heyho, welcome to the (tiny) linux world ;-)
I didn't try apophysis myself but currently I'm maintaining the wine extension. usually you should just try out, whether wine + apophysis work and if not maybe file a bug at the wine headquarter
www.winehq.org.
there are 2 wine extensions, you can try each:
wine is "smaller", doesn't depend on Xorg (basically for 3D features in this case) and
wine-gl is almost the complete package. either way wine needs some space - unpacked it's about 80 MB without dependencies, so be sure to have enough ram
you can install extensions through the appbrowser. there you can also read special information about that extension - after installing and following the hints in the info file you can download apophysis through a browser and start the exe in a terminal like this:
$ wine Apo202.exe
. Then wine will try to start the installer and install the program in your home directory (e.g.
~/.wine/drive_c/program files/apophysis). If that is successful you can start the program in a terminal like this
$ wine C:\\Program Files\\Apophysis\\Apophysis.exe
. If something fails you can try to tweak your wine installation - that is by using the
winetricks script, which you can get here:
http://wiki.winehq.org/winetricks. winetricks is able to download and install additional M$ library files, installers, etc. which may be necessary for some installation. If that still fails you can try to override the builtin wine.dll's with the original ones through winecfg.