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Wine Gets Direct3D Support
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.
I don't think this would make more gaming companies want to port to Linux. Why? Because they would have to recompile the game with WINE and Linux to get a native binary. Unfortunately, with these 600Meg-1Gig games you see, that would mean adding another CD (or two) to the box, which would cost money, as well as add weight for shipping costs. Why not just go ahead and create a Linux version seperately, if it's going to cost so much more?
The other option would be to compile a Windows only version, test it using WINE on Linux, and if it works, ship it with that version of WINE on the CD. Unfortunately, using WINE as an emulator will see significant loses in speed and framerate (or at least in my experience).
--
The World is Yours.
OS/2 2.1 was sold and advertised at retail, true. But I think this was once again after it was clear that OS/2 hadn't gained much widespread corporate traction.
... I think the default desktop setup and the lack of out-of-box support for anything but SCSI CD-ROMs tells that tale.
Now whether OS/2 2.1 was really designed as a consumer OS
IBM was taking advantage of the incredible frustration out there with Win 3.1, but it sure looked like short term cash scam instead of a real strategy, at least until Warp 4 (The Tombstone Edition) came out.
It's unlikely that IBM was paying that full $90 price for Windows, because they owned full rights to Windows 3.0 and below according the MS divorce terms.
During the anti-trust trial, it came out that IBM was paying $11/copy for Windows 3.11 as an OEM. It's possible they had to pay 'full retail' for the OS/2 component, but extremely unlikely.
"OS/2 For Windows" was cheaper, but my guess is that the big reason was because it was marketed towards home users and it wouldn't undercut corporate folks paying $300-$500 for the full version. Plus it was an 'upgrade'.
The Transgaming DirectX path is distributed as a diff to Wine 20001222. The WINE site seems extremely poorly designed, with a series of sites [oddly labelled `mirrors' despite the fact none of them contaisn the same software]. I'm still hunting down the list for packages, or even source tarballs, but they're damned difficult to find and most of the sites mentioned are a little stale.
Sould someone please post a link to Wine 20001222? RPMs and DEBs would be great, but source will do.
2.1 was the release of OS/2 that had the most chance of making it in the consumer market. It was stable, allowed you to preemptively multitask Windows programs, and you could do things Windows users could only dream of, like format a disk and do anything else at the same time. And we had users -- the highest estimate I heard was that OS/2 had 10 million users at the height of its popularity. Many of those were home users who were curious and wanted to try it out, ham or BBS operators who wanted real Multitasking, and programmers like me who wanted an OS where you could crash the DOS shell and not have to reboot.
Of course I probably don't know my OS/2 history either. After all, I started working IBM's OS/2 support line around the time that 2.1 was introduced and left around the time they announced that the Boca Raton plant was going to be closed.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Wine doesn't let you run xbill in Windows. It lets you run WinLinus in X.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
> Wine users are confronted with C:, D:, etc, /scraft isn't the location of my cdrom, but wine thinks it is. Now I can play starcraft without the CD so I can listen to music at the same time (yeah, that's it, listen to music. of course, I *have* the CD. It's not like it's at a friend's house or anything *nervous glance*)
> drives that don't exist. which is also cool,
"huhuhuhh, go away. we're like closed or something"
Perhaps one that had a game with good gameplay but not so flashy graphics who wanted to sell to as wide a market as possible? Many people believe that this thing that you also wrote:
Is so wrong that it's not even funny. Game programming is about producing an enjoyable game, not about throwing megapixels on the screen. The whole "pushing the hardware to the very limit" BS is a fairly recent phenomenon, and may be the reason that PC games (not just the Linux ones as reported on /., but PC games in general) typically are money-losers.
In fact, I believe that the emphasis on programming is misplaced because a game's design is far more important than how pretty the graphics are, and the game's graphics depend more on the work of visual artists than on some coder who's always trying to bum a few cycles. To be sure, the best programmers can combine with the best game designers and aound and visual artists to produce a game that is enjoyable to play and visually stunning as well as a programmatic masterpiece, but simply being a programmatic masterpiece is not sufficient.
The point is that different developers are trying to accomplish different things. Not every developer will share your vision of the way things ought to be. Those that can produce a commercially viable product will get to do it again.
