Ubuntu – Game Console Emulators (Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, Gameboy…)

Virtual machines are a good way to run another OS side-by-side on an Ubuntu desktop to share data but they all come at a high cost of performance drop on graphics demanding applications such as games are.

How good any game will perform in a virtual machine depends much on your host hardware, VM settings, the game's and your own demands of course. A scale from 0 to 100 is highly subjective, as you may be happy with the performance while others (eventually on other hardware) are not. It is something you have to try out for yourself, but be prepared for much frustration from slow graphics.

If dual-boot is not an option then I'd recommend to install the OS as host where you spend most of your time in, or where your hardware or performance demands are better supported.

The arcade emulator MAME is natively supported from Ubuntu but for release 14.04 you may have to install it from an unofficial ppa. This alone should therefore not be a reason to run Windows in a VM.

Many Windows games will also run with Wine. It is very likely that games not supported by Wine are the same that will also not perform well in a virtual machine.

Okay, i am so excited, because i searched for a long time and finally fixed this myself. Just a heads up, this might be incomplete.

To make this work, the proton "layer" requires access to some specific xaudio dll's, most notable the xaudio2_7 dll.

In here i'll condense my answer down to "what works" and try not to go to deep in to "why". First off because i would not call myself an "expert" in this topic and secondly because it is really messy and complicated. If someone want's to got in the deepend of this, feel free :)

How can you get this?

There are multiple layers to "what works" and you might find yourself satisfied earlier or later.

1

The most common fix appears to be, to install xact through winetricks (as for example discussed here, here and in many, many more parts all over the internet.

For that, you can run the following command:

WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx winetricks --force xact

This will (in the loostest terms possible) install the required xaudio dlls (and more) into the wine-layer used by proton.

Alternatively, you can also manually add the xaudio2_7 dll to you game, because where some crashes reported, which appears to be caused by installing the whole xact. For that run

WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx winecfg

and navigate to the "libraries" tab, enter "xaudio2_7", click add and you are done.

2

That didn't work? Okay, try to adjust the access level of the proton-layer. You can specify which parts the proton-layer should use, by doing the following:

run this command:

WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx winecfg

In the freshly opened window, navigate to the tab "libraries"

Select either *xaudio2_7 and/or xaudio2_7 and play with their access level from "Native" to "Native then Builtin". There have been multiple different positive results reported for all possible configurations.

Some even reported success with adjusting xaudio2_6 with that.

3

According to some other sources (like this issue on the proton github site itself), this does not always fix the issue.

I also found myself in this scenario. In this case, it appears that steam might override the wine access settings, which we set in 2.

This is a bit more tedious to "fix" but also can be done easily, by doing this:

1. Rightclick your game in the steam library.
2. Click on "Properties"
3. Add this to the "Lauchoptions" field WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_7=n,b" %command%

This explicitly overrides the access level of the xaudio2_7 to "Native then Builtin).

By the way: With this fix there can also finally be sound for Fallout 4 :)

Last straw

If everything else fails, try to do this (as reported here), though it should not be needed.

Download the latest FAudio build from https://github.com/Kron4ek/FAudio-Builds/releases, and untar. Then cd into the untared folder and run

WINEPREFIX=~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx bash wine_setup_faudio.sh

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll have 2 new games to attend to, i previously could not play because there was no dialog/sound and hopefully you will soon too :)

Have a great day everyone!