Hello there,

I was wondering if anybody had any joy running Overseer in Linux under Wine. I am at my wits end, tried everything I could think of, but the best result I was able to achieve after many a trial and error was the game running OK, but with no sound in the FMVs and no in-game music, a common problem otherwise known as the MIDI device issue.

Under Windows one can install the CoolSoft Virtual Synth and set the MIDI device in the game to one emulated by this soft running in the background, sadly enough it does not seem to work in WIne. I've tried various Wine versions, installing various Windows DLLs and so on, with the same result - still no MIDI sound. I can choose from two MIDI devices in the game settings, MIDI Throughput Port - 0 and Wine MIDI mapper, choosing either makes no difference. Sound is otherwise working fine, that is Tex's in-game speech and sound effects work, but as I've said there is no music.

If anyone has figured this out or has any ideas I'd be much obliged.

How did you get overseer to work in wine? I just get the mpeg error message.

Hi,

I used Lutris auto installation and it worked fine, except for the sound that is. If that's not your cuppa and it won't work out of the box in Wine, you can install ffdshow decoder, easiest way to do this is using Winetricks (select default prefix and then install a Win or DLL component and browse down to ffdshow), but I just gave up on getting the MIDI sound running after about 30 attempts.

I'm sure there must be a way to get this going, the game shows the various MIDI devices (Wine MIDI mapper, Timidity, etc) as I installed them, but there is only silence no matter which one I choose. Maybe it has something to do with whatever MIDI I have installed on my Linux distro, I couldn't get it to work on any though.

If you get it working I'd love to hear about it.

Ok, IT'S WORKING!!!
Install QSinth and run it BEFORE starting Tex.
Then you'll see the newdevice in the MIDI game configutation.
It's working all smooth, now

Hi there,
thanks for sharing your success story. I tried it out myself, but can't seem to be able to get it to work. There is now a new MIDI device in the game settings, but no sound again.

I played around with the QSynth settings - I tried changing the audio drivers and whatnot, still no dice. What Linux distro are you using and what audio driver - Alsa, Pulseaudio or something else? Perhaps there are some settings you could share with me to push me in the right direction?

EDIT

OK I got the in game music working now, but I have no sound in the FMV sqeuences. That is a bit weird. I'll keep playing around with it and see if I can finally crack this.

Ok, MIDI configuration is saparated from music configuration.
Try to maximize Movie volume and Sound Effect Volume.
Be sure "Mute" button is not checked

OK, here's an update, in case anyone is interested - I got it to work. Flawlessly!

First things first - it runs on a default Lutris installation, latest working version of Wine, 6.10 -7 under Linux Mint 20.2 with default stable kernel (5.4.0 -80) and all latest recommended updates. I am not sure if this is relevant or I am just being not tech-savvy enough, but I tried running Lutris under latest Manjaro and did have all sorts of issues with games under Wine (no sound, etc.) - lots of tinkering but with little or no effect.

Anyway, assuming you have it installed in Lutris, there are 3 things you need to do to make it work well. After you install run the game and the "Windows" system will ask you if you want to use ffdshow, click yes, always, don't ask me again. Second, you need to set the Wine emulation to Windows XP, anything newer I ran into troubles with in-game graphic textures not displaying properly. Last but not least, the install QSynth (as mentioned above - thanks kyuzo68) and get some decent soundfont - I use this https://github.com/urish/cinto/blob/master/media/FluidR3%20GM.sf2. Once you have it, fire up Q synth and click "setup". You will probably get some error but just ignore it, go to the Audio tab and select "alsa" as your audio driver. Then go to the "Soundfornts" tab and click open to navigate to where you downloaded your soundfont file. Remember, Q synth has to be running before you run the game and the soundfont file needs to be accessible so do not move or delete it.

Et viola, something I never thought possible for years is now a reality - the most difficult to run Tex game running flawlessly under Wine! Not a single reason to go back to Windows for me now, ever.

After a while here's another update - I haven't played this in years and recently decided to give it another go but I noticed with the recent versions of Wine I could not get the cut-scenes working (the famous MPEG2 error) no matter what, so courtesy of PCGamingWiki I found out you needed to update the FFDShow AND de-register the version that is packaged with the GOG installer. First de-register by opening wine console, navigating to the game folder and typing "regserv32 /u ffdshow.ax". Then install the latest 32 bit version of ffdshow from ffdshow-tryouts.sourceforge.net by running it inside your wine prefix. Just make sure you select libavcodec for MPEG-2 decoding in the setup and you are golden.

Perhaps a suggestion is warranted here - it would be nice if GOG updated the game installer to include the latest ffdshow, as apparently this is not a Wine issue but rather a "recent version" Windows thing.

Another thing I noticed is that there was quite a bit of screen flickering in-game and also the mouse cursor flickered so much it was practically invisible. No amount of tinkering with DGVoodoo's VSync or FPS limiters helped, the only thing that worked for me was setting Wine config to Windows 95 version.

Midi music still needs Qsynth running in the background with a sound font loaded before starting the game, and the Midi device needs to be set to Wine Midi Mapper in the in-game music settings.

With all of the above it is perfectly playable with the latest Wine version.

Hope this was of help to someone.