Slashdot Mirror

friedmud writes "WineX 2.1 is out on the street, get it at transgaming.com. It boasts, among other things, full support for Warcraft III. Other games now included are: Grand Theft Auto 3, Civilization III, and Black and White. Check the press release for further info. And, if you haven't already, go here to get an account... It is definitely worth it." I've been rebooting my laptop to WC3, so maybe I'll give this a shot. I bought a subscription originally in part due to their misleading Sims compatibility claims, but this looks like it finally is truly emulating top windows games.

fdsa writes "After a heated debate, and under some pressure by TransGaming, an 'intent to package' WineX from sourceforge CVS for (non-free) Debian has been withdrawn. The message provides a good summary of the recent Wine chaos, and notes how WineX is effectively under a different license than stated. Here's a mail from their CEO Gavriel State on the issue."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Breaking news today on the Transgaming website. Today they announced an alliance with the company Transitive. Here's their headline: 'Los Angeles, Ca. TransGaming Technologies, in partnership with Transitive Technologies, unveil their game-porting technology that can allow Windows-based x86 games to be simultaneously released onto multiple platforms. These include the Sony PlayStation 2, Apple Mac OS, set-top boxes, PDAs and wireless devices.'" There's more info on the Transgaming Site. Since Transgaming has ported The Sims already, it's a lot easier to believe that this isn't just vapor.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Breaking news today on the Transgaming website. Today they announced an alliance with the company Transitive. Here's their headline: 'Los Angeles, Ca. TransGaming Technologies, in partnership with Transitive Technologies, unveil their game-porting technology that can allow Windows-based x86 games to be simultaneously released onto multiple platforms. These include the Sony PlayStation 2, Apple Mac OS, set-top boxes, PDAs and wireless devices.'" There's more info on the Transgaming Site. Since Transgaming has ported The Sims already, it's a lot easier to believe that this isn't just vapor.

Mister Snee writes: "As of the latest WINE release, the developer who's been working on the ActiveMovie and DirectShow code for the last nine months suddenly pulled it all from the source tree, citing fears of trouble under the DMCA." And an anonymous reader submits: "TransGaming Tecnologies is offering much of its own proprietary code up for exchange if Codeweavers are willing to relicense some of their code under the less restrictive (more free) X11 licence (eg contributing it to the X11 fork of wine, Rewind). Details can be found at this post by CEO Gavriel State. This all came from the Codeweavers-dominated recent licence change (to the LGPL) which was done in an attempt to steal TransGaming's Direct3D code and force them to open up all their work (thus have no means to make money)." Your attitude toward these license machinations may vary; Codeweavers seems unlikely to oppose people making money from WINE development.

Moridineas writes: "Since the wine project decided to change from an X11 style license to an LGPL license, a BSD fork has emerged, called Rewind (for 'Re-engineering Windows,' or something like 'Rewind to the old Windows days' in the words of Ove Kaaven) and currently hosted at http://rewind.sourceforge.net (but looking for a new home). The announcement of the fork and some additional information was posted to the wine-license mailing list [winehq.com]. At least one company [transgaming.com] has already stated that they will not be able to work with the LPGL wine (citing among other things, possible DMCA violations) and will be actively helping Rewind (with cash and code it seems)."

ZaMoose writes "Looks like Transgaming has released version 2.0 of WineX (with full support for Jedi Knight II and initial 3D sound support. Joy!) Prepackaged .debs and .rpms are available only to subscribers, but you can always just download and compile it yourself (you just won't get the nifty SafeDisk workarounds/InstallShield proprietary stuff)."

ZaMoose writes "Looks like Transgaming has released version 2.0 of WineX (with full support for Jedi Knight II and initial 3D sound support. Joy!) Prepackaged .debs and .rpms are available only to subscribers, but you can always just download and compile it yourself (you just won't get the nifty SafeDisk workarounds/InstallShield proprietary stuff)."