I ran warp 2.11/3.0/4.0 fine on all my IDE boxes and even on a 386 with an ESDI drive.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
.net is about getting every msft customer to send them monthly subscription payments. NOTHING more nothing less...
Let's go back to when computer gaming became mainstream. The 1980's and the C64. What were the most successful games doing then? Pushing the hardware to it's limits. Same thing with it's successor, the Amiga. The same thing also happened with console games.
What about the PC then? Well, in the end of the 80's the PC got some decent graphics hardware. Soon after that some games like Wing Commander came out and pushed the hardware to it's limits. It sold like crazy.
What about the coming of FPS games then? When ID software released Wolfenstein 3D they did things not thought possible with the hardware. Turned in a lot of money. DOOM got them heaps of it after that since they had ditched their distributor and were good at it themselves. Same thing here. Quake a bit later made people drool at the realistic, fast 3d. After this the ID programmers were driving Ferraris...
Oh yes, using the hardware to the max really makes a money loser...
Oh sure, you're right about that. But what do most 3d artists want, to be able to produce better visuals? More polygons, more and higher resolution textures, better effects... And still at a good framerate.How do you achieve this? You could require the user to buy hardware that's hardly on the market yet. Either that or you could make the user run it on a system that can throughput a decent amount of data, and get a good coder that can really make good use of it...
It's not a big challenge to code under crossplatform newbie APIs like OpenGL... Unless you want to make it run at a decent speed.
Now there is an API that is fairly usable without being Windows-only and complex. Glide. Oh, what do you say? Glide doesn't work on your card? Tough luck, that WAS the standard for years.
DirectX is the best API available, it really makes a difference in what quality of content can be provided. Have a guess of why Linux OpenGL versions of games are usually pretty late compared to DirectX? It's so that top-notch computers can run them fast enough that they can't be called slideshows...
Now as for enjoyable gameplay, that is something you've got to experience first hand. If you watch a review that has screenshots with crappy graphics most people won't buy it, and won't experience the enjoyable gamplay. If it on the other hand is beautiful and slow like hell, then it isn't enjoyable.
If you were Joe Windows User, would you buy the game noone of your friends is playing, that has bad graphics and is slow, or would you buy the Windows-only beautiful, fast and fun game that all your friends are playing?
Maybe I'm crazy, but it's not even an interesting question until there's demand.
Not true. Microsoft needs third-party developers. That means they're symbiotes, not parasites.
I've been unable to compile or run any programs written with allegro over the last 6 months (since I first started trying) ... DOSisms ...
Subscribe to the Allegro mailing list; there may be someone willing to help you get Allegro working. It worked without a hitch on my Red Hat 6 and Slackware 7 boxen.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Microsoft considered having Windows test for the presence of MS-DOS, because Windows 3.1 had only been tested with MS-DOS. The notion was that Microsoft could warn consumers that they were using an untested configuration and that Microsoft could not guarantee the proper functioning of their machine. To preserve the option of including such a message in the final product, Microsoft included in the third beta release of Windows 3.1 certain code that looked for MS-DOS. If MS-DOS was not found, that code displayed a benign message asking beta users to call Microsoft support personnel. The goal of the message to beta testers was to determine whether the code that tested for the presence of MS-DOS was working properly. Importantly, Caldera fails to mention that the message to beta testers did not mention DR DOS or DRI by name or suggest that the reason why the message was being displayed had anything to do with the beta tester's operating system. In fact, the message provided beta testers with no indication of what was causing the message to appear. Caldera also fails to mention that no such message was ever displayed in any commercial release of Windows.
Very good! The reason many still have Windows on their computer isn't MS Office and friends, but games.
course, my site linux tribes (shameless plug) would love to see better DX support in wine so Tribes will run better. :)
________
That would be the one with the calc.exe which would display "0.0" when you calculated 3.11-3.1.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Great! Now I can play some more of those M$ Games that I like! (Age of Empires!)
-- Kleptotherapy: Helping those who help themselves.
Nope, xbill was started before WinG existed :)
Naw, Counter-strike doesn't run on a Playstation. That's why mine has been sitting in my stereo cabinet unused now for the last year and a half. Playstations can't hold a candle to a computer with a decent graphics card and the cool FPS games out there. If you want to play basketball or football games then a console would be fine.
No link to www.xbill.org. I wonder if I should be offended.
