Icewind Dale - 2nd Post - intel vga, 64-bit Linux

Recently I've revisited Icewind Dale part I., after a while. I was facing trouble starting the game copied from a previous installation to my new Arch Linux desktop. I was forced to reinstall, but this time I decided to install it on my laptop to make it easier to access whenever I feel so.

So the configuration of the laptop is something like a dual core Intel 64-bit with Intel GMA 965 driven by a freshly updated Arch Linux distro. The installation went nice with all the expansions (plus the Lure Master free to download expansion) along with the No-CD patch for the 1.43. This time I didnt even have to bother with symlinking devices. Just used Winecfg to add the CDROM as a drive - today's wine is handling these things very nicely, even the automounted devices.

To make things more interesting I'm running this on an AMD64 architecture. I have to use bin32-wine and lib32 packages to be able to run the 32 bit Windows executable. The wine is version 1.1.35 - it's important, because with a previous version it didnt want to start with GLX error, or another wine version crashed upon pressing Okay in the character generation's background story editor pane.

So to sum it up, even the weak Intel GMA 965 is able to handle things in 1024x768 with latest xf86-video-intel driver 2.9.1 and X.org 1.7.3. I did switch off some of the effects tho' to make it run smoother - a bit of a shame for a video chip from 2007, isn't it? Well, that's what you can expect from Intel vga, it's not for gaming certainly. Still this time it's a 'go' situation, it works well for a game made in 2001 + wine from 2009. :)

Knights of the Chalice

This one is a recently released D&D RPG featuring very nice and challanging tactical combat plus very old school style graphics, 2D pixel art. It's classic and for those who are fond of those old times. The game features 3 classes to choose from (knight, cleric, wizard), is turn and party based. It has a lot of hours of gameplay in it, and for me it brings back the feeling of the DOS game Dark Sun. I'm already playing it for hours under Linux with latest wine, my party is level 6. So far no major problems with it except that there's no music (which is not a major thing IMO, it's midi music and for me it gets boring after a while too (tested it under Windows too :P)).
So far I have been able to play it with binary nvidia driver + wine. Intel driver didnt work well on my laptop (had to set backbuffer for OffScreenRendering in regedit to make it start, but it was way too slow!) So requirement is wine + nvidia (or probably ati) video card.