Major problems remaining for Civ III (non-Steam) v1.0 on 8.1.4 on Ubuntu 9.10 amd64 (with ATI fglrx video driver) seem to be:

• CD copy protection. Use a no-cd hacked civilisation3.exe

• Font problems when starting. "Error loading font (Error code 28)"
  See also wine bug
  http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3498
  workaround in the installation folder:

  ln -s LSANS.TTF LSANS.fot

  chown root LSANS.fot

• The in-game map is totally corrupted

Christian Kirbach wrote:

Major problems remaining for Civ III (non-Steam) v1.0 on 8.1.4 on
Ubuntu 9.10 amd64 (with ATI fglrx video driver) seem to be:

• CD copy protection. Use a no-cd hacked civilisation3.exe

Interestingly I have a very similar setup - I'm using the amd64 kernel, but not an ATI card, I have an nVidia 8400GS using the 180 drivers in the ubuntu repos for 9.04. My CD version has no issues with copy protection failing (but does if I patch to the latest version). I'm using a winxp bottle, so perhaps try that if you haven't already.

Christian Kirbach wrote:

• Font problems when starting. "Error loading font (Error code 28)"

See also wine bug
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3498
workaround in the installation folder:

ln -s LSANS.TTF LSANS.fot

chown root LSANS.fot

I can confirm this fix does indeed make the game more playable - as in any *nix OS, there is more than one way to achieve the same result.

Christian Kirbach wrote:

• The in-game map is totally corrupted

Now this is one bug I haven't experienced. The in-game map seems to be functioning normally to me. Given the almost identical setups, with the only significant differences being the video card and the kernel version, I would suspect this is an ATI fglrx driver issue (as is notorious for these drivers).

I will post a screenshot of the in-game map as working for comparison.

Most still holds true for Civ III (non-Steam) v1.0 on CXGsmes 9.1.0 on Ubuntu 10.04 amd64 (with ATI fglrx video driver).
The only exception is that the in-game map is clear, but unit graphics as well as the bottom menus are extremely distorted.
Hmm well and the font error message problem is gone, although fonts are not the exact size they should be.

Crashes when trying to build a city "could not allocate buffer"