"Can you imagine running 3DMark2000 benchmark on an ultra 10 with a 3D-creator card" Yes, and it would blow ass. Ultrasparc II CPUs are designed for databases, not 3D. If you want fast UNIX 3D, go for SGI.
LOOK! There allready is xbill for windows:
http://www.azzit.de/xbill/
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
1) Is it true that the WINE project could one day run Windows programs faster than Windows does itself? I would have thought that with the open nature of the program code, it would just get faster and faster until it outstrips Windows itself. If this is true, then it would be great for playing games on ;)
2) Is it likely that Microsoft will deliberately try to scupper the WINE project by introducing new API's that are top secret but required to make MS programs work? Or perhaps try their hand legally? But then, I'd have thought that the WINE project benifits Microsoft in a perverse way, by giving them another market to sell to.
Brrrr. I just can't get over how cold NE America is. I can't get used to it at all! :o)
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
will their method work though, and more importantly would it be accepted? "As long as our company keeps turning the $$$ over we'll keep giving you code" I guess the issue is, what's to stop others from developing competing code, especially with the core changes TransGaming are making. Or would they try an even eviller tactic, and require that only their patches be included. The idea of good faith sounds nice, but there is an ever growing mistrust of companies, and especially with their tactics on how to make money out of OSS efforts. Cheers, leroy.
SCHWEEET!
Allegro is still alive and kicking.. Damn that brings back memories. I wonder if my mikmod+dos only version of allegro is still on x2ftp? I wonder if x2ftp even exists anymore..
Well most asf files work okay with the latest version of avifile, which is to be found at http://divx.euro.ru/
You need version 0.52 and the latest binaries (windows dlls) works on i386 only of course....
Sorenson don't even give out an AVI codec or avifile would play sorensen quicktime crap.
Moritz
WINE is certainly a nice thing to have. However, I'm wondering whether it really is doing more good than harm, as there is a theory that one of the factors which led to the demise of OS/2 was precisely its ability to run Windows (3.1) applications.
Of course, everybody agrees that IBM's attitude did not help, to say the least. But the lack of native OS/2 applications can also be explained by the fact that software developers could target the DOS and Win16 platforms, and also have some OS/2 market share...
Now, OS/2 did not have a strong open-source movement behind it. Nevertheless, couldn't a good WINE make Win32 the de facto standard platform for PC software, and eventually make the OS's it runs on targets for the Microsoft change-the-API tactic, as they did with Windows3.1, 3.11, win32s1.1, 1.25 and 1.30?
If you want to rip directly to DivX, go to http://www.divx-digest.com. They have a bunch of tutorials about how to add subtitles to a DivX, burn it to a VCD, and a whole bunch of other DivX info.
Obviously you are a person who has never programed in COM or DirectX. The whole point of COM is that when you add new features you add a new interface, you do not change anything that already exists.
If I wanted to use DirectDraw in DirectX8 I would simple create an IDirectDraw7 interface exactly as I had done in DirectX7. You recompile DX7 code in DX8 and it still works, you run DX7 code with the DX8 runtime and it still works.
I've never heard such misinformed FUD in my life!!
Oh and while I'm on a rant, there is no such thing as Direct2D. If you want to access a 2D surface in Direct3D you can use something like IDirect3DDevice8::GetBackBuffer to get you an IDirect3DSurface8 which you can do whatever you like with!!
A portable engine can be just as fast as a non-portable one. Its called Quake III. Game engines don't use the OS. They call some initialization routines, and then use whatever APIs are available to shove the OS out of the way. The only thing they interface with is OpenGL, the filesystem APIs, and the networking APIs. In the core code, it doesn't interface with anything except custom game code, and maybe OpenGL. Games like Unreal even do their own memory management.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Appartently Linux-nazis think X-Bill and Ktetris (or whatever) is funner or more intellectually stimulating than Alpha Centauri or Quake. They need actually start playing some of these games that they mention.
One of the toughest jobs a programmer does is testing; once a bug has been discovered it is often easier to locate and fix it. The important thing is to read the relevent instructions on what the bug report requires and make sure you give as much of the requested information as possible.
--
Steven Murdoch.
Steven Murdoch.
web: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/
Wrong. Buy a Playstation instead.
Does it run Linux?
