running AOE quite happily. Two days later, it stopped launching properly, just giving a black screen. I run it in an 800x600 window, so I am able to kill it off.

Sniper Elite, meanwhile, despite being a 3D game, still works flawlessly. I'd have thought the more graphically intense game would stop working, and the simpler AOE would still work.

If I start AOE through Wine via the terminal, there are no error messages to say something broke.

I have in mind that there were updates to Mesa at that time; though I admit I don't really know what Mesa is, I know it's to do with graphics.

Grateful for any suggestions.

[deepakdeshp]

Only thing I can suggest is rollback your system to previous working state using backups if you have them. If you don't have ,do develop a habit of taking backup.

[ThaCrip]

I run it in an 800x600 window, so I am able to kill it off.

TIP: I suggest leaving the terminal open with the following typed into it as it can come in handy once in a while...

Code: Select all

wineserver -k

NOTE: any Windows processes running through the Wine will be immediately killed off. so I suggest not having anything important running when using that!!!

so if the game blackscreens and it seems there is no way to close out of it you can alt+tab over to the terminal window, even if you can't see much (just as long as the terminal window is active), then press ENTER and it should immediately kill off the Wine processes and get you back to your Mint desktop like normal.

p.s. you can try ALT+F4 if a game is active as sometimes that will immediately kill a game to as I noticed on older games if I use ALT+F4 it immediately kills them off. but when trying that same thing on Red Dead Redemption 2 for example, it asks to exit the game with a confirmation at which point I have to press enter. so it's not quite as effective here.

[rambo919]

Wine or driver update usually.

I remember having to run AOE in a virtual desktop if that helps.

This is where lutris helps, some games work better on system wine, some work better on proton, some work better on protonGE

[deepakdeshp]

There is wine compatible database https://appdb.winehq.org/ Please see if the game is listed.
Wine is flaky. Best is to run the game in dual boot mode or booting Windows as a VM.

[MiZoG]

More information is needed
1. System specs: see the link in the pink box on the top of this and of any thread.
2. Version/method of installation of Wine
3. Version /method of installation of game? Optical media? Digital download? Which store?

[Neigdoig]

If you can't get it to work, just play 0 A.D., since it's very similar to AOE II.

[Neophyte]

Heard elsewhere that there was an Nvidia update that broke things and that rolling back fixes it. Apparently, it can also affect you if you have an AMD GPU too, if you had previously used and Nvidia one and the Nvidia drivers are still on your machine.