Well, I saw my brother playing Stronghold: Crusader through Wine about a week ago, and that got me wondering how well Age of Empires and the Age of Kings were running in Wine now, with it having a somewhat turbulent history with Wine in the past. Unsurprisingly networking still fails because it utilizes DirectPlay, but the rest works surprisingly well.



There are a few annoying glitches here and there, mostly audio related, but it does seem to mostly work and is fairly stable. One weakness that AoE reveals in Wine though is that it needs to get better Midi support, which could be done quite simply by giving it proper Timidity support. As it is, assuming you have Timidity++ installed, you can get some Midi support through Wine by launching a Timidity sound server from a terminal using the following command:

timidity -iA

But even then it is still not the best as there can be long load times between tracks. Still, an improvement on how it was from when I first was able to fully migrate over to Linux. :)