Okay, after fiddling with Timidity (MIDI driver), I can get to the main menu and watch the intro video. The game starts, but crashes in the first battle. I'm going to have to do it again to see if anything is obviously causing the crash.
[EDIT]
Well, the crash just happens a few moments after the battle starts, nothing seems to specifically happen. It could be at the start of one of the enemy soldier's attacks.
[/EDIT]
Wine gives this just after the crash occurs: err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x7d22f9c0 "x11drv_main.c: X11DRV_CritSection" wait timed out in thread 0018, blocked by 0009, retrying (60 sec)
Loading my current save game (which is in Cosmo Canyon) gives an instant crash.
What bothers me is that the crash dumps are blank, and an emergency save file is never created, even if I say yes at the prompt.
Aali, if you're reading this, when the renderer needs to play a video, does it just get a filename or something along those lines, or is the linkage more direct? If it's loose, would it be possible to try and load the file with the extension changed to mkv, and fall back to avi if such a file can't be found? I hate the current audio quality, and it seems to me that a good solution would be to repack the video with flac audio in a matroska, which is supported by ffmpeg.
[EDIT]
Well, the audio does have more problems than the quality that bugs me. It bugs me on Windows too, so that's not a Linux thing, but in Wine, sounds are clipped at the front and end, seemingly randomly, such that if I switch between "Continue" and "New Game" at the main menu, the sound I get varies from the full chirp to a short squeak to a small pop.
[/EDIT]
Anyway, I'm still fiddling at this point. Kudos to Aali, the graphics are flawless, including the battle swirl, except that the credits effect before the main menu where the words fly from different sides and converge runs really really fast. Is that symptomatic of anything involving the renderer? The only scenario where I can see that happening is if Wine is responding incorrectly to calls to gettimeofday and its cousins, but that would mess up more than this effect.
Oh, and the MIDI kind of falters every so often, and it bothers me that it can't keep a steady tempo. That's a problem with Wine/Timidity though, and I'll worry about it later. Right now, MIDI works, and that's good enough.