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Running Windows Games with WineX
GonzoJohn writes "Linux Orbit takes a look at TransGaming Technologies' WineX and puts it through its paces with eight different Windows games. In addition to reviewing: Diablo 2, Starcraft, LinksLS 1998 (Golf Simulation), Dungeon Keeper 2, Populous the Beginning, Black and White, Fallout 2 and Might and Magic 6 under WineX 2.1, we also give you some helpful tips to make your WineX gaming experience as pleasant as possible."
Of the 8 games that I installed and tried to use with WineX 2.1, only half actually worked.
So, use WineX and take your chances that the game will work (50/50), or dual boot the Windows that came with your computer.
Also, the overhead of WineX must have been pretty serious. I was running Diablo2 and Starcraft on a PII 233 without a hitch.
WineX - Not ready yet
I have been pwned because my
instead of windows = cutting off your nose to spite your face.
...but the farthest I got with WineX was getting Warcraft 3 to install. After that, nothing.
Now, I wasn't using their membership-based binary release though, but still, why should I go through the hell of manually editing config files and removing the cinematics from my game when I could just reboot?
...if it can't run GTA3 *perfectly*, I'll stick with Windows for my silly wastes of time. :P
Move 'sig'. For great justice!
I guess a negative is that you've got to buy vmware, whereas I imagine winex is free ... but you've got to buy the games too, right?
PS: What's wrong with me? I've never played a computer game, after I got bored with PONG, lo so many years ago.
Come on...if you're using Linux, what's the big deal about command line installation? Yeah, I know - make it appealing to the masses, blah, blah, blah.
ha ha ha, welcome to Why Linux isn't Used on the Desktop 101.
This reminds me of point 3 on this excellent Linux Zealot putdown on the other site
I just dont want to see anybody dissing on Wine for not supporting more games. If Microsoft loosened up their grip on the DirectX code it would make matters better. How can they possibly call it "Trustworthy Computing" if you or I cannot even look at the source. Do they mean that I should be Trusting Them worthy of writing my code? Just my 2 cents.
Interesting stuff. Reminds me of some informal tests I did on my Mac OS system running the PC hardware environment emulator Virtual PC.
What I don't get from the article is why performance and compatibility is so poor, given that WINE is a virtual machine, according to its circular acronym ("WINE Is Not an Emulator"). Sounds like WINE doesn't link very well to the existing native hardware.
Based on these results I would suspect greater compatibility in Virtual PC (Windows or Macintosh version), although these emulators don't officially support many games since graphics acceleration isn't available in these games. Most of them should run in VPC, but slowly.
There must be a common link to all the games that don't run in WINE. I know that video acceleration isn't required for Diablo 2--so that's probably a starting point.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Precicely... Personally, I'm a self-confessed 'command-line junkie'... I've lost count of the number of times that I've been watching someone clicking aimlessly in a GUI of some kind, trying to change this-or-that configuration, and I've sat down and had the change done in 60 seconds flat from the command line - and that applies to Windoze as much as to Linux...
There's nothing that you can do in a GUI that can't be done equally well from a command line. Sure, GUI's make software easier for non-techies to use, but what they do NOT do is make software easier for a non-techie to UNDERSTAND. Biiig difference.
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
...does WineX handle Solitaire?
Here is the main site:
http://www.transgaming.com/
Subscribers get to vote on what is next to be worked on (example: improve overall sound).
I actually am pretty biassed towards WineX. OK, in the short term, it will help a number of people that are running Linux and want to play a particular game.
Unfortunately, WineX will in the long term halt or slow down development of games running native in Linux. Why would a gaming company put money in porting it, Linux users _can_ play their game.
The skills of the people running Linux might well be their undoing,
Mainly for this reason, I mainly buy _linux_ native games (Quake 1 and 3 and Kohan). Unfortunately, ID decided not to release a Linux version of Wolfenstein anymore, but the binary was downloadable from the net (unfortunately or fortnutely, one needed the wine to run the Windows-only installer from the CD).
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
What about running MS "Combat Flight Simulator"? I found getting all my drivers just right was the very devil before CFS2 would run.
And, IMHO, CFS/CFS2 is the only reason to run Windows, period! (Although my son would add "Medal of Honor" and "Silent Hunter II").
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
one of the big reasons behind WineX gameing is to help push Linux to the desktop. i.e. when Linux can run games [a current weakness] more people will use it. If you want Linux on the desktop then it needs to be as simple and easy to setup and use as can me. So yes, I think "Sorely" lacking is a good way to put it.
as much as I dislike MS business practices, they have done a lot right when it comes to user interface. rember what ever good interface ideas they could not beg borrow or steal, they developed.
General Users are scared of a ">_" and should never have to see it. especily not for a game.
I've been tryin for months to get my wine install to do anything but shut down after a command line is entered. I'll stick with dual boot till games are released for Linux.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Sheesh, I can't even get the damn thing to run on WinXP and they've got it on Linux!!! What's next, Linux on my Playstation???
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I've tried WineX on my system and apart from being able to run the installers of the games it didn't help much. I managed to run Wing Commander Prophecy ... in software mode! All other games just didn't start or halted the entire system while trying.
I've read their FAQs and it seems they don't support anything but nVidia cards so as far as I can see I'm screwed with my Matrox G400. (And probably that also applies to my future Radeon 9700)
To me, WineX is a step in the right direction, but it's still far away from making games playable without me having to dual boot to my old Win98.
The thing is that if you have to boot you waste some
time. For me one of the problems was the speed loss.
I don't know why wine has to be slower when its
supposed to emulate windows calls rather than each
and every x86 instruction.
Is that link slashdotted already is is it just me? I'm running Mozilla and I can't even connect to www.linuxorbit.com. Says connection refused.
There are distributions that make it so you NEVER have to use the console, you know.
Hey, does anyone know if .NET is going to eventually encompass new versions of DirectX?
That would be sweet - assuming other implementations (Mono, etc) could implement, I wouldn't be "stuck" on a windows box anymore... the sad thing is, Windows 2000/xp is actually decent enough that I don't mind anymore...
Course, I don't plan on gaming on the PC anymore - consoles are more fun now that I actually work in front of a PC all day. When I get home, I'd rather fire up the gamecube these days.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
>can't handle partitions > 2GB
Wow, he lost me there.
That info is so out of date, it was out of date 8 years before kuro5hin even opened (I'd say longer, but I can only vouch for how long I've been using it).
I wouldn't trust a single thing that guy says if he can't make a partition bigger than 2 GB (and, AFAIK, there's never been a 2 GB partition limit in Linux).
The truth is that person made about 1 cognisant complaint about linux, and one monkey sitting at one typewriter for one month could have done better.
Maybe next time he'll say windows XP is no good because it runs on top of DOS like windows 3.1.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Obviously, using Windows to play Windows games lacks the cool value of using Linux to play Windows games, and it really sucks to want to play a Windows game when you're using Linux to render/compile/download, so there is added utility to having WineX besides just running Windows stuff slowly (533Mhz AMD, so I can't complain)... but until the compatibility hits that critical mass I'm going to hold off.
Stuff like this is why I keep reading Slashdot at -1! Much more funny than the actual articles and the posts by +5 Insightful mental masturbators.
Maybe in the future wine(X) can serve as a porting platform?
For companies who don't have the resources to come up with a true gnu/linux port of their software (yet) this could be a possibility. They'd simply test their games/applications against wine and try to avoid windows api calls that do not work properly in wine(x) and thus have a gnu/linux port without much effort.
Of course, a native port and free software is much better, but anyway this could also lead to more software running on the gnu platform.
There are in fact already some existing examples for this, e.g. xilinx is offering their eda software for the gnu/linux platform using wine and i've heard of a german company producing tax software for gnu/linux which is also wine-based.
time is a funny concept
WineX + Starcraft at 8fps redefines "fog of war". It's one thing to make the games run. It's another to make them actually playable. Then again... the fps deal makes for a great excuse as I'm running my career record to 12-213-2. ph33r ^^3!!111
Karma: Anything remotely associated with Boy George I have no interest in.
First off, I work on WINE everyday and Transgaming has done one thing to hurt WINE and OpenSource Windows Development. They have taken the fun out of WINE DirectX development. One of the two people the wrote the initial WINE directx support put it best when he told Gav, "It used to be fun".
I work on the Mingw port to Microsoft Windows so as to adapt WINE to ReactOS so I understand why OSS developers do it. Alot of it has to do with the M$ monopoly but for the most part people write code because they enjoy it and they want to share the fun. "Hey look I can now play StarCraft with WINE under linux. They were cheap bastards and wouldnt do a linux port so hah". Now its all about the money.
Thanks Transgaming you've taken the fun out of it. I guess you idea IS working.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
Is that like bilingual but referring to two asses instead? How do you like being biassed?
It just struck me as odd, that's all...
Yesh p on line 105
/home/orbitftp/www/pages/pnadodb/adodb-mysql.inc.p hp on line 105 /home/orbitftp/www/pages/mainfile2.php - Line N.: 82 :"
"Warning: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in / home/orbitftp/www/pages/pnadodb/adodb-mysql.inc.p
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't create a new thread (errno 11). If you are not out of available memory, you can consult the manual for a possible OS-dependent bug in
Error connecting to dblonew
Program:
Database: lonew
Error (1135)
Remember, You can NEVER have too much RAM, especially if you're going to submit an article to your site to slashdot.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
English, MOTHERFUCKER, do you SPEAK IT?!!
Got the link wrong. Here's the right one:
http://www.transgender.org/
Dude, that's the best post I have *ever* read on slashdot, good work.
You sure know a lot about ass-fucking. Get a lot of practice raping your younger brothers?
I found the following games work very well:
o Half-Life (Single Player)
o Warcraft II BNE
o Fallout / Fallout2
o Unreal Gold (some hacking required)
o SimEarth
o Hexen II
Installing is often a problem. Sometimes you need to boot to windows, intstall, then copy the whole tree over to linux. Often it is useful to start X in 640x480 mode as well.
My experiences are with vanilla CVS Wine. TransGaming won't accept my debit card, so I haven't subscribed (would like to though).
If only Serious Sam I and II would get supported, my life would be complete! Or maybe
icculus will finish his port someday.
Also, you can now play Hexen II using Anvil of Thyrion which is a native linux client.
work pretty good IMHO
I recently tried the wine, wineX and crossover office.
This is what I found out: Crossover office works fine with MS Office, Exploder and Outlook Express. However, it doesn't work well, if at all with accounting, taxation and game software.
WineX with compiled OpenGL support, works fine. I mean, I haven't tried anything other that Half-life and Day of Defeat, but it works fine with those two game titles. I also tried CS but it didn't work.
Wine supports some of the software but it is way to difficult to use for me ( I am accountant and not a software hacker).
The two games that I have used are just as responsive as their windows installs. And no, I am using the WineX built in dlls and not the MS Windows dlls.
The way I see it, one or both of the following scenarios needs to happen before we see a lot of Linux games - and we'll see more Linux games as the installed base gets larger.
Scenario 1: AOL/Linux. Seriously. As soon as the millions of AOL sheep get a new version of AOL that uses Linux, many of them will switch. There's countless numbers of people who buy the latest "whiz-bang" PC and all they use it for is Web / Email, and maybe an occasional game. The Operating System to them is irrelevant, they just want to email their friends and family. Many of them already think that they're just running AOL, and that AOL = internet. The game market for this crowd isn't as large as it could be, but it still changes the "numbers" of the installed base.
Scenario 2: The next killer game is Linux only. What would happen if say... Doom 3, or something similar, was Linux only? And what would happen if in the box with the game, was a Linux distribution? Given that I have an installation of Windows 98SE to play games on at home, how many people would be willing to install Linux in order to play Doom 3? I'd suggest there would be a lot. Or, what about a Linux Distro that just booted from CD, effectively treating your PC like a high powered console when you want to play a game?
Once one or both of these happens, then the installed user base gets larger and companies are going to be willing to eat the up front development costs to produce a game. And there will be a cost, as not every Windows developer has ever run g++ to build something, but in the long run it becomes much cheaper to develop on Linux then it does paying the MS tax over and over again. Even if Linux can get 40% of home users, then companies will be willing to develop native games. And then, WineX will be around to support old games, while the new stuff will run natively.
Seriously.
You know nothing of games. As stated already, vmware doesn't support directX, which most boneheaded developers are using these days.
And no, winex and the games it "supports" aren't free either.
Err, yes I do speak English, very well thanks, and I am well respected for speaking English correctly.
What is your point? You don't like the fact that Wine is illegal? Tough, it is.
Or have I made a typo/spelin mistayk. Oh dear, I am terribly sorry. I am only human you know.
I am glad that you posted an informative, and intellegent reply to my post, though, I expect you'll get modded up to +5 informative in a second...
Wow with such an argument like "Doesn't that *SOUND* illegal to you?" I stagger at your logic. First I'm guessing you are not a lawyer.
1st thing, WINE is called a clean-room reverse engineering, which is illegal, because it uses none of Microsoft's intellectual property to produce
2nd Microsoft is very familiar with WINE, they mentioned it during their Anti Trust hearing as an example of how application compatibilty can be achieved on non microsoft systems.
Sorry, I meant to say that clean room engineering is legal
alot of that is BS.it doesn't support partitions > 2GB? when? i've used linux since '97, back on a 3.5 gig partition. can't use hard drives > 32GB? :looks at 40gb hard drive:
bash can run all your sh scripts, too. and i've had 256MB swap partitions. i didn't find anything about "facist sysadmins" in my su manpage.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
i'm sorry, i missed the point where 'wine' was illegal!
since it is just a rip-off of the CP/M API (extended somewhat over the years). I don't think Microsoft will want to push that point too hard.
You might be right, if all of the Wine developers had never used Windows.
I really don't believe that no reverse engineering has gone on. Don't even both to mention that, 'Oh, but reverse engineering in Europe is permitted to make an interoperable product', that is taken out of context all the time. Just like 'Copyright allows you fair use rights, therefore you mustn't stop me copying something', WRONG! If I write something really, really small in a faint pencil, and your photocopier doesn't copy it, TOUGH LUCK. You have no right to demand that I write it more legibly.
Wine was developed by reverse engineering Windows. That is not clean room engineering, anyway.
>With a sample group of 8, statistics and percentages don't mean much
So you`re saying the review was worthless?
They think all linux users expect free stuffs. If we change that attitude, and don't whine about games not going open source, then we may have a chance.
"If Microsoft loosened up their grip on the DirectX code it would make matters better."
this is a commom mistake that people make.
the point isnt MS letting directx specs out, its that people continue to use this piece of shit api. use SDL
if you use sdl, your game is portable (or at least easier to emulate with things like Wine). be smart, dont use directx
an old Win9x or earlier parition
Better yet, FreeDOS. However, your point about sound cards that have abandoned the GUS and SB hardware interfaces still stands. The only reason why video cards still work is that the BIOS checks for a VGA compatible card during the self-test.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why it hurts gaming:
1)
Support. Unlike something like web-serving or database software, they assume (rightly) that Joe Gamer is a computer-illiterate moron. They're already swamped with people who cant figure out 'click OK to install game'. They could just write off Linux as 'unsupported' and hang up on linux users who are having problems, which would just hurt their customer relations.
