You'll be able to post links once your rep is a little higher; it's something the site does to deter spamming.

And once you can, you'll be able to come back to your post here and insert the links (if you so choose).

Nice summation. I gave your post an upvote; by itself, it doesn't increase your reputation, but enough of them will.

The D3D Wine links are easy to find anyways, if you can't find them and get them dumping files into your install directory probably isn't the best idea anyways. I did it and it didn't really improve much. I haven't tried firing up the widscreen patch and additional patches though. I have a bunch of laptops so I'm just playing it on my Win7 machine, works perfectly on it. Long term I have no doubt GOG will get it smoothed out with Win8, but it's still pretty young and uncommon, especially for gamers interested in games made that far in that past so no biggie.

Re: TwoHandedSword: Links and Rep: Well that's good to know. The error message didn't really say why I couldn't post links, and the other posters didn't seem to want links, so I guess I just figured it was disabled globally. I'm not much of a forum person, so I dunno if my rep will ever get high enough to post links but maybe!

Re: wilbo26: Your premise is flawed. Patching a broken game and searching for things on the internet are not really related, and your attitude doesn't help any of the people who are having trouble playing the game. When I ran into this problem there were no clear instructions on how to fix it; after I solved it I made it a point to post some clear instructions. What's the issue with that?

Ok, I found older versions which had the ddraw.dll, but it seems to have made things worse.

oh and in case my specs get blamed:
core i5 2500k OC'd to 4.5GHz
8GB DDR3 RAM 1600MHz
GTX 690 4GB

Oh, and the lag only seems to show up in 1080p. If I keep it down to 1650x1080 or lower, I do not get any lag whatsoever if I just remove ddraw.dll and use the -no3d flag.

I don't believe that Wined3d 1.4.1 has all the dll files you need. Go to the WineD3D webpage click on the link http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/wined3d and download version 1.1.38 it should have all the dlls you need.

Now after copying the new ddraw.dll into my Arcanum directory, but now the game crashes before it gets to the title screen. Hmmm. I'm using windows 8 64 bit, and have an intel graphics processor. I tried right clicking and editing the cmd prompts, but I don't understand how to do that in Windows 8. Any help is appreciated, I really enjoy this game

Did you copy all three DLLs (ddraw.dll, libwine.dll and wined3d.dll) into the Arcanum directory, from the same version of WineD3D? The way you name only one of them after akazach's post makes me wonder whether you're trying to mix and match.

You might also test running with vs. without the -no3d and -doublebuffer flags (use the shortcut in the Arcanum directory - 'Launch Arcanum Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura' - adding flags to the target box in its right-click dialogue), although I'm not sure they'll do much to address a crash problem.

Yeah, at first I mixed and matched the files, then used all 3 from the same version, it still crashes. But it gets to the first loading screen, maybe the first 3 seconds of the opening cut-scene, and stops working.

I was thinking it might be because I have no idea how to edit in Windows 8 64 bit. Ive read that the edit command is simply non existent, so I really don't know how to go about adding the -n3d, -doublebuffer, and -window prompts to the shortcut

Is there another program I could use to do the same thing?

I just right click on the shortcut icon, go to Properties in the menu, and then edit the Target field, as in previous Windows versions. If you're trying to alter how the game's invoked from Metro, I'm afraid I don't know about that; I use Classic Shell.

Ah, I just edited it like you said. Added -no3d and -doublebuffer and it runs great. Crashes when I try to run it with -window, but oh well. Other than that, runs perfectly as far as I can tell. No lag when I scroll the screen or anything.

If you run it in Windowed make sure to take Double Buffer off.

I also have found a problem when using the wine files. Well for me anyway.

It seems it makes the game run emulated in a borderless window fullscreen. Which causes alt to open the context menu of the window, freezing the game whilst it's up. This isn't too big of a problem, but alt has some features like firing aimlessly, which is required for some quests including the one for the master bow training.

Edit: ignore; it does affect me as well.

Because the PC "Mastarace" is based on systems built with different parts, even though some run the same operative system or share some components. A slight difference in CPU manufacturer is all it takes for a program or game that runs flawlessly on another same-speced machine to not run at all on a second one. And the same goes for software differences, drivers, anti-virus programs, video codecs, GPUs... all of these matter a lot when determining how a video game will perform on different computers.

Hence no idea (and my checking was mistaken anyway; my post's been edited).