https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46361
--- Comment #34 from Zebediah Figura z.figura12@gmail.com --- There have been many changes to parts of the joystick stack in Wine recently. Many of these improved applications. What distinguishes Proton is that it uses an old Wine version, and therefore does not include some of these changes. Doing exactly what Proton does is therefore not in fact necessarily desirable, as it would mean breaking other applications. Presumably one or more of these changes caused problems for Sonic Mania, but a priori it's not easy to tell which, nor how. If it was that easy we'd never have regressions in the first place. Even from examining logs this is not always possible.
As it happens I did examine logs, and I found a problem which may have been fixed by https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/commit/ea7b8ad9241559d5b9a0ab9082a766... (and then https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/commitdiff/a0a3b6b90e2d938200bbe86fd1...). The fact that it still crashes means that there must be a second bug hiding behind that, and it's impossible to tell what that could be just from that log. This is why I asked for new logs. Two crashes can have very different causes.
I apologize that compiling Wine is difficult and time-consuming. I've been trying to work on improving our instructions to make is a bit easier. As for packaging, I don't know what distribution you're using, but I suspect the "official repository" is not the one under our direct control. If I'm wrong, please feel free to complain, ideally by filing a bug with the Packaging component.