2)
Big game developers don't trust us. They work around the clock coding newer and tougher copy protection schemes. Coding stuff that wont run on what they consider an 'easily hackable' platform like Linux would be a no-brainer. Hell I'd probably pepper my code with superfluous calls to those WineX incompatible DLLS just to keep my code on the platform it was designed for.
3)
They also see the linux zealots who, although a minority, are the most vocal and color all of the Linux user base as 'anti-corporate' and unwilling to pay for anything.
More and more the development is being shifted to console only. They're sick of running charities, game publishing is a tough business, and despite all the ranting, pirating of PC games has always hurt.
Why I think it hurts linux:
Linux isnt Windows. Every attempt to make linux look/smell/act like Windows meets with more failure than success. To the Joe Users that linux needs to reach, this just makes linux look, frankly like garbage.
We need to focus on what linux is good at, not make it look like a "really crappy" version of windows, which frankly is what the common man (if they've even heard of it) sees it as.
Just my 0.02
So, you are claiming that Wine doesn't infringe on any of Microsoft's rights?
Yeah, right, hang on a minute while I try to stop my head falling off from laughing too much...
Right, that's better. Now, as for the criticism of my "Doesn't that *SOUND* illegal to you?" logic, the whole point was to point out that even non-lawyers can see it a mile away.
I disagree with the overhead statement. Some software seems to run more snappily, others less.
For example, Windows menuy widgets seem to operate much more slowly, but I've played Starcraft on the same machine in both WINE and Windows NT, and if Starcraft wasn't faster in WINE, it was at least as fast (admittedly, WinNT's DirectX probably wasn't as tweaked as newer releases, but even so...).
I just wanna see Close Combat work fully...sigh.
May we never see th
Run all games via emulation (oh, yea wine isn't a emulator) or dual boot and wait for your platform to be respected... Isn't it too much people?
Well, it may not have been compatible with CP/M, but the history of DOS states that it was a "cut-down implementation of the CP/M operating system" known as QDOS which was "designed by Tim Patterson for Seattle Computer Products." Microsoft later purchased the license for QDOS and presented it to IBM.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
Scenario 3: Sony releases set-top device based on Linux for video recording AND console games (Tivo on steroids?) - gives enough value add to the hardware so that they can make a couple of bucks selling the devices but retains Linux compatibility. They still get to license the Playstation moniker for money.
Simultaneously, Sony releases VAIO PC's with Linux that duplicates enough of the set-top functionality so that you don't have to choose between desktop and set-top box. Best of all for Sony, no M$ royalties.
As a guy gave up Linux just for games, I'd say some stuff and how would Wine kill any native linux game but I can't
Guess why? They would make me -1 troll or -1 flamebait
A lead Nvidia hardware guy came and gave a talk at our university. I asked him whether Nvidia preferred using DirectX over OpenGL because of more supported features in DX8 vs OGL 1.x, and he surprised me by saying that, no, in fact they significantly preferred OGL.
Apparently, when Nvidia adds a feature, OGL has a standard way of adding an extension to the language to support extra features. MS, despite serious lobbying from Nvidia, strongly pushes against supporting extensions (for obvious reasons, but it still doesn't go over well with Nvidia). So there may be a number of performance-enhancing features or tricks that are used with OGL (because the game developer did a bit of extra work to support the extensions) that are not used with DirectX, or have to be done partly in software with DirectX.
Anyway, the gist of this is that if you want to use all the features of your Nvidia video card, you're likely better off using OGL modes in your games.
I'm not sure what the take on this is at ATI or Matrox, though.
May we never see th
So, you are claiming that Wine doesn't infringe on any of Microsoft's rights?
Correct. If you believe otherwise, please quote title and section from United States Code. Here's U.S. copyright law. Here's U.S. patent law.