For more information, click here.
I saw an improvement of 3fps when running UltraHLE under Wine in Linux, compared to Windows 98 optimised by that Norton tool. I can't check it again though, as I got rid of Windows and my Voodoo 2 (which UltraHLE requires).
A _little_? Uhh. To say the least. Considering (afaik) you wouldn't be calling DirectX APIs via any sort of RPC, and considering the APIs weren't designed with wire communication in mind _at all_, it'd be dog slow.
Either you're trolling, or you don't understand what RPC (and SOAP is just another way of doing RPC) is all about.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
What's the point if you can remote control Halflife 10 on a windows computer with soap if all the grafics appear on the server?
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
Yes surely they are. But theres a problem. Microsoft is known for developing frequently new API versions.
That's what they did. DirectX8 has a completely new graphics API. Which makes new Software using it incompatible.
That's why I'd like to see a "Yes, it runs with Wine"-Logo or similar.
There are some programs which use Wine (like Corel's PhotoPaint). And many developers are bound to Windows (or think they are). Maybe this could get some fresh wind into cross plattform development.
I don't think many Windows developers would use AmigaOS to achieve this. :-)
Is this license DFSG compliant? Will it prevent itself from inclusion in Main?
xer.xes -- 4181
if they are totally dependent on MS to survive, then they are a parasite
Maybe a better term would be "symbiote"? Symbiosis indicates that two organisms (or whatever) are dependent on each other. The software companies need MS (well, they rely on MS's popularity to provide a large user base for thier product), and the proliferation of software for MS systems helps to make MS Windows, etc., a more popular platform. MS would not disappear if third party developers stopped doing software for it, but it would probably hurt MS. Similarly :) the 3rd party developers could migrate to different platforms when they start getting more of a market share than Windows currently enjoys.
--8<--
--8<--
DirectX 8.0 is completely compatible with versions going back to 3.0 They did not break anything! They added new interfaces, sure, but everything else is still there and even better performing!
I doubt Wine will ever hurt Linux:
Monkey sense
You have selective memory. Some games have always pushed the hardware to its limits, but the reason that PC's had "turbo" buttons for years was because most games, and turbo buttons were all about games, did not push the hardware and you had to slow a faster than standard computer down for them to be even near playable. Most console games even then didn't come anywhere near taxing the hardware they ran on. Some (and here I'm thinking things like Atari chess) did, but it was less about graphical displays than it was about limitations of RAM and ROM. The graphics were intended to be competitive with the often specially-designed arcade equipment and, for the most part, achieved that easily by including similar hardware.
Carrion also wrote:
And how many other game programmers, all of whom are writing games that require substantial upgrades to the typical Windows computer just to run, are driving Ferraris? Damn few. Isn't it just possible that, given the success that some people have while writing games that push the hardware when others fail utterly, even though they push the hardware every bit as hard, that the success doesn't really have that much to do with how extreme their performance is?
For what it's worth, I think Id's commercial success has more to do with having a coherent and enjoyable vision and wise business practices than it does with advancing the state of the art in graphical displays. The pushing of the hardware to new performance levels was a side-effect required because the older techniques weren't able to support the vision. But the vision came first.
There is no doubt in my mind that Id's vision is always going to take the hardware to its limits, but that's the sort of games they design. Other designs are not nearly so hardware intensive. (How many megapixels/sec do you need to do a "Tetris", anyway? I would expect that more people play "Tetris" and "Mahjongg" daily than have ever played "Doom", "Quake", or even "Wolfenstein 3-d".) The fact that other sorts of games can be every bit as enjoyable to play and not tax the hardware proves my point.
Carrion also wrote:
Not necessarily, but making a game that uses hardware "to the max" does not necessarily make a game that is a money-maker. It's the emphasis on technically duplicating "Quake" without really understanding what makes "Quake" playable that makes for money-losers. Your counterexamples don't disprove my opinion because they are so rare.
Carrion also wrote:
How do you know? Are you a game artist? I am willing to stipulate that that is what the visual artist might want, but what does the game designer want? I'm not talking about some crap derivative game designer who is trying to duplicate "Quake" or "Half-Life" or "Diablo" because he thinks, as you apparently do, that simply duplicating someone else's success will get you a Ferrari, too. No, I'm talking about someone who has a different idea of what people will play.
