Now that the new patch dropped I just tried to install Freelancer 1.0 and Discovery on a new prefix from scratch and here's the things I discovered:
1. Both games install and run just fine on the latest mainline Wine, my runner was compiled using wine-tkg scripts, but no special patches nor proton fixes are needed.
2. Manually installing DXVK is no longer required for Discovery because the launcher bundles a (pretty new) renderer, DXVK 2.4 which is what this guide recommends has known issues, 2.6.2 which is another one used by Lutris also has issues, but 2.7.2, which is the one included by the launcher works (leaving random crashes aside which I must investigate), rolling distributions also (should) include an equally new DXVK renderer that should work just fine, I can say Artix/Arch at least does.
3. Freelancer 1.0 installs and runs flawlessly with DXVK 2.7.2.
4. From all runtime dependencies listed, the ones I installed are the C++ one found on the main post about installing Discovery here, dotnet48, directplay, msacm32 and webdings, and Discovery works just fine with these.
5. The launcher has some problems with window focus, there's some strange gray layer on top of it which doesn't play nice with wineserver and won't allow selecting, I bypass this problem by alt-tabbing on the launcher a couple times but on first run the launcher will open two windows, both with this gray layer, and alt-tabbing won't circumvent the problem. What I had to do was to move the launcher to another workspace, which left the gray layer (visibly) stuck on the first workspace and allowed clicking on the launcher on the second workplace, I use xfce4 though so this behavior might be different or not present on other DEs.
Other than that both game work, Wine 9 is no longer needed, but you do still need to make a 32bit prefix with whichever wine runner you wanna pick, the games will fail to launch otherwise, even if all 32bit dependencies are checked and properly installed. The gray layer thing was introduced when the renderer flavor was implemented on the launcher, I'm sure it's there for a good reason but given it's a nuisance on Wine it's probably worth fixing or maybe patching out.
