If we can somehow see what the crash error is then we have something to work on, a starting point if you will.

On Windows the event viewer shows system and program crashes so I do think looking at that is a good starting point. Even if it just gives error codes you can look further into it.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to try pretty much the same as you. It just sounds so grazy that I had to try it: running a Windows game on a virtual Linux machine, which is running a "virtual" Windows machine. :D

Machine: Lenovo ThinkPad T400 running Win7/64bit (this runs GOG Icewind Dale fine by itself, but that's beside the point I hope)

I started writing detailed instructions how to install VMWare Player and Ubuntu 12.04.01 LTS in it, but phuck it. Long story short, in Ubuntu (which is running inside VMWare Player on my Win7 machine), I first installed Wine from Ubuntu software center, and after that installed GOG Icewind Dale in Ubuntu Linux (right click on the GOG installer .exe and chose "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader". And then proceeded normally as in Windows.

Seems to work pretty much perfectly. Sounds are fine, graphics are fine, I could start a new game, save a game. No problems. Ok, there was some lag in the intro music/speech, but I presume it was just because this machine is rather underpowered to begin with, especially for so many virtual machine/emulator layers and whatnot. Quite frankly, I'm amazed how well it works! I might try it on some other machines too.

So while this seems a very heavy-handed way to try to make the game work on her machine (installing VMWare, Ubuntu and Wine), the OP might try this approach as well, just to get the damn game to work. Naturally it would be preferable to get the game run straight from Windows, but if just getting the game to run is the highest priority over anything else...

If this works for her, then her GOG purchase might not be in vain after all, because it is quite possible the original retail version she already has will not run ok in Wine, thanks to its copy protection (which wants to install some Windows drivers that Wine can't accept... I recall at least the IWD expansion pack might have e.g. Starforce). Since the GOG version has no such copy protection drivers to install, no problemo with Wine.

Note: I am unsure whether the graphical problems she has in her Vista machine (greyed out screen etc.) would not appear also on Ubuntu/Wine for her. I am unsure how VMWare/Wine access the actual hardware. As said, on my PC GOG IWD runs great even without such workarounds.

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

http://www.ubuntu.com/

tburger and timppu, this is what I like about this community. Great lengths are taken to help people get their game running!

Out of curiosity, tburger, do you have an ATI or Nvidia card?

You may be able to run IWD by selecting a Windows version of 98 in winecfg for IDMain.exe.

One thing I can't figure out with my setup (VMWare/Ubuntu/Wine): how to set it up to play in full screen, ie. so that the IWD screen is scaled up to fill the screen. Now it runs in kinda window in the middle of the screen, with black borders in both up, down, left and right. Maybe it is just some Wine setting? Or I don't know if some VMWare Player setting affects it too. As a last resort, maybe either Windows or Ubuntu resolution can be lowered to match game's native resolution.

EDIT: I guess the problem is that VMWare Player does not scale to fill the whole screen, if you set Ubuntu to use lower resolution than your current Windows desktop resolution. Maybe it is possible somehow, but in the meantime at least setting the resolution of both Windows desktop and Ubuntu (running in VMWare) to 800x600, and running Ubuntu in full screen mode, lets you play the game full-screen. A tiresome workaround, but at least there's a way...

Also, with Ubuntu 12.04 with that stupid "Unity" desktop or whatever, the Unity bar seems to pop up on top of the game screen sometimes, e.g. if I change the IWD ingame graphics settings. Then the Unity bar blocks the IWD side icons, and scrolling the screen with the mouse doesn't work either. But, clicking on some Unity icon, and then back to IWD screen, seems to get the whole screen back for IWD. Maybe this annoyance is only with Ubuntu/Unity, not some other Linux distros.

Other than those two things, it feels pretty much like playing the game straight from Windows.

Sorry if this was mentioned already, but I didn't want to read 7 pages...

Have you tried playing IWD with the GemRB engine?
It's a open source "port" of the infinity engine, which runs on windows, linux and android.
Here's the webpage:
http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start

ATI 9600 Pro (please, no biting remarks :-P)

Lucky you - went it all hassleless out-of-the-box? No additional tweaking, downloading updates for Ubuntu, playing with settings was necessary?

