The installer works flawlessly, the game starts and the intro movies play alright, with no delay or any problems, but there's some problems after that.
First of all, the loading screens are flipped upside down (by the way,this also happens with Silent Hunter 2), then, there's a deal of slowdown drawing the start menu, the mouse pointer icon on the menu disappears, and when it's there is upside down!. I haven't been able to go further than this since i can't see the pointer most of the time and the menu is almost unresponsive.
I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 and the latest wine version, with options (Winecfg) set to default, i exceed the minimum system requirements.
Anyone has any advice on how to make this playable?

I'm running 1.1.33 under debian stable and while I haven't had a chance to actually play any yet, I mostly followed the appdb entry from about step 9 onwards (the part about running with -no3d and -doublebuffer) and the game seemed to run fine after install.
I'll try to come back and update once I get a chance to actually play a bit.

I actually had a similar problem with Tropico 2 and a previous Wine version, and I had to choose "software rendering mode" (while upside down) in the ingame menu in order to fix it. I believe I read somewhere that the bug is related to Nvidia's proprietary driver. However, one of the latest wine upgrades took care of that issue for me and I haven't had a problem with hardware rendering since.
Having just tried out Arcanum, it seems to work fine for me so far. I didn't do any of the configurations from the appdb entry that sprork mentions. It simply ran perfectly out of the box.
Are you running the latest stable version or the development version of wine (currently 1.1.37)? The development version has fixed a lot of 3D rendering issues, and is generally not particularly unstable at all, so I really recommend upgrading often. Of course, you might already be using the Ubuntu ppa from Wine. I'm running Fedora, and since there are no updated rpm's, I tend to compile the new versions myself. Compiling wine is also pretty straightforward and might be a good idea with regards to maximising hardware compatibility.

Just posting to thank you both guys, this thing is running like clockwork now! I had to make a little icon on my desktop with "wine Arcanum.exe -no3d -doublebuffer" on it.
Also, Julipan, i didn't know there was a known problem with Nvidia's drivers, but i'm going to check out a few games that i had problems with before. I just recompiled from source and Wine is actually running faster, acording to TOP is using about 20% of one of the cores.
Thank you guys, much appreciated!

Sorry for the long time between posts, here's a bit of clarification now that I've gotten a chance to play for a bit.
First, I should probably disclose that I'm using the nv drivers so I don't really have hardware acceleration in the first place (which would make sense as the reason for the no3d option).
When attempting to run the game without the -no3d option (like Julipan), it loads and the opening movies play, but there is no mouse cursor. With the -no3d option though, the game itself appears to run fine so far, and everything works. Since it sounds like Julipan is using the nvidia drivers, it leads me to believe that the issue with running the game normally is more of a lack of hardware acceleration (at least on my part) than a failing of wine.

hi...
I have a problem, reported in several places but I didn't see any explanation/solution/workaround: I have two clicks for every clicks in the character screen. Thus I can't even create a character, as can't increase any stat by only one, always by two...
Tried with unofficial patch, Hires, in desktop window, with -doublebuffer and -no3d and the problem is always there. (Ubuntu 9.10, latest wine).
anybody have smthing for me? please?

Yeah I have the same problem, ie no cursor in the game. I am running OpenGEU 8.10 and using playonlinux with 1.3.3. Can anyone help?

I have the same exact problem. The game works perfect otherwise, but when I try to choose a spell in the character creation screen, there's always a click, then it freezes for a second and it clicks again on it's own, making it so that the spell is not selected. And after that, it does it to the stat increase buttons too. I'm running the game on Macbook with Crossover Games.

Any solution for this problem would be highly appreciated, it's a shame that such a minor problem is keeping us from playing the game.

Could somebody please be so kind as to enlighten me, how I would run that installer in Wine? I am on OS X, but that should not matter, since Wine is Wine. I am completly new to Wine, never used it before, so I am a bit confused, how to start the application, especially, since I have heard, that the GOG downloads are a bit specia, in some container or so?!

Is one Wine Prefix enough? Do I install all games in there?
What would be the preferred Windows version for Arcanum?

GOG definitly needs a Wiki for such stuff.



EDIT: Ah, no need to reply. Found out myself. I was just too confused. For those confused like me:

Under Wine, install 'Universal Extractor' from legroom.net. Then start it, browse to the archive you downloaded from GOG, it will extract it (default to a folder named like the .exe without .exe in the same directory) and from there you can 'import' this in different ways: Either you launch it via WineSkin, import it into your local ScummVM or into the folder where you keep your DosBox stuff. The game is in a folder called {app}.

Was there a regression with the latest version, or did a setting just go awry?

I have my launcher set up with env WINEPREFIX=blahblahblah -no3d -doublebuffer and it worked well (though the sound was messed up).

Yesterday I patched with an update to Wine 1.3 and now the game is too slow to play, and has the doubleclick bug again.

Update: Reverting to 1.3.26 fixes it, 1.3.28 breaks it. I put in a bug report.

I just wanted to drop by and say that Arcanum seems to run great on my setup, played for an hour straight without any issues. I'm using Wineskin 2.5 on Mac OS X, but there should be no difference compared to real Wine.

Wine Version: 1.3.36
Winetricks: ddr=gdi (this might only be needed for Mac OS X, it fixes a flickering issue I have with Arcanum since 1.3.29. Same issue with Arx Fatalis, but this trick won't do it)
Launch the game with -no3d -doublebuffer (no3d might not be needed but it doesn't hurt either). It's so good to get a proper mouse acceleration with high resolution, before higher resolutions would slow the mouse down, making the game a pain to play.

I'm using the unofficial patch and the high-res patch (play it in 1280x800), mouse movement is natural Mac OS X acceleration and loading times are pretty good. The patches were installed in using Wine as well, no help from Windows needed at all.

Hello friends, I too am having issues running GOG's Arcanum in wine. I downloaded the wrapper from paulthetall and installed the game, which went smoothly. When I try to play the game, however, my screen goes nuts. While sound appears to be working just fine, the screen in a whole mess of flickery white blocks, and my dashboard kinda pops in at the bottom of the screen. I can kind of see the intro videos, but they're mostly obscured but this big fragmented, blocky mass. I'm running the game on a macbook pro with osx 10.7 and the hd3000 graphics card. Any help would be MUCH appreciated. Thanks!!

EDIT: Tried hitting cmd, ctrl, a and running in windowed mode. The flickering issues appears to go away when I do that. Not sure if that means anything.

EDIT part 2: I tried running ddr=gdi in winetricks and running orm=backbuffer in winetricks as recommended to a poster on another forum a while ago who appeared to be having similar issues. That poster didn't confirm if these worked for him, but they did not work for me.