Hi
I did a quick search of this and I couldn’t find anything, so apologies if it’s just my search skillz that are lacking.
I have a couple of old games that crash when they use more than 2GB of RAM. This was the case on Windows too, which I overcame by making them Large Address Aware with CFF Explorer. I can’t work out how to do this with Lutris, Wine or Winetricks however and would appreciate any pointers in the right direction.
Hi,
It might just be your wording - WINE just provides an environment, it doesn’t change your executables.
Proton comes with Large Address in (set PROTON_FORCE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=1) to run programs that support it. Have a look at ProtonDB for your game - sometimes it has helpful info.
In Lutris, you can set the environment variable (name, value) in the variables section of “System Options” tab of any game to enable Large Address Awareness when WINE or Proton runs - assuming your selected runner supports it.
For standard WINE, just search for the equivalent LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE variable - again, set it before you run your game, either in the variables or a launch script.
Still, there is no guarantee that things will run properly - that’s down to the coders to ensure all the calls, all libraries and all the things they do understand the amended memory ceiling and not bail when something returns an address above 2GB 
Yeah I kept finding information on Proton (which enables this by default, the flag exists to turn this behaviour off); I couldn’t find anything about Wine.
I know increasing the address to 4GB works in these games – you have to mod the executable on Windows in order to prevent frequent crashing. Game code was not keeping up with the explosion in common display resolution (and hence VRAM) that occurred between 2008 and 2013.
In any case, your first sentence provided the inspiration I needed to fix it: I just ran CFF explorer in Wine and modified the executable headers in exactly the same way I did in Windows. Now the game launches without crashing. Thanks