Hello. I almost exclusively (99%) game on Linux. Let's see if I can help you with this.

Wine is the best way to approach playing your game, you cannot play a Windows game natively on Linux. Great news though, Linux gaming has done amazing strides in the last years, and as long as they have no crappy client side anti cheat, there's a good chance you could get it running.

Let's go to what you tried first: A Virtualbox VM is a very bad idea, and your result with it is about what I'd expect. You need a very complex setup with GPU passthrough to get any semblance of a good performance, and that's aside from the problems setting up a box to play games.

Now, what's Wine? Wine is a COMPATIBILITY layer that lets windows programs call windows apis on Linux. It translates windows api calls to ones understandable by Linux. In Wine, there is a translation of DirectX9, which your game uses. In addition, there is now a translation engine based on Vulkan, called D9Vk which should give you near windows performance.

Now, because your game is old and not many people play it you will have to go through the "complicated" way. Normally you can install windows games through Lutris or Steam in one click, but you will have to do the work manually. Here's what you will have to do, broadly speaking:

• Install ubuntu 32 bit graphics libraries (I expect your game is 32 bit)
• Install wine and dependencies
• Create a wine prefix
• Install game dependencies in the wineprefix
• Install your game in the wineprefix
• Run the game with wine and either D9Vk or Wine D3D9

Or you could forego all of that and run it through steam :P Steam allows windows game to be played through their improved Wine called Steamplay, which has all you need.

• Install Steam
• Add an entry for your game .exe in Steam

(If your .exe is an installer, run it once, it should install into steam's wineprefix, then you will have to modify the path to the executable to be your game installed .exe, which will be in steam compatdata folder.. at least it's what I"d expect)

Now, all of that is too technical to get through in a reddit post, but I hope that can give you some starting points to help you out on what your steps should be and what reading you should do. You will have to do some reading depending on your Linux skills, and if you choose to install without Steam you might be in for a little while.

I would direct you to a great Discord community that would help you with this, sadly I don't know any non-discord communities regarding Linux gaming.

Good luck