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Transgaming and Transitive E3 Announcement
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.
Now I can play Ultima Underworld on my cellphone!
I'm almost certain I'm not cranky at you...
it works on existing hardware and a MIPS/ARM cpu has the same power saving or better than the crusoe...
so the question is why do custom hardware ?
I've spoken to them and they seem like a nice manchester company (-;
regards
john jones
At first glance I thought the topic said Transgaming and Transvestites. Thats one untouched genre I hope stays untouched.
I'm not sure that Cool toilets would look good on the Sharp Zaurus =]
... I can get that pretty blue screen on my PS2 that I've been hearing such good things about from my Windows-using friends.
::dreamy sigh::
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
How are they supposed to do 3D stuff on a PDA? Will it feel like Q3A on a P200MMX with a Voodoo2, or better/worse?
For one, I'd prefer see them continue on their WineX development. But I can understand, if they need the money, that they'd join such a venture.
Here's why: Suppose they have everything in their kit that they need to support all Windows games written for Windows versions from 95-XP. Great, right? That means that with just a little bit of effort, a vendor can release a Linux version of a game, giving us more games to play with. However, here's the downside: If by writing for Windows you can target both Windows and Linux (and whichever other platforms they support), then why would anyone write any native Linux programs? Then, in XP+1, Microsoft introduces major breakage into their API, such that it's a long time to get it working correctly with Trans{gaming,itive}'s kit. That means that potentially, there won't be any new Linux releases until they can get it fixed. And if they can't... Well, consider OS/2.
Any thoughts?
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
I'd just like to be able to buy The Sims for Linux for less than $70US. Mandrake (exclusively) sells it bundled with their Linux distribution, but has no standalone version.
Considering that folks can get it (on Win32) for $50US, there's little incentive to buy it except "for the good of the company". After I found out what Loki did with my money, I'm still a bit jaded about paying a premium for Linux games...
Looks like someone got caught up in press release hype.
Of course The Sims was easy to port - it's 2D.
From reading the company website, their technology is indeed slightly novel: they've reimplemented the win32 API functions for other platforms. On top of that, they've reimplemented the DirectX API as well.
But for 3d games, I don't think this will be at all trivial for porting... the PS2's architecture is extremely different to that of a PC, and just blindly interpreting Direct3d Immediate Mode calls ("draw this triangle here") will surely not take advantage of the PS/2 architecture at all.
Transitive's angle is that companies can just write their game for the win32 platform, talking to all the native APIs, and Transitive's APIs will take care of porting to other platforms.
It's not that simple. It's far more important that game developers write their game for portability from the ground up, with an abstraction layer, for OS-specific stuff like win32 API calls, at the lowest levels.
But 3d engines are not going to port well just by having Direct3d calls translated, especially for platforms that are as odd as the PS2. In that case, it's going to take a non-trivial adaptation of the graphics engine for that platform.
Okay, this is totally off topic, but I just read over at Gamasutra that Max Payne, one of the flagship games for WineX 2.0, was sold to Take-Two Interactive for $34-million dollars.
At least not with respect to the PS2. The architecture of that machine is quite simply nowhere near what a Win32 programmer expects.
Input and Sound are handled on the IPU, which is essentially an embedded PS1.
The machine has an insanely low amount of ram for textures that the only way to actually use many is to either compress the hell out of them or use the insanely high memory bandwitdth to contunually load new textures into memory.
The EE / GS (Emotion Engine and Graphics Synth), and the VU0 and VU1 units handle data much differently then a standard 'Wintel' box.
And all of that is just considering the differences between the PS2 and a PC!
Using a well written library, it may be possible to get something to compile. However, all of the games art content (Model geometry and textures) would have to be re-worked signifigantly. Getting a game to run on multiple consoles is a bit more involved then simply switching compilers.
Further complicating this is that for this to work, you will have to write your game with the proposed game engine in mind. This means that if you want to have a simultaneous release, you will have to stick to the lowest common denominator among the selected machines. For some simpler titles, this will be fine, but no game that wants to push a machine to its limits can really get much use from this sort of technology.
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When TransGaming came to us (MandrakeSoft), they said they could port The Sims in less than two months. I must admit I was skeptical at first, but they delivered the merchandise, and we made the Mandrake Gaming Edition, which had great reviews.
;-)
When they said they would port Max Payne in the same amount of time, they delivered the merchandise.
Now, when they say they can port to other platforms, I would bet my last dollar they will deliver the merchandise again.
