[HOWTO] Run Prey without Stuttering

**GameGod** · June 24th, 2006

Hi guys,

What's Prey?
It's a kick-*** first person shooter by 3D Realms.

Where can you get the demo?
Right here...

Prey works in WINE 0.9.16, but on my PC at least, I was running into mad stuttering problems. The stuttering would eventually just completely break the sound a couple of minutes into the game, making it unplayable. (The stuttering is caused by DirectSound buffer underruns, and is a tricky problem that is being tackled by the WINE developers.)

Anyways, I found a patch that took care of the stuttering problems for me, so hopefully it'll help someone out.

BIG FAT WARNING:
This patch has the nasty side-effect (that I just discovered) of either forcing you to run all your WINE apps as root using sudo, or to type in the following command before you run your WINE apps:

Code:

sudo chown $USER -R /tmp/.wine*/*

Here's how to use it:

First, download the WINE 0.9.16 source and the patch:

Code:

wget http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wine/wine-0.9.16.tar.bz2
wget http://plan99.net/~mike/threadprio.patch

Next, untar the sources and move the patch into the right spot:

Code:

tar -xvjf wine-0.9.16.tar.bz2
mv threadprio.patch wine-0.9.16

Now, install the build dependencies for WINE, apply the patch, and compile WINE:

Code:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine
sudo apt-get install build-essential
cd wine-0.9.16
patch -p1 < threadprio.patch
autoheader
autoconf
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Almost lastly, set the setuid bit on wineserver (has something to do with the way the patch works):

Code:

chmod +s `which wineserver`

Really lastly, perform one last workaround so you can run wine as a non-root user:

Code:

sudo chown $USER -R /tmp/.wine*/*

That's it!

Now you can run Prey with WINE without buffer-underrun related stuttering!

(Occasionally you might still get a hiccup, but it's nothing WINE related... ie. it'd happen on Windows too, or with a native Linux version...)

Troubleshooting:

If you get an error like:
wine: '/tmp/.wine-1000/server-306-14f5af/socket' is not owned by you
... then try the "sudo chown......." workaround from above... (You might need to run it once before each time you
What the hell did you do to my WINE installation?
Relax, we can put your old WINE installation back with one line:
Code:
```
sudo apt-get install --reinstall wine
```

**FredB** · June 24th, 2006

Only in sudo ?

So, no demo for me. I am not suicidal !

Thanks anyway for the guide.

**Speedator** · June 24th, 2006

Sudo for wine-installment, yes, but not for running prey-demo. Works without problems here, too(Dapper, Wine 0.9.16).

**DaneM** · August 24th, 2006

I came upon this thread while doing a Google search. It's not necessary to install a patch to play the prey demo (and probably the full version) using wine without stuttering sound. Just do this:

Code: