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.

Comments

Re:Games are nice, but

[ag3n7]

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.

winehq supports war3 too

[uhmmmm]

see here for setup details.

warcraft 3 has worked with winehq wine as far back as the warcraft 3 beta, see this post to the wine-devel mailing list.

Re:Not a good open source citizen

[eyepeepackets]

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.

Re:Not a good open source citizen

[Ryu2]

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.

Re:Just what Linux needs

[Elbereth]

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.

Does it finally work with SCSI CD-ROM drives?

[Wee]

I paid for a subscription when I first heard about WineX. That was last year about this time, and my subscription has run out. I had hoped that WineX would take the place of Loki going down (or not releasing patches or new games -- same thing), but WineX is not a good replacement for a native port if you have certain hardware, namely SCSI CD-ROM/CD-R(W) drives.

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

little offtopic but it's still about games.

[Twister002]

Why not roll your own with FreeCraft?