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Whereas:

1) Given a sufficient amount of resources/programmers, any Windows game can be made to run under Wine.

2) Many games run *more* quickly under Wine than they do under Windows.

3) Linux has a lot of free games that don't run under Windows.

4) Transgaming has access to proprietary software and partnerships that give them near-monopolistic control over the Windows-games-on-Linux market.

3) Programmers seem to be somewhat underemployed these days.

Why is it that Transgaming has yet to fill this niche? Is there not enough capital? Go public. Is there not enough income? Get WineX to run on more games; more income will follow (at an exponential rate, even). Not every IPO is a scam. There really are quite a few software companies that are poised on the brink of a huge market, without the capital to, um err, capitalize on it :)

You're in luck.

You can switch to linux today. Get a distro with KDE 3.2! Its so more user freindly than Windows XP its not even funny anymore. There are THOUSANDS OF GAMES FOR LINUX with HUNDREDS preinstalled on most distros. There is also WineX to run propreitery Windows Games on Linux. There is crossover office to run those apps you need, OpenOffice 1.1! Its fast, its free, it is a good Office Clone for linux, plus if you really want office you can use crossover.

So make that day today, grab a distro such as Mandrake 10 and be part of the future, today!

you can play the sims on linux

Well, I consider myself a linux gamer - one without a windows partition. My interest in games has been a bit declining recently, resulting in me having only time to play the "big" games (it's hard to play more than one or maybe two games competitively at the same time, and I left out trying out new games to "relax" from the more "serious" games). Each genre has its references, or very popular games, multiplayer of course. For first person shooters that is Counterstrike, period. Now personally I don't like the game, but I can say I have successfully run it under WineX. Other "important" FPS games that run under WineX are Battlefield 1942 or Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. Many FPS such as UT2003, any ID Game (Quake 3 Arena, RTCW, Enemy Territory) come with a linux client so that's even less of problem.

The real time strategy genre hasn't seen any good linux clients so far, but there are only three really established RTS games out there, Starcraft, Warcraft III and Age of Mythology, of which I can say that I've played all except the latter one under WineX. As for other genres, I don't know. I doubt that Fifa games run very well. Missing some other genres, the biggest multiplayer RPG (not MMORPG) is NWN right now, I think, which, after a one year delay, finally has gained linux support.

Short: If you are a "casual" gamer who likes to constantly try out new games, you should inform yourself and think before switching. Should you focus your attention on single games in order to climb the ladder or participate in tournaments, there's a good chance for success. In any case, check out www.transgaming.com, click on "Games" on the left and check the working rating for your favorite game.

Well, finally I can say that having an nvidia card spares you a lot of pain most of the time (better drivers). And oh, if you're one of those "strictly GNU" fanatics -> forget it, you're not going to like WineX (somewhat open-source, but 5$ a month).

Perhaps you should be looking at some official sites? You might find info a lot faster that way.

You should try the user-friendly wine apps, like crossover office and winex. Yes, they cost money, but they do work. Winex plays every game I want it to play, and crossover office already runs office, photoshop and, to a degree, flash mx. You can look through the list of supported applications on both the transgaming and the codeweavers websites. Really not that shabby. My guess is macromedia will pay the codeweavers people to make it work perfectly, just like disney paid codeweavers to make adobe's photoshop work perfectly.

And, yes, the code from codeweavers does flow back into wine. In fact, they now don't even need to backport it since they work straight on the main wine codebase. Transgaming however chose to stay with the X license when wine switched to LGPL, so their code doesn't flow back as much (all the directx stuff in wine is a fresh implementation which has nothing to do with the one in winex).

It probably was just configuration issues with wine. That is why you buy CrossOver Office for applications and WineX for games. These two apps run the popular MS Windows apps/games they support well and make it simple point-n-click to install/setup everything.

I think that you're mistaken. Wine does support DirectX and DirectSound to some large degree.

http://www.winehq.com/site/status_directx

Quite a few games work well under wine. In fact, a whole company or two is devoted to making DirectX games work under wine.

http://www.transgaming.com/

There is still the DirectX API and all... but with PPC Wine working or just even winelib that may not be a big problem after all.

I wonder if Transgaming will be getting even more OSX game porting business.

