Tested the new version on a fresh wine prefix:
WINEPREFIX=~/gentlemen-of-fortune winetricks -q vcrun2012 vcrun2017 dxvk corefonts
Extracted the contents of the gentlemen of fortune eras 2 mod and copied the (entire) Wine_vs2012-Directory contents in its base directory
Game boots up now, up to the main menu, then immediately crashes - log shows:
Missing decoder: Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) (video/x-ms-asf)
Note: The wine-included gstreamer does not come with an ASF plugin.
As an (ugly) workaround I plain installed the entirety of gstreamer plugins on my Kubuntu host - this list can most likely be simplified, however, really didn't bother to:
apt install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-doc gstreamer1.0-tools gstreamer1.0-x gstreamer1.0-alsa gstreamer1.0-gl gstreamer1.0-gtk3 gstreamer1.0-qt5 gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio
The game boots to the main menu - exited and switched to the directx9 64bit executables, working flawlessly.
I'll be in touch again if I run into gameplay issues (of course), however, just in case you run into another Linux/Wine user, this is how it's set up and runs. The vcrun2012 package obviously shouldn't be needed using the directx9 executables.
Onto trying actual gameplay now - and thanks for the fix!