Linux Tutorial for Playing PSOBB on Ephinea

Did this tutorial work for you?

  • Yes, I'm running it on Linux!!!

    Votes: 14 63.6%

  • No, I'm running it on Windows still.

    Votes: 4 18.2%

  • No, I want to run it on Mac OS X.

    Votes: 3 13.6%

  • No, I'm using some other operating system anyways.

    Votes: 1 4.5%
  • Total voters
    22
The game still has slowdowns in wine, hence i tried vulkan. The slowdowns without vulcan come when i see many players in the lobby or many enemies.

I spend time researching and figuring out the steps to do (using dxwrapper for d3d8to9).

With the wrapper enabled, the game still looks fine without vulkan. Once i enable vulkan, the darkness issue appears
 
I'm experiencing the same issue, on the same machine it works well natively on Windows, but through Wine the framerate fall with many characters on screen.
It seems not a GPU issue in my case, changing graphics settings don't have any perf effect and it using less than 50% natively.

But it seems the CPU usage is higher than on Windows.
My CPU is not particularly powerful to begin with. What is you CPU, and is the activity going almost 100% when running through Wine?
I think it requiere faster CPU cores like i7.

Anyway I don't think it will ever achieve same perf as on Windows.
 
I am on an AMD Phenom II X4 Quad core. Game runs with 50 %to 80% accross all cores. i suspect its CPU related too.

Game is running fine on wine with dxvk except the darkness as depicted in my screenshots
 
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I tried this morning on Ubuntu, with a machine running an i7 9750H 6 cores, it have no issue framerate issue with lot of chars on screen.
But even with this CPU, usage is quite high, so I'm definitely not surprise of the perf on my other computer with a slow i5 2 cores.
 
I found a solution: instead of dxwrapper, use dxvoodoo2 and dxvk. Now i'm able to run pso with all effects maxed out even on 4k! CPU load remains at 40 to 50%.

To i used the psobb install script on lutris to set up the wine prefix (just search for phantasy star online in lutris)

This set me up with wine 5.6 and dxvk enabled. In addition to that, copy over the x86 directx files and dgvoodoo2 base files to PSO's install dir. open up wine configuration, go to libraries and add "d3d8" and set it to native. Afterwards. run the dgvoodoo2cpl.exe within wine. select your GPU's VRAM size and make sure to check the fast vram access.

PSO is working like a charm now (except for some minor micro stutters (which can be ignored in my opinion). I suspect these are related to DXVK or wine as i happen to see them in steam proton as well
 
Nice, I have not managed to make it works with dgvoodoo, I'm always stuck on a black screen at boot.
 
hannes said:
I found a solution: instead of dxwrapper, use dxvoodoo2 and dxvk. Now i'm able to run pso with all effects maxed out even on 4k! CPU load remains at 40 to 50%.

To i used the psobb install script on lutris to set up the wine prefix (just search for phantasy star online in lutris)

This set me up with wine 5.6 and dxvk enabled. In addition to that, copy over the x86 directx files and dgvoodoo2 base files to PSO's install dir. open up wine configuration, go to libraries and add "d3d8" and set it to native. Afterwards. run the dgvoodoo2cpl.exe within wine. select your GPU's VRAM size and make sure to check the fast vram access.

PSO is working like a charm now (except for some minor micro stutters (which can be ignored in my opinion). I suspect these are related to DXVK or wine as i happen to see them in steam proton as well
Click to expand...
using dgvoodoo worked a treat with the lutris prefix.
 
Do any of you know how to configure Ephinea PSOBB on PlayOnLinux (using Steam's Proton) to maximize performance?

I managed to install it and get it to run, but the game really slows down when there are multiple entities or movement being drawn in the screen.

This happens in a lobby with many players, a monster area or even inside Episode 1's Pioneer middle area between the shops and the hospital - when the NPCs and the warp for the admin room are visible, the frame rate drops a lot.

Running Ubuntu 20.04 on an Intel i7-8700 @ 3.20GHz (with hyperthreading) with a GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile 6GB and plenty of memory, so the hardware is more than capable to run it.
I suspect this is just a configuration step I need to undertake.

Thanks a lot!
 
One more thing you can try would be to try using d3d8 to d3d9.

https://github.com/crosire/d3d8to9/releases

Download the latest d3d8.dll and put it in the same folder as psobb.exe and online.exe

Not sure if it's relevant to your case but it helped some who had mobile laptops with NVIDIA Optimus use the graphics card over the Intel. Also, I've heard it increases performance on some peoples' rigs with GPUs anyway. It's needed for ReShade anyhow (which I'm not sure is supported with Linux and what not.)