You can't tell me, because you can't imagine such a person.
Maybe it's not the hit game of the year, but it is cool -- Codeweaver's WINE runs Stardock's Entrepreneur practically PERFECTLY. I'm happy about that, since I bought the combo OS/2 & Win CD and have been wanting to play it ever since I dumped OS/2 for an all Linux system.
ONLY problems -- when you install, you have to install the demo from the CD first. If you run the install program and install the game, it will say it succeeded but the files don't seem to be actually copied. After the demo is installed you can run it again and it installs fine.
It crashed ONCE. Once in several (probably 10+) hours of gameplay. Not too bad I'd say, since you can save often.
A couple of times, the keyboard quit working in that session. I could still control it w/the mouse, but that's not good enough. In one case, it started working again, and in the other, I killed it and restarted. I think it happened when I switched between various windows and a terminal window overlapped with the Entrepreneur window.
But game play is flawless -- scrolling and sound are fine.
They have to develop for the Mac because they need Apple around as evidence that they're not a monopoly on the desktop. Without the anti-trust trial, Office for the Mac would never have existed. Office for Linux doesn't exist because Linux would almost immediately eat WindowsNT/2000 for breakfast, whereas the Mac is no threat in that department. There's a reason why Compaq, Sun, IBM, Dell, Intel and Oracle have investments in Linux, they can see it's potential to remove the closed monopolistic Windows and replace it with an open OS. I'm always surprised to see people defend a single closed unreliable product, when the PC they use would not exist had the standards not been freely available (thanks to the IBM anti-trust trial folks). Look at how powerful PCs are now, and yet the shipped home OS has barely changed since Windows 95. Look how long it took Microsoft to produce a reliable OS in Windows 2000 and it still crashes occasionally for no obvious reason. Microsoft are a blot on a thriving market and the sooner they are cut down to size the better.
I think you're joking, but I'm not sure. Just to get the facts out there: Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple in 1997 as part of an orchestrated effort my Steve Jobs to renew Wall St. confidence. It worked; the stock jumped more than 40 percent on the news. $150 million is nothing to Microsoft, by the way, and they've probably unloaded most of their investment by now. So that's that.
1989: Office for Mac 1.0 released by Microsoft
1991: Linus Torvald tells comp.os.minix he's doing a free OS
1994: Justice Dept. begins 1st investigation of MS's (specifically their licensing practices).
The reality is there's no demand for Office for Linux -- just hype -- which is why boondoggle-prone Corel is looking to sell their Linux Office division.
Remember when the hypesters were demanding a Java version of Office from Microsoft? And what a fad that turned out to be? The industry is full of hype landmines and this is one. They'll build it when there's demand and no sooner.
Furthermore, the website is as full of bluster as any go-nowhere $uP3r 31337 project I've seen. Smells like Project Armageddon to me, only this time we're supposed to foot the bill.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Yes, but swapping 30+ floppy disks (depending on whether you installed the "MMPM" or not) wasn't the most pleasant experience, right?
I know support for other CD-ROMs was there, just not in the box, so not consumer friendly.
Isn't it really freaky how we're struggling to get things running at "Windows Performance"? /. we talk about how slow windows is in relation to anything, but here we are talking about the life-and-death quest to seek parity with Windows Performance..
I mean, in some threads on
just a random thought that occured to me..
it is kinda scary though, isn't it?
-ws
ìì!
I'd rather see them include the required version of Wine, much like they now include the required version of DirectX
Monkey sense
If SOAP really replaces DCOM, CORBA, Bonobo, et.al. then who is going to really need an emulator? If you are instantiating a SOAP object then who cares what OS it was written for or runs on?
O/S 2 Failed because it only supported SCSI out of the box. An installer had to modify scripts and data files on the install disks to set up an IDE system. So only fairly advanced users could do it and, anyway, SCSI is expensive compared to IDE.
That and Microchannel killed the IBM OS. It wasn't lack of applications...
I don't know a whole lot about how Wine will be pulling off DirectX support, but I'm making the assumption that it's doing so by reporting some form of generic hardware to DirectX, which when querried claims to support the features that DirectX requests.
This is all find and dandy, but I think everybody is missing the point of DirectX, which is to allow game developers to make feature-calls from hardware without having to actually access the hardware it's self.
In Wine, DirectX support or not, games written for DirectX will simply have one more layer of software to trudge through.
I'm skeptical that performance will be acceptable in any game with anything more than very modest hardware requirements.
I'm aware this isn't emulation, but an API running in an application hosted on an OS might as well be emulation.
-=-
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
IIRC, OS/2 used to be cheaper than DOS + Windows3.1. The usual argument was that the price of the latter combination was already included in that of the PC you buy, which is still often true of Windows95/98/ME/etc. Furthermore, are the applications really going to run? How long till Microsoft adds a new API à la win32s?
What do you mean? Weren't Win16 applications "assimilated" in the sense that they ran under Win32 with the same look&feel as the other 32-bit programs? I thought a lot of early "for Windows95" software was actually Win16/win32s?
Again, the same was true of OS/2. Some were even free (as in free-beer) or even included with the OS. The only difference with the situation now is the free-speech side. I hope it is big enough.
This begs the question from me - why reinvent the wheel?
Couldn't resources be better spent optimizing or developing any number of open graphics standards instead of pumping dev time into a relatively closed standard such as DirectX?
IMO, the advances made with DirectX compatibility via WINE will be redundant by the time they are finished. Graphics technologies move at insanely fast rate (I had read moores law CUBED somewhere) and by the time that yesteday's great DirectX functions are working great in WINE, we will already be two generations ahead.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but DirectX is primarily used by games. I've never seen a killer office app that depends heavily on complex graphic functions via DirectX. Most applications dont need insane graphics acceleration. This move seems to be targeted towards making three-year old games run well in WINE. Why devote such resources to something in which very few people will actually have any benefit from?
Oh and by the way: Can you imagine running 3DMark2000 benchmark on an ultra 10 with a 3D-creator card... :)
Yup, and I shudder at the thought... Sun's 3D hardware isn't exactly impressive, IMO.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Why not instantiate DirectX objects using SOAP on a *NIX system to run DirectX Games? Yeah, there would be a little network latency but... Why not?
Then why don't you do it now? What do you think .Net is about? OS independence.
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Hmm... no. I was referring to individual companies that base their entire product line around a single product (MS-Windows). If that product was withdrawn, then all of their software would cease to function immediately. If an individual company withdrew a product that ran on Windows, then Windows would still survive. If a software apps company used a cross-platform library, or had other products that ran on different platforms, then the company would not be (as) reliant on MS, and would not be a parasite.
However, if you are speaking in more general terms, then yes, software apps companies and OS companies form a symbiotic relationship, as do software and hardware companies.
It still is Windows, just emulated.
Yes, but with more games available to play under Linux, more people will be using Linux to play games. With a significant percentage (e.g. 15%) of people playing under an alternative platform, there will be an incentive to improve the quality of a game under that platform (i.e. make it portable, and provide a native version).
This moves Linux closer to that 15% (or whatever magic number is needed).
There's been an XBill port for Win32 for years. Search for it and try it out- it's pretty close to the real thing. I still play it regularly at work... *grin*
~wmaheriv
~wmaheriv
"Shema Yisroel- Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad!"
Of course this was back in the day when most cdrom drives had proprietary interfaces.
Now getting OS/2 to install on hard drives > 640MB and getting OS/2 v3 to recognize ATAPI cdrom drives was a bear.
But what really killed OS/2 was the clueless nature of the general public combines with a truly clueless marketing scheme. When most people simply don't comprehend a computer without Windows and when most manufacturers won't preload anything other than Windows (well can't say I blame them for not pre-loading OS/2, would one really expect Compaq, Dell, etc. to buy an OS from their competitor IBM?) and combined with a $100 Million advertising campaign including such quips as "OS/2 obliterates my software" and featuring Roman Catholic nuns you've got a commercial disaster.
have a day,
-l
OS/2 2.0 supported IDE out of the box. It also supported MFM, some SCSI cards, and ESDI. In fact, I remember running it on an MFM based 386.
Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure OS/2 1.3 ran on IDE based systems as well.
