http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12444
--- Comment #9 from Andreas Dehmel zarquon@t-online.de 2009-02-03 14:44:01 --- On a hunch, I checked the general Serious Sam forums today and found some entries about Windows users experiencing the same kind of problems with the game. It turned out that all of them had multicore CPUs and for all of them the problem was solved by setting the process affinity of the game to one CPU. So I tried to do the same thing on Linux by starting WINE with taskset and hoping I'd nail everything required to one CPU (since running WINE always launches multiple processes, I wasn't certain I'd manage that). And that actually worked! I watched the demos and played a little, everything smooth as butter, no lags or freezes. So for the record: if you have a multicore CPU, start the game via e.g. taskset 0x00000001 $WINE_EXEC Bin/SeriousSam.exe and everything should be fine. Essentially you can close the bug now. I don't know whether other people will find this solution in the closed bugs section, though, I think this is one for a more generic WINE troubleshooting guide (if such a thing exists...), especially since it may also affect other older games.