Makes me wonder if forking Wine to have a "Legacy Windows" compatibility layer... for... modern windows would be worth half a damn.
replywine has more backwards compatibility options than Windows itself, but in this project also triggered some different buggy code paths in the original (see cousin comment).
replySo this game still needed its bugs fixing to run in a modernised Windows, or it would have been stuck in a hardware emulator running Windows 95.
Your project's readme suggests that you tested on Proton. How poorly does the unmodified game run in Proton and/or Wine when you limit it to a single CPU? Very? Somewhat?
replyDon't know actually!
replyBut after it was working on Windows, I tried it on Crossover and found that MacOS doesn't allow you to pin to one CPU. So it needed a racey scheduler rewriting.
There was also a difference in the way wine provides printer drivers that caused a buggy code path to run in the game, which caused a crash on the Steam Deck too.
So those bugs would have been critical even if the display implementation had worked.
The patch also adds an OpenGL window & scaling filter as the game's primary output, so it doesn't rely on GDI for pixel output any more.