Armed with Duke and a 3 in 1 Magic Box there i went.
My first problem was that CDEMU did not mount the images of my games.
A bit of google-fu after i found xbfuse . Installed on Ubuntu libfuse-dev and after a little and very cleanly the program was compiled.
Next running CXBX-Reloaded itself was giving me issues, which from the debugger i could see were related to missing functions from Wine builtin dll.Using Winetricks i was able to install the vc2017 package.
And then
Now let's see if the controllers work..