A friend of mine tries to get some old win95 games to run... xwing fighter and such. They work in wine, but they don't run on XP, dosbox or win95 in a virtual machine (needs directX 7 or something). You can download some zip files for windows from winehq: http://www.winehq.org/site/download, but I don't know what to do with them.

Try running Microsoft's Virtual PC. You can download it for free, and install win95 or win98 that way. It is still a vm, but I found that it does run windows better than vmware and I have played starcraft and discworld II with no real problems.

I think he already tried that... doesn't support directX. I might be wrong though.
Right now the latest VMWare Fusion Beta supports up to DirectX9, but it's not available for windows either.

Discworld II and Starcraft require directx, and this was in win98, so I would imagine win95 has a version of directx much lower than 98. Virtual PC handles windows and directx relatively well.

But Diskworld and Starcraft are both 2D... I don't think 3D stuff works. I'll ask him if he tried that, I'm pretty sure he did though.

Sounds about right. VMWare does not support 3D acceleration.

Probably it'll work same way as in *nix. "wine.exe program_name". But wine for windows uses quite old version of Wine.

It does.

I'd try wine for windows first, though, since wine performance probably will be better.

By the way:
Have he really tried to google for solution? Games probably give some error messages, which can be used to find solution. Changing program compatibility settings also might help.

Apparently not:
http://www.rebelsquadrons.org/classicgames/tie.php

Anyway, I'm still curious how to get that wine for windows stuff to work... there is no wine.exe in there, just a bunch of dll and cfg files.

VMware Workstation might support direct3d, but VMWare Workstation costs 200$

I wasn't actually aware that they were working on that, so that's a good one to know. Thanks! But I don't think that counts. Experimental. I'm talking production level ... Stable.

1) Oh, I forgot. There is no real need for wine.exe, because you can use native windows loader. So you are probably(I'm not certain about it!) supposed to copy dll's into program folder (do not put them somewhere else (especialy avoid c:\windows\system32), you might damage your Windows system very badly, if you are unlucky) or something like that. But before doing that you should double check all available documentation for "wine for windows" - I've no idea how exactly "wine for windows" works - on Linux Wine emulates registry, for example, and it is unclear whether wine for windows will use native registry or emulate it's own. This means that toying with windows system in this way is really dangerous - for example you can damage your windows system (registry) by doing something wrong - for example, if with wine for windows you are supposed to copy *.dll's into program folder and it emulates it's own registry, then you might damage your system's registry if you forget to copy *.dll responsible for registry access (that's advapi32, if I remember correctly).

Aren't there any instructions in the packages? Maybe some kind of readmes? Or maybe comments in *.cfg files?

2) Or you can try installing cygwin and compiling wine from source within Cygwin. That's not guarranteed to work, though, although compatibility will be better in case of successfull compilation. That's because "Wine for windows" version is way too old.

3) If you have some kind of programming knowledge you could try building wine on Windows using either Microsoft Visual Studio express (free) or Mingw (or OpenWatcom, or whatever). That's may be difficult, but it is possible. Also, as I've said, you don't have to convert all parts wine project on windows (I think it isn't really necessarry to convert kernel32.dll, gdi32, user32 and such, but I may be wrong). You'll just need some *.dll's that doesn't work in your current windows version.

"wine for windows"

your kidding me...

but here's a blurb on it...