OK, I have a debian/knoppix system and I am trying to get gta3 to work under wine. I have gta3 on my win98 partition, and it works fine in windows. I have a recent (newest i guess) version of wine installed, configured, and working. When I goto load gta3 with wine, it says I need a win98 system. I went into my wine config and the only types were FAT32-win95 and NT40 and i believe win3.1. is there anyway i can trick gta3 into working in wine?... my system is pretty fast so im hoping i will finally be able to get some games working on my linux side.

I doubt it. Wine is pretty temperamental. It's either hit or miss. WineX supports GTA3 though:

http://www.transgaming.com/gamepage.php?gameid=517

you might consider either install WineX-CVS or purchasing WineX. It's worthy the investment