https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40479
--- Comment #59 from RD frail.knight@gmail.com --- With wine staging 2.8 released with additional support for the following:
"Starting with this release Wine Staging generates more functional 32-bit fake DLLs. For those unfamiliar with Wine internals, fake DLLs are used as a placeholder inside of Wine prefixes, whereas the real implementation resides in ELF/Mach-O libraries. The content of those placeholders does not matter unless applications try to load such files without using the Windows API, which some DRM / anticheat modules unfortunately do. With Wine Staging 2.8 you will now get a stub exception instead of a random crash when such a DLL is used. For ntdll functions starting with Nt or Zw prefix the fake DLL will correctly forward calls to the real implementation."
...Does this make console output any more relevant?? Can we glean anything new from it like new stub exceptions? The game still doesn't launch, but I certainly did not experience a full wine crash with backtrace.
I do realize Andrew Wesie's patches may not be included in wine staging 2.8. I'm not sure what ever happened to them. Were they ever merged?? I do not see his name listed in the patches list any longer.