Agh, that may be the case. I've been looking at switching to Linux with this "End of Support" stuff for Win10, and it seems like this type of thing may be what does me in. Found out this isn't the only game I'm having trouble with.
In any case, we tested the game version 0.72 with Linux Mint: it is enough to run the file with the sh extension in the terminal and the game starts (no emulators are needed). The integrated Intel HD4000 video subsystem, which is already considered old, was enough to start. More complex games require more effort, with the selection of drivers for video cards, especially if these are NVidia video cards older than the GTX 1600 and RTX 2000 series.