What are you talking about? You can get the code from CVS to WineX from here. All of the WineX stuff gets back to Wine except for a few proprietary technologies that Transgamming does not own. Many commercial Win32 games have copy protection crap on them. WineX works with that protection, however Transgamming is not allowed to just release the code to some other companies copy protection technology. In fact, the only two things you cannot get from WineX without purchasing a subscription is copy protection related code and texture compression. The whole focus of WineX is games, and WineX supports far more games then just Wine does. So if you don't need to run any Win32 games, then Wine will work fine for you. Just don't go around spreding FUD about how Transgamming doesn't give back the code, when that is commplete bull.

Wine consists of a program loader, which loads and executes a Windows binary, and a set of libraries that implements Windows API calls using their UNIX or X11 equivalents. There is no "translation" and no "emulation". A win32 binary should run as fast if not faster as under MS Windows on the same hardware. Some programs I have run under Wine do seem faster and others seem slower. What could cause that? It is the Wine source code itself. Wine has 1,000's of win32 function to write and convert to a Linux world. Some of those function are not complete yet, some have not been tuned yet, etc. It is a huge job and takes time.

There is no translation as if one massive wine function grabs all the Win32 calls and goes through a massive switch statement and "translates" it to some Linux function. Say a Win32 application calls CreateWindowEx, under Wine that application does the same thing. Wine has a function named CreateWindowEx that has the same parameters as the Win32 version. The application doesn't know and doesn't care.

erm, no it isn`t and yes they do.
You can download the source for the latest version if you want, you just need certain proprietary, closed-source libraries for it to work correctly. RTFL(icense)

WineX can't just support every single game released for Windows, this is simply impossible, at least right now.

However, WineX supports the big hits pretty well, Call of Duty, Max Payne 2, Warcraft III, check out their list of supported games.

If you are a subscriber, you can vote for games to get more support, and if the game is popular enough, they'll work on it.

WineX works great with supported games, and has dramatically decreased my Windows boots.

Grab any game off the shelf and play it.

Stop spreading lies about Linux gaming support because it is just as good as Windows for games, in fact better because you can optimize your software for the hardware for more speed

I see this argument over and over and frankly I just don't think it's true. Linux doesn't need native games, it just needs to run games, and run them well. Winex runs a lot of windows games, and runs them well. It runs every windows game I want to run, even those that aren't on the official supported list (like some popcap games).

I admit, I'm not hardcore into games, but linux has better gaming support than the mac, and you never hear people say "you know, macs are just not ready for the desktop because they don't run enough games."

See this list of supported games with a score of 4 or better (which means they're playable).

I see this argument over and over and frankly I just don't think it's true. Linux doesn't need native games, it just needs to run games, and run them well. Winex runs a lot of windows games, and runs them well. It runs every windows game I want to run, even those that aren't on the official supported list (like some popcap games).

I admit, I'm not hardcore into games, but linux has better gaming support than the mac, and you never hear people say "you know, macs are just not ready for the desktop because they don't run enough games."

See this list of supported games with a score of 4 or better (which means they're playable).

If you want to play homeworld check out transgaming winex, http://www.transgaming.com. I believe its supported. I play diablo2 and warcraft 3 under mdk linux and they work better than they did on windows.

Wine(x) is far from perfect, so don't go in expecting it to be a deus ex machina.

As for winex their site they have something similar. Search and see if the game you want will work.

As for winex their site they have something similar. Search and see if the game you want will work.

WineX

Now if they only had an emulator for the Win95 games that no longer work in 2000/XP... Somebody aught to support these commercial products that no longer have an OS to run on! They do, its built into windows XP and 2K (requires a registry hack and SP3 in 2k) its called compatiblity mode. It allows you to convince the app your running win95, 98, 98se or NT 4. As for playing them on linux try winex

Well, that's hard to answer if we don't know what games do you play under Windows. Some games run natively on Linux (ie. Unreal Tournament), and rather big number of other games runs under Wine or Winex. Do you want your Diablo, Baldur's Gate, Civ3, Neverwinter Nights, CounterStrike, FooBar? It works. Not everything works, but I'd say that majority of games does.

In fact, they've been updated fairly recently in fact.

They're fairly well supported, the Kyro2 I'm still using runs everything from Natural Selection under WineX to Enemy Territory natively under Linux without a hitch.

Unsupported? Hardly.

Not true. I've had many hours of gameplay on linux. First off, many windows games work very well with Wine or Transgaming.

