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Transgaming's WineX 2.1 - Supports WarCraft 3
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.
You don't need this to support MS's Remote Desktop Client...
rdesktop has been doing this for a while. Try it at http://www.rdesktop.org/. I use it to connect to Windows 2000 servers and Terminal Services servers without any problems. If I remember correctly, XPs RDC is the same protocol as the aforementioned products.
Give it a shot.
warcraft 3 has worked with winehq wine as far back as the warcraft 3 beta, see this post to the wine-devel mailing list.
so, what about Ximian Evolution? I use it daily to connect to our Exchange server. Many folks in the office prefer it to Outlook 2000/XP and generally have no problem because it is so similar to its M$ counterparts.
;)
As for the remote desktop client..errmm...Migrate 'em to Linux and use OpenSSH!
A lot of the problems with Transgaming source is that they've had to license certain technologies, such as Macrovision's SafeDisc for CD copy protection. They cannot lease such code out, because it's not theirs and even making available would get them into a lot of trouble.
Of course, they could have tried to reverse engineer the specs, but since that's illegal under the DMCA (since Herr Kaplan ruled that the provision for compatability doesn't count when it's used for Linux), they're kind of stuck.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I think Transgaming is a valid exception and here's why.
Getting games to work well under Linux is a very important step and not an easy one. These folks are not trying to get rich doing this either, since they only charge $5 a month ($60.00 a year) which is about the price of one good game. All indications are they're just trying to pay their way while the work gets done.
I subscribe and it's well worth it. I don't have to reboot to play Diablo II or Starcraft or Command and Conquer, etc. I don't have to buy special Linux specific versions of the games, the windows versions work right out of the box.
One last point. Don't let the press release fool you into thinking only a few games are working at this point. Go to Transgaming's website, click on the games link and then on the "browse all games" link at the bottom. Any game you see listed as a 4 or 5 is working good enough to play and that's a big, big list of 4 and 5 rated games.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
The main reason for the fork was because WineX includes reverse-engineered copy-protection support code to support games running. If Transgaming released the source code to that, it would be entirely possible to modify/hack the code so that you could play pirated games, a likely violation of the DMCA and exposing Transgaming to all sorts of legal issues. If they don't release the source code to the copy-protection, they can honesty claim that it's only an emulator, and still doesn't allow you to circumvent copy-protection. That's fine, I guess.
But I really do agree that they really should open-up their non copy-protected related code, and make that LGPL, and back-port any (non-copy protection) improvements into the official WineHQ tree.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Have you looked at what's available for the Mac? All Blizzard games are hybrid now, plus most OpenGL games have been ported. That's about ten times as many (good) games as Linux. All you really need is Diablo II, Civ 3, and Unreal Tournament, anyways.
It's too bad that Blizzard doesn't like Linux, but that's why I bought a Mac.
WineX will not work with SCSI drives and copy-protected CDs. Every new release has something about how SCSI support has improved, is fixed, etc, but it never seems to work. If you check their forums you'll see what I mean. Most every issue is marked "fixed", with the solution seemingly always being a symlink or some such. It's not fixed as of the last release.
Does anyone know if they got it fixed this time? I tried to check the release notes at http://downloads.transgaming.com/files/winex-2_1-r eleasenotes.txt, but got a 500 error (on a .txt file no less). If the SCSI issues are fixed, then I'm gladly subscribing again. If not, I'm saving my money and keeping my new dual-boot setup.
If you have SCSI drives, make sure you investigate this before giving them any money or you'll likely have paid for nothing. I don't think SCSI support is real high on their support list. It's been broken for almost a year, after all...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
but remember, WINE Is Not an Emulator.
It's a wrapper that maps windows library calls to UNIX system calls.
kc8apf
Why not roll your own with FreeCraft?
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
It looks like none of the expansion packs work, but I only tried Vacation, myself.
I have also talked to a number of people who have tried to get the game working on other distro's, and TransGaming's support staff has been slow, dismissive, and unhelpful. (I didn't have this problem, I'm still running that specific version of Mandrake.) I guess they really are bringing the Windows experience to Linux!
RDP version numbers always match the TS OS version number. Windows 2000=RDP5, WinXP=RDP5.1. Rdesktop emulates RDP4, which both XP and 2000 are backward compatible with.
true
i ne-license/2002/ 05/0132.html
WineX led WineHQ to beleive that they would eventually be getting some code back a claim which was later quitely dropped. this lead winehq to concentrate on other areas of development rather than end up doing redundant work.
hopefully some arrangement can be made to get some of the WineX code into the main WineHQ but from what i have read winex strike a hard bargain and i would not hold my breath.
so WineHQ are actually worse off than they would have been. this is not so much a problem of the previous choice of license so much as the misleading claims made by wineX.
a mailinglist thread about the "negotiations"
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/w
The misleading statement made by Transgaming:
Once we have reached our subscription goals, we plan to release all of the WineX source code under the Wine license, which will allow it to be directly integrated with the core Wine project code hosted at www.winehq.com. Until then, we will periodically submit selected portions of our code for integration with the Wine project."
The patcher comes up nicely. It downloads and installs all the new files. Unfortunately when it goes to actually play the game it throws out a 'Direct Keyboard" error and exits.
It's an improvement, but it's got a way to go.
No being a slow builder does not make you any less stratigic. On 2 of the maps included in the game you can destroy the bridges to your base. When they get there with his land based force, they are screwed, because you took the extra time to get a few zeplins and tech up to air units, and they forced to drink the kool-aid to get under the supply limit.
In fact, they had stated that the linux client would be released in the box with the windoze client and the mac client. Didn't happen. So, they said "sorry, linux client is delayed, will be available for download shortly after the windoze release"
'shortly' has been almost a month so far, and news have it that the coders working on it will be back next week from vacation.. so some of us are still waiting for the darn thing with an useless set of cds on our hands.
The problem here is that Bioware didn't say "ok we'll have it for download as soon as we finish it".. they said "It'll be released simultaneously and in the same box". They couldn't comply. fine, but don't come telling us that you'll have it done shortly after release, then take a month to come up with "coders are on vacation, will get on it pronto". At least a decent status update would be fine, be it by mail, forum, a section in their site, whatever.
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
SafeDisc and ST3C Texture compression support will not be merged into an open source tree no matter how many subscriptions transgaming gets... they had to make a deal to keep those parts closed sourced just to be able to use them.