Great to see some fellow Canadians have success!
basically transitives can emulate x86 on MIPS/ARM/(custom hardware) they then run linux (x86) which has wine installed(transgaming wineX to be exact) which runs the sims
so to get the sims running they did sweet FA
transitives had to doo all the work of makeing an x86(screwed) run on a MIPS (nice)
regards
john jones
Maybe they didn't "port" The Sims, per se, but they
*did* port DirectX to Wine...
The main difference between Loki and TransGaming is
that Loki ported individual games, while the other ports the DirectX layer, so when they work on a game, you suddenly get more games working, eventually to the point where you have hundreds.
Are you guys going to release The Sims for Linux as a standalone? Right now at $70US, the only way to get it (Mandrake Gaming Edition) is priced $20 more than the Win32 version.
I'm sure this is awfully discouraging to would-be purchasers. (like me)
yes and to get this working they did Nothing haveing already done the work
hey I'm not saying it was easy to port x86 windows version of the sim's to linux but they would be in a world of pain to get it to run on a big endian RISC machine without doing the transitives thing
regards
john jones
If you purchase the Mandrake 8.1 Gaming Edition with The Sims (which I, unfortunately, did do, and it was rather a waste of $80), and you install it, you will receive a copy of TransGaming's WineX in addition. Once you have done the installation, you can start looking around at the setup.
The data is put in /usr/lib/the_sims (by default), which has, in addition to the UserData directories, .the_sims/, simsdir/, and winex_sims/ /usr/lib/the_sims/simsdir/ includes simsinstall.exe (a Windows executable), two .dlls for running, and the default game data. /usr/lib/winex_sims/ includes the normal bin/ and lib/ -- lib/ has all the normal wine libraries (plus, it looks like, some winex-specific and maybe Sims-specific libraries), and bin/ has the normal wine/winex launchers.
The shell script which launches the game (/usr/bin/the_sims) is a bash shell script which sets up the environment to reference that specific winex install, sets a few bits related to it, and runs wine /usr/lib/the_sims/.the_sims/c_drive/simsdir/S ims.exe
From public statements (sorry, no reference handy), it appears that Transgaming had the Windows source -- but rebuilt the binaries to work around some Wine/WineX-specific issues. But they're still Windows binaries and Windows libraries.
PLEASE stop perpetuating the myth that TransGaming is doing "native ports". They are customizing the executable to work better in their existing emulation[*] environment, and the environment to mesh better with the Windows executable.
If TransGaming were truly doing native ports, they would not need a second company to emulate the x86 processor for their technology to work on non-x86 platforms!
(I'll point out that most Windows games are memory and processor hogs, and many of the platforms they mention, such as PDAs, set top boxes (devices on which I develop), PDAs, and wireless devices are very memory and CPU limited. Not to mention that the UIs usually need redesigning, and the binaries heavy optimization just to fit into the tiny memory and screen footprints these devices have.)
[*] I did not say that WINE is an emulator, I said that the environment (in toto) emulates the Windows environment from the perspective of the Windows executable being run.
But for 3d games, I don't think this will be at all trivial for porting... the PS2's architecture is extremely different to that of a PC, and just blindly interpreting Direct3d Immediate Mode calls ("draw this triangle here") will surely not take advantage of the PS/2 architecture at all.
I thought that too, but after looking around the Playstation2 section at CompUSA I noticed that there are a LOT of PC games (Half-life, No One Lives Forever, Baldurs Gate to name a few) that have been ported to the PS2. That makes me think that perhaps the hardware, or at least the PS2 API, is that different from a PC.
Granted, I've never DONE a porting to the PS2 but it seems like a lot of companies have.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
I took a quick look at the Transitive site, and it seems like they have some interesting technology. Essentially what they do is transcode binary executables from one CPU architecture to another. So you take an x86 binary, run it through their "Dynamite" product and out pops a PowerPC binary.
This is all well and good, but I would have thought this is only a tiny step for most games. Many games make extensive use of platform-specific libraries to provide graphics, sound and IO support. I would imagine that running (for example) the DirectX libraries through Transitive Dynamite would be a technically interesting but legally difficult exercise. Are Microsoft really going to allow Transgaming to port their libraries to PS2?
And this doesn't even touch on the hardware specification problems. How would a game that expects at least an SVGA screen really cope with trying to run on a Palm? Isn't the PS2 architecture sufficiently different from the PC architecture to cause major problems?
These issues can be addressed (presumably that's whay the Transgaming press release says it reduces porting time from "2 years" down to "2 months") but it seems that binary porting is actually only a small aprt of the problem. You would have to heavily rebuild the source code anyway, so why not just cross-compile it straight to the target platform?
Perhaps I am missing something. Can anyone enlighten me?
Sailing over the event horizon
According to:? query =port
http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi
2. To translate software to run on a different system or the results of doing so. See portability.
I think Transgaming fits that definition.
