And now finally it works. The problems with this game under wine are the same as under windows xp. The error messages are meaningless probable deliberately so to avoid hacking. The installation cds were corrupt and one of the .pak files was faulty. replace the .pak files with good ones and it works. But there is still a lot of tweaking to do. It would be nice to have an icon on the desktop to start the game or a menu entry. Wine does sometimes generate menu entries but for this game I have to browse with nautilus to .wine and then to SoF2.exe, right click on it and then select wine. winecfg-->drives must include /media/sofii_1 or it cannot find the cd. Some of the patches available online to avoid the need for a cd contain viruses and so are not to be trusted (password stealers). There is no easy way to implement the path variable under wine except using wine regedit and even then wine cannot find SoF2.exe. But I love wine more and more. It should be possible to have a launcher on the desktop containing "wine SoF2.exe". Many other windows applications can be used like my favorite text editor ultra edit, and games like sol and bgammon. I just wish now that I know how to implement set path so that program starting is easier. There must also be a way to join dosbox with wine so that starting old dos games would be easier. Once again thank you to the developers of wine for the many unpaid hours that have gone into this project. Hopefully I will never need to use Microsoft windows again. It was only useful for games. You cannot expect developers to donate the man years that it takes to write a game for free.