I've also played a lot of old nintendo games. I hooked up my box to the TV (using a nvidia card with TV-out) and then I inserted two Gravis Gamepads which only need one gameport. Kernel modules worked just fine, and this was some years ago. Grab the latest SNES9X-emulator and start gaming!

P4 1.7Ghz with 2 year old NVidia graphics cards, so Quake and the likes are out of the question...

This is funny, very funny. You know i used to play the quake demo in college at lan parties with a P166 & Diamond Viper card ( minimal settings of course ). You are a very funny person ;-). Why don't you tell everyone that you're tired of Quake and the likes. Simple, clean and most probably the bare truth. Otherwise, you can always try Tribes for linux, if making games work is your kinda thing. Also, make sure you had a good look at what WineX can offer you.

Yes, Tribes is the best ever multiplayer game IMHO.

But not in Linux. Pity really :-(

"If the Linux community _really_ wants to invade the desktop space, we need some killer games."

True. But what we need even more is a killer Linux-exclusive game. Sadly, though, no company that attempts it will survive for more than a couple months past release

(wow, we're so far offtopic I can't get a radar fix on the original discussion! Let's see...ah! A 64-bit Emachine with Linux can make buying the machine now instead of running Windows 64-bit later in the future...there we go...mod me up :-)

Maybe the Mac is the answer. If companies would ship Transgaming's WineX then all the Mac OSX users can play PC games without further development. And _also_ would include Linux as well.

You're in luck: Transgaming sells API implementations that support games like D2 and CS on Linux. (Actually they sell "subscriptions" but whatever.)

This is what I thought collab.net was created for, but that seems to have died. This idea is also represented, in a representative form, in Transgaming's voting system. It is a fantastic idea, as you have presented it, and I hope it comes to fruition.

The list of Star Wars games that do work (if you don't mind a little tweaking) or have a chance to work are;

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars Insiders Guide

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns

The Phantom Menace

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Galactic Battlegrounds

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Rebellion

The devil is in the details, so take a look before leaping.

Wine (main branch, not Transgaming's) has made some substantial updates over the past few months to support DirectX function calls.

The list of Star Wars games that do work (if you don't mind a little tweaking) or have a chance to work are;

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars Insiders Guide

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns

The Phantom Menace

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Galactic Battlegrounds

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Rebellion

The devil is in the details, so take a look before leaping.

Wine (main branch, not Transgaming's) has made some substantial updates over the past few months to support DirectX function calls.

The list of Star Wars games that do work (if you don't mind a little tweaking) or have a chance to work are;

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars Insiders Guide

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns

The Phantom Menace

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Galactic Battlegrounds

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Rebellion

The devil is in the details, so take a look before leaping.

Wine (main branch, not Transgaming's) has made some substantial updates over the past few months to support DirectX function calls.

The list of Star Wars games that do work (if you don't mind a little tweaking) or have a chance to work are;

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars Insiders Guide

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns

The Phantom Menace

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Galactic Battlegrounds

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Rebellion

The devil is in the details, so take a look before leaping.

Wine (main branch, not Transgaming's) has made some substantial updates over the past few months to support DirectX function calls.

The list of Star Wars games that do work (if you don't mind a little tweaking) or have a chance to work are;

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars Insiders Guide

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns

The Phantom Menace

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Galactic Battlegrounds

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Rebellion

The devil is in the details, so take a look before leaping.

Wine (main branch, not Transgaming's) has made some substantial updates over the past few months to support DirectX function calls.

The list of Star Wars games that do work (if you don't mind a little tweaking) or have a chance to work are;

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars Insiders Guide

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns

The Phantom Menace

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Galactic Battlegrounds

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Rebellion

The devil is in the details, so take a look before leaping.

Wine (main branch, not Transgaming's) has made some substantial updates over the past few months to support DirectX function calls.

The list of Star Wars games that do work (if you don't mind a little tweaking) or have a chance to work are;

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars Insiders Guide

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns

The Phantom Menace

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Galactic Battlegrounds

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Rebellion

The devil is in the details, so take a look before leaping.

Wine (main branch, not Transgaming's) has made some substantial updates over the past few months to support DirectX function calls.

The list of Star Wars games that do work (if you don't mind a little tweaking) or have a chance to work are;

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars Insiders Guide

Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns

The Phantom Menace

Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Galactic Battlegrounds

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

Rebellion

The devil is in the details, so take a look before leaping.