They did port the DirectX layer, then tweaked the source so it would run fine on Linux.
OK, it's not "native", but I haven't seen the word "native" in the article, on in timothy's comment.
While that approach will certantly enable one to easily port from an older piece of hardware to a newer piece, it does not work both ways. Especially if, for example, a game that uses 32 megs of texture memory is ported to a machine / platform that can only provide 8 megs of texture memory.
Compression technologies aside, its not that easy to get 8 megs RAM to emulate 32 megs of RAM.
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This is already possible if the developers use SDL/OpenGL or CrystalSpace. I don't think either will support PS2 (unless you use the linux kit) and handheld support is probably shaky. But they're open source and cross-platform!
"a quote" -me
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
whats a deltic?
The directX on linux isn't what's being announced here. That's been out for months (though its still being worked on), and for the games it works on it's great. In particular I run counterstrike on linux at almost the same speed it runs in windows. It doesn't work with all games yet, but once you're a subscriber you get access to monthly updates and you get to vote on what game they get working next. I'm a subscriber (its really cheap, just $5 a month at the basic level), and I really want more people to support this company. So if you want to support games on Linux, join up!
See http://www.transgaming.com/gamefaq.php?gameid=9
not sure if you have to be a member to access that page
I don't know if that means it's using a wine executable to run a windows binary, or if they used libwine to compile a native linux binary, I don't own a Linux version of the Sims.
You should also note that the Windows version of The Sims does not run under winex at this point.
Furthermore, I'd like to point out to all the naysayers that Transgaming has come through with EVERYTHING they said they would just as quickly as they said they would, and they have also contributed a great deal of code back to the original wine project, and their code(minus safedisc) is available from sourceforge.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Loki was porting Deus Ex although it was never released. It was held up waiting on some tools, and eventually died along with Loki. perhaps Ion Storm will finish it, but probably not.
Jedi Knight 2, Max Payne, Soldier of Fortune 2 Full Version, Half Life, HL Counter Strike, Sacrifice, Quake 2.
Quake 2 had linux binaries available, but they were intended for a 3dfx chipset. Documentation on getting Q2 to run on OpenGL (Nvidia) hardware is SO hard to come by, that I just said screw it and installed under WineX. Works as well as under windows natively. SoF2 was released YESTERDAY, a cutting edge title that runs under linux thanks to winex (issues to install, see transgaming forum's for details).
I love WineX. I believe the the big money payoff for this announcement is the Mac folks comsumer base. They wait a looong time for a meager trickle of PC games, this could work to making main stream games available to them upon initial release. Linux is not mentioned in the press release, but I'm assuming that by x86 PC, Linux is the main target, as windows needs no help to run native apps. The optimistic result of this (if the tech pans out) is that developer's are so happy to have a multi-platform release that they adopt open design standards (sound and graphics) as opposed to DirectX API, to keep their titles available for all platform's via the WineX environment. That's a step closer to open standard games which require no WineX. As has been posted, there are open standards (SDL, etc) that could be used now to accomplish this, but what we need are baby steps that result in sales $$$ to publisher's as a result of the broad cross platform market.
This is a dangerous idea. If what TransGaming achieves is true portability of Windows game source code to Linux and console platforms, and if game developers take to it, it makes Windows the reference platform for game development. Is this where we want to be? Specifically, is this where we want to be in another couple of years when Microsoft suddenly starts adding patented "features" to DirectX that can't be brought into the TransGaming WINE environment?
Write your games using truly open standards like OpenGL, and then port to Windows.
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From transgamings press-release:
About TransGaming Technologies:
TransGaming Technologies is the dominant provider of software portability solutions for game developers and publishers. TransGaming's unique technology allows games designed for one system to be deployed on multiple platforms - faster, cheaper, and better than anyone else. TransGaming Technologies has recently developed strategic relationships with Electronic Arts, the world's premier game developer and publisher; MandrakeSoft the world's largest retail Linux distributor; and MacroVision, the world's most-used PC copy protection provider. TransGaming has a license to the world's top selling game, Electronic Art's "The Sims" and shipped an optimized Linux version just eight weeks after receiving source code.
My emphasis.
So, transgaming will do their very best to work with "copy protection providers", which interfere with what people want to do with their hardware. yay! Good that I've not given in to the urge of donating money to transgaming. Now I know that I never will neither.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
That is not correct, the only things missing from the current CVS is safedisk support and some install-shield code(both because of licensing and with safedisk probably the DMCA as well).
You can see for yourself, download the cvs tree and compile it, use a nocd crack for max payne or aoe and you'll see that they run. (my friend does this)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden