Are you running full-screen or windowed? Does it change if you switch to the other?

Fullscreen. No change if I run windowed.

I should note that the choppiness occurs in-game and not at the title and menu screens.

Created attachment 45908 [details]
Hack to ignore dinput's full-screen clipping

Does the attached patch improve things when running full-screen?

I've applied the patch to 1.7.1 and no change with the cursor movement.

Also, I can't test it on anything after 1.7.1 because it seems a bug was introduced in 1.7.2 that breaks games that need ddr=gdi. I just get a black of gray screen.

(In reply to comment #4)
> Also, I can't test it on anything after 1.7.1 because it seems a bug was
> introduced in 1.7.2 that breaks games that need ddr=gdi. I just get a black of
> gray screen.

If you haven't already done so, please file a separate bug about this and do a regression test to find the cause.  Thanks.

I've opened an additional issue for the DirectDraw problem here (http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34878).

For this mouse cursor issue, Microsoft still has a trial version online if you're interested in replicating: http://download.microsoft.com/download/aoe/Trial/1.0/WIN98/EN-US/MSAoE.exe

Otherwise, we may have to wait for the DirectDraw problem to be fixed until we can proceed further.

There are several issues going on that I can reproduce with the demo you linked.

First, you need to install native DirectPlay (dplay) to work around a problem where an address range that built-in dplay needs for itself has already been used by something else.  I ended up installing all of DirectX 9, so it's possible that it needs more than dplay and I wouldn't have noticed.

With ddr=gdi, I am seeing the black screen (which you filed as bug 34878).  I didn't investigate this.

Without ddr=gdi, you run into bug 34166.  You can work around that for the Mac driver using a patch on that bug.

After I did that, the cursor seemed OK to me with current Wine.  However, I wasn't able to compare it to the X11 driver.  The workaround for bug 34166 only applies to the Mac driver.

It's possible that this patch <http://source.winehq.org/patches/data/101087> might help with this bug.

Thanks Ken, I think that patch fixed the problem.

I've tested with both Age of Empires 1 and 2 on Wine 1.7.11 with Henri's hack for #34166 applied (http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34166#c23) so that I could use ddr=opengl instead of the ddr=gdi workaround for the flickering (which only worked up until 1.7.1 but appears to have been fixed in 1.7.9).

So mouse movement is definitely fast and responsive as compared to X11 for these games. I should also note that I tested without directplay installed for Age of Empires 1 so I'm wondering if that's even necessary now. Though before your patch I found that installing directplay as you had suggested seemed to help.

Not sure what the deal is with #34166 but it looks like one of those issues that is never going to be fixed since blame is coming from both Apple and WineDev, so best to keep that hack around. Without that patch there's no way I can actually test these games in the default ddr=opengl.

Great!  Thanks for testing and reporting it fixed.  For the record, it was this commit that fixed it: http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/commit/77f0a63b4fce90e4a35393eb16468f11a922ea3a

Regarding directplay, the need to install native was because of a conflict over an address range.  It's possible that as the code changes, or even is recompiled, that it will change which addresses it takes up.  So, it may be that the Mac driver has changed such that it's loading in a different address and allows built-in dplay to work.  Might break again at random, though.

Closing bugs fixed in 1.7.12.