http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14939
--- Comment #27 from Itzamna xamaniqinqu@gmail.com 2011-03-23 07:16:46 CDT --- Hello Ben, I hope you're enjoying Black & White - it's been a long time coming.
1) The XRGB1555 -> DXT135 compression algorithm is no longer essential to running Black & White, as it's only used to compress the screenshots into thumbnails when one saves a game. The crashes were caused by a shoddy implementation of DirectDraw blitting (used when making these savegame screenshots), Zdenek Behan has provided a hack that bypasses blitting. In the HowTo I have included all 3 patches needed for playing Black & White on Wine.
2) Personally I think this patent fear is nonsense, since only a backwards, oppressive and capitalist legal climate as in the U.S. would allow patents to kill innovation. If you like, I could write a patch to hook into libtxc_dxtn, though there are two concerns: A) the overhead produced by converting the 16 bit textures to 32 bit (libtdx_dxtn works with 32 bit textures) and then performing a function call to libtdx_dxtn.so would be just silly and B) the Mesa guys are finally turning on the light in their attics and are discussing providing DXT support natively in Mesa ( http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-March/005826.html ). I'll push a patch to provide fast, direct compression / decompression of 16 bit (A)RGB textures to Mesa when they've completed the merger.
For now, just follow the HowTo on the AppDB page and you're good to go. If you want an online match sometime, give me a yell! My rhino is feeling lonesome. =(