I mean, either way, it's worth a try. If it doesn't work, just delete the DLL.
 
Thanks for the replies, Sodaboy.
Running a mobile dedicated GPU, so not running NVIDIA Optimus or anything like that.

I added the d3d8.dll and it didn't do much of a difference.
I also tried running in full-screen mode, which increased frame-rate a bit - however, after exiting the game, it left two black vertical bars on each side of the screen (Ubuntu desktop).
When I played either the original SEGA PSO Blue Burst or on Schthack, I also reduced the colors from 32 to 16 bits, but it did not help much this time.

If you have more suggestions to increase performance, let me know - this hardware is a powerhouse so it certainly boils down to compatibilities and drivers.
 
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Heya everyone,

I'm trying to play through Lutris on Linux Mint 20.2 but I have some issues with bbmod.

The game run perfectly fine (feels even smoother than Windows) but once I activate Dinput8.dll in Winetricks, to make bbmod work, my controller (DS4) stop working.

Anyone have a clue on how to fix this ?
 
I recently installed the game using the Lutris installer and wanted to share some information about a few problems that I had and what ended up working for me to resolve them.

First off, installing and launching the game using Lutris was easy and went smoothly (props to whoever wrote the Lutris installer). However, I encountered a blank black screen every time I got to character creation. I was able to fix this by switching wine versions from the default to System (7.0 (Staging)).

The only other problems I had were with getting my Xbox One Wireless Controller working properly. Certain buttons weren't registering at all and I was unable to map them using the in-game Pad Button Config menu (X, R Bumper, both Triggers, R3, L3, etc). They would register if I plugged the controller in via USB (all except the Triggers), but I really wanted to keep using my controller wirelessly over Bluetooth as I do for every other game that I play.

After hours of troubleshooting I found this comment in an old xpadneo issue on GitHub, and after setting the SDL_JOYSTICK_HIDAPI=0 environmental variable I was able to get those buttons to register, and it worked as well wirelessly as it did plugged in (meaning that both Triggers still weren't working).

Apparently the issue with gamepad triggers is a common issue (they need to send as buttons, not as axes). I was able to fix this by using AntiMicroX to bind L Trigger to the Up key (on keyboard) and R Trigger to Left Ctrl.

I wrote a more detailed guide (with pictures) of everything I did to install and get the game working on Linux using Lutris in 2022, as well as included a pre-launch script for Lutris to automatically start AntiMicroX in the system tray and load the controller profile, in case it helps anyone in the future who experiences similar problems.
 
I noticed using wine, it keeps looking for vulkan. Is is possible to run the game in wine without vulkan? Got two machines I'm setting up for pso with AMD HD6000 series gpus. Neither of which support vulkan. Running GroovyArcade (Arch based 15khz distro)

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For starters, I wouldn't recommend using this guide, and I would use something like the automated installer under Lutris regardless of Linux distribution (of course on GroovyArcade this may be awkward due to how it works - I would install from bash, open Lutris and set everything up, then link it somehow in GroovyArcade's game manager - not that I've used it)

Then in Lutris, turn off DXVK, VKD3D, D3D Extras, and DXVK-NVAPI / DLSS. This should disable all Vulkan support and use WineD3D's OpenGL libraries instead. You probably know already but DirectX is proprietary Windows software so can't be used under Linux, it needs to be translated.

That being said though, I would absolutely look into getting an upgrade to something that supports Vulkan, it will make your gaming life much easier as Vulkan is the bee's knees and it is the open graphics library of choice these days.
 
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Man this game is picky with wine. I was using wine-proton-7.0-5 with no problem. Today the game won't start. A couple other wine versions DO work but then I have audio crackle, which is why I was using that specific wine version (with FFXI too, where it also fixed the crackle). Damn it.

EDIT: Got around it in a dirty way since it was just the launcher not liking wine-proton. Game exe itself runs fine. Still wish I knew why this game and FFXI have this audio crackling issue though, I think it's to do with my new mobo since my old PC didn't have this issue.
 
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I haven't quite figured out the audio crackling issue myself.

When I was on KDE Neon, I had the audio crackling issue there no matter what Wine version I used, and this also occurs on the Steam Deck. Neon had just PulseAudio installed, whereas the Steam Deck uses PipeWire.

However I moved to Debian Stable (PulseAudio 14.2) recently and set up PSO there, and there's no crackling issues at all regardless of Wine version used, and it's great. I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly what causes it, but if you open winecfg and check the test sound in the audio tab, it will crackle really bad if you're having crackling issues.

If I had to guess, it's related to later versions of audio drivers as Wine itself doesn't seem to matter.
 
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