On my install of Ubuntu 64bit, IWD and IWD2 did not work until I set the games exe to Window 98 mode (screen shot attached).

But you mean installation on real hardware? For some reason in VirtualBox Wine does not save mode I pick for IWD. Will have to experiment a bit more.

Real hardware (I run Ubuntu Linux exclusively).

I've now tried it both in Lenovo T400 (ATI Radeon graphics) and ASUS G75 (NVidia Geforce), both running Win7/64bit. In both it went identically:

- Install the newest VMWare Player

- Install Ubuntu 12.04.1 inside VMWare using the automatic Easy Install option (when VMWare says it wants to install VMWare Tools for Linux, say yes). Skip any nagging screens to upgrade to the commercial VMWare Workstation version.

- When you are finally running Ubuntu, let it download and install any pending Ubuntu (security) updates.

- Install Wine from the Ubuntu Software Center

- Copy IWD setup exe into Ubuntu (either left-drag&dropping from Windows desktop to VMWare (which seems a bit buggy sometimes), or e.g. with an USB memory stick that Ubuntu can detect), or download it from GOG inside Ubuntu.

- Install IWD by right clicking the exe and selecting "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader"

After that it runs ok, except for these things (all happen with both of my PCs):

- The audio in the intro FMV stutters somewhat (the man telling a tale etc.). During the actual game all audio seems fine.

- The game runs in a small 800x600 "window" with black borders on all sides, ie. it is not scaled. I didn't find any suitable option in VMWare settings, so for now the only way to overcome this for me is to set the desktop resolution both in Windows and VMWare/Ubuntu to 800x600, before running the game. Then it looks as intended, black bars only on sides.

- If you don't set the resolution to 800x600 and VMWare to run in full screen, in some cases the Ubuntu Unity taskbar may pop up to block part of the game screen, You can reclaim it back by clicking somewhere on the icon bar and back to the game screen. This does not seem to happen at all if you did the earlier resolution change step.

I didn't try to set any Win9x compatibility settings in Wine/Ubuntu, I don't even know how to set them (I haven't used Wine much before.)

The funny thing is, after all that hassle, IWD (and probably other GOG Infinity engine games) actually run a bit better on ASUS G75 in VMWare/Ubuntu/Wine, than when run straight from Windows 7. Well, apart from the stuttering sound on the intro and non-scaling graphics, that is. :) Namely, I get also the "blocky fog of war"-artifacts because of the new GeForce graphics chip (there are workarounds for that), and from Wine those don't appear even though the graphics chip is the same.

I think I saw in the software center that it is 1.4.1, ie. the same as yours.

But now I seem to be unable to confirm the version, I saw "1.4" in some About-screen. I have still problems understanding how to find my way around inside Unity. Learning to cope with Unity feels even harder than trying to learn play Master of Magic. :)

EDIT: Ah, FINALLY I found how to open a damn single terminal window in Unity. :) "wine --version" says "wine-1.4". I don't know if that means 1.4.1 or if it is an older version, because I could swear I saw it being listed as 1.4.1 when I was about to install it. But who knows.

Even after giving "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade" in Ubuntu terminal window, Wine is still listed as 1.4 (not 1.4.1). So I presume it is now the latest version regardless.

So from my point of view the differences between yours and mine are:

- Different PC hardware naturally (but I get similar results in two quite different PCs though, so maybe it shouldn't matter that much)

- You use VirtualBox, I use VMWare Player in order to create a virtual Linux machine? (I haven't ever tried VirtualBox, I might try it just for the kicks.)

- You use an older Ubuntu LTS release than me.


I think it is interesting you were able to recreate the original problem (if I understood right), which could certainly help to find the root cause on the problems getting the game to run on OP's Vista machine, without having to resort to these complicated "run it in a virtual Linux machine which is running Wine"-workarounds.


And now I am interested to try out something completely different, the GemRB engine that Verdan mentioned. If it works ok, it would be a much more elegant (=simpler) workaround. But maybe I should do some real work for a change...

(I hope nullzero is able to keep up the list, this is branching to so many directions, but I feel there are now at least some potential workarounds available, if not real solutions to the original problem.)