Half-life graphics flickering on ATI Radeon

Blue Lightning

Hi all
Thanks to some posts on these forums and several hours of frustration I finally got DRI going on my gentoo system.

I got wine emerged and managed to install Half-Life with no problem. However, once I actually got into the game I found that the graphics were flickering like crazy, and most of the wall textures were black or grey. Other than that the game seems to run fine. The suggested "gl_ztrick 0" in the Linux Half-Life FAQ reports "unknown command VModEnable" in HL's console (not the Linux console), and appears to do nothing.

I'm using Half-Life 1.1.1.0, ATI Radeon (R100), Xfree 4.3, DRI set up correctly (I think, at least glxgears gives me 1000+FPS), Wine 20030219, Gentoo 1.4rc3, kernel 2.4.20 (if it matters).

Any ideas?

jufoa · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2003 9:06 am Post subject:

hmm. i hear that half-life is pretty difficult to get working with ati cards. with nvidia cards it works great. no extra settings or configuration required. i recomend buying some cheap nvidia card for gaming in linux.

the_snark · n00b Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Posts: 13

Hello
Blue Lightning: I have a rather similar setup, at least as far as I can
tell from your system details. Half-Life was working fine for me a month
or two ago. I just tried again about two weeks ago and I had precisely
the same problem that you mentioned. Unfortunately it is not
immediately apparent exactly which factor is the culprit, as in the time
since I last played it I have upgraded loads of software packages. My
bet is on the new WINE and/or the new XFree86.
Interestingly, I have a new problem with it. I just tried it (with the new
xfree-4.3.0-r1 ebuild) and now I get this instead:

XIO: fatal IO error 0 (Success) on X server ":0.0"
after 181 requests (181 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

My new problem appears to be bug #16420:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16420
In any case: Don't worry about it being impossible. I imagine it is
just a temporary bug in one of the related software packages, and it
appears to have started recently. I am looking around to see if a
reported bug accounts for this.

-- Daniel Mannarino

Blue Lightning · Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2003 10:00 am Post subject:

Well, I got it working, just with WineX instead of Wine.

I suspect the current Wine is broken with respect to this (OpenGL in games - I tried Unreal 1 and it was broken also, though it still isn't perfect under WineX).