See, I haven't contributed anything to the Linux community at all
If you feel guilty, you could
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with,
I've had good luck with Allegro 3.9.33. It's a cross-platform 2D gaming library; there's an add-on package to make it interface with Mesa3d or OpenGL. You wouldn't believe how easily it is to recompile a Linux Allegro game for Windows or DOS.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No, you see, people want to run fun games on Linux. You know, games that actually utilize the processor? I had fun playing the standard GNOME and KDE games the first time around, when they were sold as the Windows Entertainment Pack around 1992.
If you want 50,000 clones of Tetris and Solitaire, go with Linux. If you want new, fun games, you'll need Windows. Thank you.
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OS/2 was NEVER cheaper than Windows. Reason: When you bought the full version of OS/2, $90 of your purchase bought a copy of Windows to run in it! You could also "upgrade" using the hellish "OS/2 for Windows" (shudder) which merely took existing Windows code and reused it to run in OS/2.
Of course, one might also argue that OS/2 was meant to compete with Windows NT, which it did at least in price comparisons. But that's a discussion for another day.
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It's been a while but I seem to recall that menus looked different. A thing that was annoying though not widget-related was that those old programs used the ~1 names, not that much of a problem as the long filenames were kept intact (except for Win32s programs) but annoying enough to switch. This kind of little annoyance is something that is also present in Wine as users are confronted with C:, D:, etc. drives that don't really exist.
Monkey sense
Free to develop on Linux? Um yeah. No matter how many companies you broke MS in to, none of them would develop desktop apps on Linux. Microsoft has shown willingness to develop on *viable* competing platforms already -- in fact, they're the largest software developer for the Mac, a little recognized fact. (Anyone see Office 2001 Mac? Very slick.) There's a reason Corel is trying to sell its Linux business...because it's a boondoggle and a distraction. See also 'Linux Games Not Selling' which appeared on /. on August 13.
this is sure a good news.. i wonder how fast it is. will games run as 'smoothly' as ms-office?
another question: will direct-sound, direct-blabla also be supported?
long live d1rect-x. fuck opengl.. *NOT*
If I wanted to use DirectDraw in DirectX8 I would simple create an IDirectDraw7 interface exactly as I had done in DirectX7.
What I meant was that Microsoft is no longer actively developing DirectDraw, except as a wrapper around Direct3D that takes advantage of a whole new set of calls (nicknamed "Direct2D") to manipulate 2D surfaces using 3D hardware (presumably with some sort of parallel projection).
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What this could do to the gaming industry? I would love to see "SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:" on Gaming Boxes to list the version of WINE that is required to run these type of games, and even see Software writers be more aware of other gaming platforms...
:)
Oh and by the way: Can you imagine running 3DMark2000 benchmark on an ultra 10 with a 3D-creator card...
Lets put our hands together folks...
Sarcasm is the recourse of a weak mind...
--
Without the anti-trust trial, Office for the Mac would never have existed
I pointed out that Office for Mac preceded any antitrust inquiry by five years; further, it preceded the development of Office for Windows. When I pointed out that another company had tried porting their Office suite to Linux and found lackluster demand, all you could do was dismiss Corel as a "great bandwagon jumper" instead of explaining why Microsoft should do something that failed for another company. Your poor reasoning continued:
Why are [sic] IBM investing a billion dollars in a 'non-viable' platform?
IBM believes it's a disruptive technology (Note that you can't in one breath say Microsoft faces no OS competition and in the next breath say Linux will topple Windows). You also can't use another company's investment strategy to argue that Microsoft should port Office to a platform with no demonstrable demand. Remember all the high-profile investors Priceline had? If a high-profile investor jumped off a cliff, should we all follow? :-)
Apple were [sic] in serious shit before Microsoft came along
No, Apple was in serious shit before Steve Jobs came along. He slashed expenses and turned the company profitable in Q1FY98.
Linux is already the number 2 choice on Intel servers, and it's not far behind MacOS on the desktop.
I would agree Linux is a contender in the server market. The desktop market is another story (and "it's not far behind MacOS" is not a very compelling statement, by the way). Listen to Id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead explain why they scrapped a retail version of "Quake III Arena" for Linux:
"It's a support nightmare due to the multiple flavors of popular versions (of Linux) and the ever-changing kernel; retailers don't want it; and the Linux Q3A sales were disappointing."
