After having played Starcraft II on my Windows 7 desktop, yesterday I was trying to get the first Starcraft to work on my laptop under Ubuntu Lucid with Wine; the wine-hq website reported the game as perfectly working, and in fact I only needed to install a patch to let the game start without the mounted CD, but no matter if I tried to play with original Starcraft or the Brood War expansion, I always got random freezes: the game just hung up after a while, it freezed either on the menu or in the playing screen, the cursor wouldn’t respond anymore and all the screen stopped; the audio seemed to be fine though, because sound kept on playing.

I tried changing almost everything under wine configuration, enabling windowed mode with virtual desktop or disabling it, enabling or disabling hardware acceleration and all the other checkboxes under “Graphics” tab. I tried setting up the audio driver… no matter what I did I still got the random freezes.

Until I tried adding a couple of registry values that were reported in the Wine forum for that game but weren’t apparently addressing this particular issue.
Anyway, after adding these keys, I was able to end the first level and go through almost all the second one (time for lunch now) without a glitch, except for the occasional sluggishness.
Run wine regedit and add these couple values under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Wine > Direct3D

The values are two REG_SZ strings:

DirectDrawRenderer = opengl
RenderTargetLockMode = readtex

Should work for you too.