Wednesday 30 May 2007

Capturing Wine's messages better

Up til now I've rune the games from the command line, as suggested somewhere in the Wine web-site.

This means that all the messages and error messages that Wine produces appear on the screen. Which is good.

Unfortunately, games often change the screen display resolution. After the game has ended (I suppose 'crashed' is the technical term) I find I can't copy and paste the whole message, as some has disappeared off the right-hand side of the terminal window, and has gone forever. Items like:
fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 94 (SPI_GETMOUSETRAILS)
appear as
fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 94 (SPI_GE

I'm sure you'll agree that this is Less Useful&tm;

So, I need to send the messages to a file, not to the screen.

And there is a cunning Unix command called '>' for this. It sends all the messages Wine sends out to whichever file you name after the '>'.
wine c:\\CAVEDOG\\TOTALA\\totala.exe > theNameOfTheFileYouWantTheMessagesToGoTo

In my case, I used 'WineTA070529-02.log'

But, it's best if all the Unix system's error messages go to that file, too. We need the '&>' command. It sends both sets of messages to the named file.

So, in the end I used:
wine c:\\CAVEDOG\\TOTALA\\totala.exe &> WineTA070529-02.log

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