And Redhat? This from C|Net:
Red Hat, the top Linux software seller, still doesn't see Linux as a desktop operating system replacement. Instead, Red Hat tailors versions of Linux for heavy-duty computers called servers and small gadgets such as Cradle Technologies' all-purpose computing devices. "The desktop space is extremely interesting, but for this particular company at this time, it's not going to be our primary focus," said Red Hat spokeswoman Melissa London.
The rest of your response is the same failed assumptions cobbled together by sloppy logic (and mixed in with some name-calling) that I've addressed previously e.g. IBM has invested in Linux, therefore there "must be something there" (yeah, remember Microchannel?), an investment saved Apply (a sinking ship is a sinking ship no matter how much $$ you pile on; Apple cut expenses, reinvigorated its product line, and addressed the failed licensing strategy of the Amelio administration), etc.
This is complete Bull Droppings. I mean, seriously! I encourage you to read their Licence Policy. It sounds like the M$ EULA to me...simply because it makes harsh restrictions. If I were them, I wouldn't dare distribute the source of Wine with "TransGaming Wine X", the so-called open-source project they are "making", which is probably vaporware. I mean, ESR will go in to cardiac arrest while he reads that license. And if that were to, say, tie in to the GPL in a very significant way, RMS will be in a coma faster than you can say "you are prohibited from decompiling this binary". If TransGaming wants to make some dollars, they could easily distribute WineX on CDs with game demos, shareware, freeware, and of course, open-source gaming goodness. Thank you for taking in my $0.02.
Definitions:
XML: Leading the way to make the web a ebiz thing
As does HP, Compaq, and many others... Where have you been? SOAP is not .Net
When am I going to be able to flawlessly run windows media player and quicktime?
Once that happens im switching. But before then no way.
Hoping that someone jumps in and corrects me and says either of them works...
I really appreciate performance in games... Be if SOAP objects can load into the local process space, no matter the OS, then those objects are defined remotely, but run locally...
I also trully love what this doe sfor the game addict in me. However does this not also mean apps employing directx such as soundforge or 3dsmax also stand a chance of running.
But by then the damage was done. Too many people had struggled with disk support in earlier version and were no longer interested...
Binary executables are relatively small.
And UPX (an executable packer) makes them even smaller on DOS, Linux, Win32, and several other targets.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
IIRC, DirectX 8 loses the DirectDraw API, replacing it with Direct2D, a shell around Direct3D.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, most GNU/Linux distributions come with a sh*tload of games in both GNOME and KDE. And they often have higher fun factors than Fake III Arena or whatever FPS-of-the-month the sheeple are buying. Also, most Allegro games (such as TOD: Tetanus On Drugs and freepuzzlearena) recompile seamlessly on Linux.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It did.
The problem with OS/2 2.x was that it only supported SCSI CD-ROMs out of the box.
Much fiddling required for the more common SoundBlaster or Sony types, much less E-IDE models.
Correct, although I couldn't say the exact price (wonder if anybody can). I did say both DOS + Windows.
It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with, but I guess we can't have everything. Actually, this could help Linux become more mainstream. If the game companies see that Windows isn't the only OS out there being used to play games with, perhaps they will think more about not being an MS parasite (not a flame, if they are totally dependent on MS to survive, then they are a parasite).
I hope they can make the Street Performer variant work well - it seems to me that people are putting a gigantic amount of effort into an ultimately doomed attempt at copy-control, and not enough into actually figuring out what to do for money when copyright has completely broken down.
I guess you need to doctor up some kind of screen shot...
And they are right. even if it is more expensive it is very much better than IDE.
sorry hehe
I've been unable to compile or run any programs written with allegro over the last 6 months (since I first started trying), including binaries with the library compiled in statically. Reading its code is also kinda' interesting... there are more than a few DOSisms in there, IIRC.
I'm more inclined to support efforts such as SDL, which actually *work*.
...by Windows coders. Libraries like SDL and Crystal Space provide quality cross-platform solutions, but the folks who learned from "Learn Game Programming in 21 Days with DirectX 7" or somesuch don't know or care. Thus, WINE's support for DirectX is important -- while not diminishing the importance of the cross-platform libraries Done Right.
And btw, WINE's DirectX support already works great with most older games -- it's the newer ones these folks are working on. It sounds like they'll be doing a great job; in any event, don't underestimate the importance of games. Believe it or not, there's a very large number of folks out there who spend more time in them than actual office apps.