Final Fantasy XI is the first online Final Fantasy RPG from Square Enix and the only MMORPG I used to play for about a good 4 years. Just recently within the past few months, they finally figured out how to run FFXI in Wine pretty flawlessly. Though there are still some downsides, such as no windower support (for obvious reasons) and unable to minimize the program without crashing, unless running in virtual desktop mode in WINE.

I recently tried installing it myself using the instructions from WineHQ on my laptop, which is an AMD 2.4 turion x2 ultra with an ATI 3100 integrated card. I got the results below in the Screenshot.

As you can see there was some problems with the graphics not displaying correctly. About 1/3 of the lower part of the window is all stretched out. Not only that, but the framerate was horrible than when playing the game natively on Windows.  Not sure if it was related to my video card or driver, but since nvidia is more linux friendly in terms of support, I installed it on my desktop which is an AMD Phenom Quad @3.0ghz running an nvidia 8800GTX. Results are below:

Now it was running flawlessly, it even seemed to run smoother than on Windows! Only problem was that if I minimize the window, it crashes, so I put it into a virtual desktop in the WINE config. I was even able to configure FFXI with my PS3 controller using jscalibrator in ubuntu 9.04 ($ sudo apt-get jscalibrator). Though I do miss using Windower, I still have a Windows partition on a separate harddisk for when I need it.

FFXI received a Gold rating from WineHQ, meaning it runs flawlessly with some minor configuration and/or tweaking. It’s the 2nd highest rating after Platinum. Platinum means it runs out of the box from Wine without any configuration. So in either to get FFXI running, you need to follow the instructions on the FFXI WineHQ page. It’s basically updating WINE to the latest version (by adding their source repositary/authentication), installing the game like normal, then copying dxdiagn.dll from an actual Windows XP installation over to the system32 folder in the wine installation, configuring pol.exe to run in vista mode, and overriding dxdiagn.dll to run in “native (Windows)”.

One thing you’ll notice right away when running POL is that the screen begins to flip upside down pretty often, not harmful, but annoying if anything. Also when I overlayed the background resolution in FFXI using the registry tweak, it noticed it wouldn’t allow it and running the game would cause large black borders to appear. But one interesting fix that was posted in the comments from the WineHQ page was to add the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
“OffscreenRenderingMode”=”fbo”

If the registry key is there already, then change it to the above, if not (like mine), then create it and add the value. That completely solved the flipping issue and the black borders, I was now able to run FFXI on a resolution of 1680×1050 with a background resolution of 3360 x 2100 flawlessly.

For full instructions, comments and explanations, go to the FFXI WineHQ page.

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=2739

For CrossOver users, as of the latest version (8.1.0), FFXI is even easier to get up and running. For WINE this should mean no more adding registry keys and no more offscreenrendering hacks. (Thanks Zak )

http://www.codeweavers.com/