Wine (main branch, not Transgaming's) has made some substantial updates over the past few months to support DirectX function calls.

> This is just like the Wine project -- for years people have been promising that you'll just be able to install Wine and fire up any Windows app.

While it's true that you can't just fire up "any Windows app", I do have to say that my experience with Crossover Office has been pretty enjoyable. For any of the apps that they support, stuff "just works". (All of the Office suite works well enough I rarely reboot any more, in particular.) From time to time other applications will work as well. CodeWeavers seem to be very good about feeding their work back into Wine, too, which is important in being a good free software citizen.

I don't have any experience with TransGaming, but they seem to cover a different part of the Wine application space and what I've read about them has been positive - with respect to the technical half of the equation.

Anyways, Wine has been in development for years and I thought for a long time it would never get anywhere. I'm glad to see it's finally getting there.

The game situation might actually be solved soon. Transgaming is doing a good job with the game situation. Now most games seem to work, just not the newest games.

I just don't bother buying the newer games. My time is usually spent on other things. Though a few weekends back I discovered transgaming's winex. I spend a few hours straight playing Grim Fandango. At the time (1998) it ran slow on the bare requirements and even had choppy sound. On my current machine it runs fine (even with the DriectX being interpreted/mapped/whatever in software). In fact it runs so fast I'm stuck in the eleveator in year 2. :(

The point is Grim Fandango was a great (ie *fun*) game to play. The characters were funny and the story carried the player forward. That's what makes it a good game. On the other had in Warcraft 3 I skipped the animated shorts between levels because I just wasn't interested in the tired two-races-at-war-story.

Each game is different and often good (or popular) games are good (or popular) for thier own reasons.

"You can't run from the grim reaper max, especially when he has a gun!" - Manny Calavera, Grim Fandango

Transgaming have said they will not actively promote compatability with games that have native ports, but this is a lie, their comments made on the Majesty section of their website make it quite plain they consider they are superior to native and they intend to beat native out of the market.

They are determined to ensure that Linux has second rate products and are a slave to Windows for our products and our api.

At Tux Games, we are more determined to ensure Linux has quality products than making a quick buck. We have turned down the opportunity to stock winex compatable games on our store, and we have invested heavily in producing native ports of games through our LGP branch. Native is the only future trhat leaves Linux viable and self-sufficient.

Transgaming have already shown that they dont really care about the Linux market, having ported a game from mac to windows without even bothering to make a Linux version.

Transgaming have said they will not actively promote compatability with games that have native ports, but this is a lie, their comments made on the Majesty section of their website make it quite plain they consider they are superior to native and they intend to beat native out of the market.

They are determined to ensure that Linux has second rate products and are a slave to Windows for our products and our api.

At Tux Games, we are more determined to ensure Linux has quality products than making a quick buck. We have turned down the opportunity to stock winex compatable games on our store, and we have invested heavily in producing native ports of games through our LGP branch. Native is the only future trhat leaves Linux viable and self-sufficient.

Transgaming have already shown that they dont really care about the Linux market, having ported a game from mac to windows without even bothering to make a Linux version.

I don't have an XBox because I have this thing called a concious that prevents from buying things from Microsoft.

Now on my PC I've bought about ten games in the last year, including Jedi Knight 2, Morrowind, Medal of Honor, Unreal Tournament 2003, ...

Actually, MS Office XP runs perfectly under Cross Over Office. It also runs Photoshop 7 perfectly. Disney actually paid to have Photoshop 7 working since many more movies are being done with Linux and most graphical artists have Photoshop training. I just set this up for my brother-in-law who is a photographer and said he "needed" photoshop, I switched him to Red Hat 9 with OOo 1.1 (very good startup times) and Photoshop 7. It runs great. There is no slow down since Wine is NOT an emulator, it runs at native speed. I personally use Gimp 1.3.x and OOo-1.1 for all my needs. However, if you "need" one of these bigger MS Windows only apps, Cross Over works great for many of them. There is also WineX-3.x that runs more then 500 of the top games.

Link: http://www.transgaming.com/pollslist.php

... is by transgaming:

http://www.transgaming.com/

There is Transgaming's WineX, you know. I hear it's pretty good for playing games under Linux.

Is WineX affected by any chance? After all, aren't they supposed to be recreating the API exactly, bugs and all? Besides, it isn't fair that Linux users have to miss out on all the really cool highly publicized bugs. ;)