Dr. Spork writes "If you want to read a discussion about OSS licenses that is not a flame war, check out this week's Wine Weekly News. Among the highlights are Gavriel State's arguments for keeping WINE on a BSD-style license. His company has been criticized for not releasing some very cool D3D code. He claims one reason is because 'there are companies out there who will benefit significantly from commercial use of this code, and who can afford to sponsor a portion of the development cost. Until such a sponsorship happens, we cannot apply the WineHQ license to that code.' GNU purists might think it's in bad taste to use the code as a hostage, but in a world where many rich companies rely on OSS, perhaps this signals the emergence of a new business model. You might call it 'code brokering,' and interestingly, you can't do it with the GPL."

Thunderbird writes "Transgaming released a new version of WineX. Winex allows you to run x86 windows games and programs on x86 Linux. It includes allmost full directx support (up to 7 including direct3d). " I'm still skeptical of their business model, but I subscribed anyway in the hopes that The Sims and its expansion packs will work soon. They look legit, although I only own 2 windows program (The Sims, Diablo 2, and their expansion packs) so I don't have much to test it on.

friedmud writes "I just saw an interesting technology demo over at Essential Reality. It is of a "glove-like" device that allows you to interact with your computer. In particular the demo(which is very viewable using the CrossOver plugin) having to do with 3D Studio Max was just incredible (almost too incredible - but hey, we'll have to see) - they put together a model of a mouse in seconds by "molding" it using the "glove". It looks like the SDK is out, and the product is supposed to ship soon. News blurbs can be found at: PCWorld, Yahoo"

nstbbuff sent in a link to a story running at ZD about Lindows, a recently funded startup founded by MP3.com's old CEO that plans to sell a WINE oriented Linux dist for $99. As usual I'm skeptical about these sorts of things, but provided code is released back, I'm down with it. Meanwhile Transgaming is doing their thing, but with game-specific stuff. Their flagship release is The Sims, but theoretically many DirectX games should run under Windows. I'm still skeptical -- I mean, how many closed WINE forks does the world need?

An anonymous reader wrote in to point us to transgaming which is trying to get the DirectX APIs on Linux, and make it possible to run DirectX games on our OS. What is perhaps more interest is their perspective on how to get paid for their work. Not sure how I feel about this whole thing.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Newsforge ^[?] has a story about TransGaming Technologies releasing a patch to support the Direct 3D gaming API to Linux. It sounds like this could have the potential to greatly improve gaming in Linux." We've done a story about this already, but it looks like they're starting to make progress. It would be very impressive indeed to be able to run all new-release Windows games without Windows...

Warrior-GS writes "Transgaming is working on a process that allows Linux users to play Windows games. According to their CEO, Gavriel State: "Essentially, TransGaming's work allows gamers to take off-the-shelf Windows games and run them directly under Linux. It won't run every game out there at first, but 100% compatibility is our long-term goal. To accomplish this, we have been working on a new Linux implementation of the DirectX multimedia APIs. Our work is closely tied with the Wine project -- an Open Source effort to implement the Microsoft Windows APIs on Linux -- in essence, a Windows compatibility layer. Wine is not an emulator in the traditional sense -- it doesn't emulate a CPU or any other hardware -- it loads and executes Windows programs directly on your Linux hardware without the need for any Microsoft code to be installed at all." The whole interview can be found at GameSpy."

Vesuri writes "TransGaming Technologies has released a patch for Wine which makes it possible to run Direct3D applications under Wine. I ran 3DMark2000 and I was impressed - it really DOES work like they promised. It's not perfect but it's a really good start!"

Vesuri writes "TransGaming Technologies has released a patch for Wine which makes it possible to run Direct3D applications under Wine. I ran 3DMark2000 and I was impressed - it really DOES work like they promised. It's not perfect but it's a really good start!"

Vesuri writes "TransGaming Technologies has released a patch for Wine which makes it possible to run Direct3D applications under Wine. I ran 3DMark2000 and I was impressed - it really DOES work like they promised. It's not perfect but it's a really good start!"

chromatic writes: "Looks like a company called TransGaming Technologies has been improving DirectX support in Wine. They plan to use a modified Street Performer Protocol to make money, and will eventually relicense their patches under the Wine license. Maybe I'll finally be able to run Thief!" And maybe one day Xbill will run on Windows.