Hint: Under U.S. copyright law, the ideas embodied in a copyrighted work are not protected; only the expression is. Even the DMCA has an explicit exemption for reverse engineering necessary to achieve interoperability.
Will I retire or break 10K?
that was acutually the point that i read "Doesn't that *SOUND* illegal to you?" was the point you completely lost me.
i am not a lawyer, and creating something as an alternative to windows doesn't sound illegal to me at all
there is no argument in you argument. no backing up of your claims. you don't establish how "bundle them all together so that they are a free alternative to Windows" could possibly be illegal. by your logic. linux is illegal because it is being offered as a free alternative to windows.
Read the page over at Transgaming for your favorite game before speculating on what works and what doesn't.
I am a Transgaming subscriber and I play several games with WineX (however I still have yet to get HL/CS working worth a damn on my machine, but I don't play it much anyway, so I haven't put much effort into it).
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
If I write something really, really small in a faint pencil, and your photocopier doesn't copy it, TOUGH LUCK. You have no right to demand that I write it more legibly.
And you have no right to demand that I not build a more sensitive photocopier.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I could be wrong....but if you want to play WINDOWS games, why don't you just run windows? I've been saying it for years, choose the right tool for the right job. For me its hard to beleive that Linux should run on _EVERYTHING_. At this point in time I can not see a good reason why my home gameing machine should be a linux machine, the games were designed for WINDOWS, i'll run them on WINDOWS.
To me trying to run Windows games on Linux is trying to put a screw in with a hammer. Sure it will kinda work some times, but why not just use a screwdriver?
Every Linux zelot hate Microsoft, and many Linux zelots are trying to make Linux just like windows...am i missing some thing here?
I'm a cucumber
The reason some things do not work is that you have to implement more than just the documented externals.
This is partly true, but not the whole story. Yes, there have been times when either MS bugs have to be reproduced and emulated, or undocumented behavior discovered. However, this really isn't the cause of most incompatibilities.
First, the WINE team is limited -- hardly as many man-hours per weak as the Windows team at MS. So they take a, as they put it, "product-driven" approach. They take a specific program, and implement just enough to get it working properly. Few programs use (or will use for several years) WinXP-specific features, because it would limit their potential market. Same goes for Win2k-specific features. So the WINE guys don't bother with emulating those. Also, less crucial and rarely used fuctions are often just stubs, meaning that software that uses lots of esoteric options/functions is much more likely not to work.
Last of all, rarely used chunks of Win32 are simply ignored. I believe that there is basically no CryptoAPI support, for instance, because implementing CryptoAPI would be a significant amount of work, and very, very few programs would actually use it.
May we never see th
You don't like the fact that Wine is illegal? Tough, it is.
I don't like the fact that you're not providing any evidence whatsoever, in the U.S. Code, in the Code of Federal Regulations, or in U.S. case law, that distribution of binary compatibility layer software developed using reverse-engineered information is prohibited in the United States.
wow. glad they cleared that up.
links has only been around for what. 15 years now?
and has only been the most popular golf game in all of those years too. why was this the only game in the list with the little helper material in the brackets? i dont even know what some of those games are. but pretty much anyone that has a computer should know what links is.
There are a couple of excellent gaming APIs
that will make your games portable with
little or no effort.
Write using SDL or Allegro of Crystal Space
and OpenGL and your games will be portable
across a number of platforms, including
Linux, Windows, Macs and BeOS.
Heffel
Expert Java EE Consulting
Or, what about a Linux Distro that just booted from CD, effectively treating your PC like a high powered console when you want to play a game?
A console has the same hardware interface on every unit. The only pretty much guaranteed video interface on a non-XBox PC is VESA, and the only guaranteed sound card is the internal speaker. (Modern sound cards have pretty much abandoned the SB interface.) Or do you want to include drivers for every sound card and video card ever made? It's going to be pretty tough to get either a. drivers, or b. technical specifications necessary to write drivers, out of some manufacturers of video cards or sound cards.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, popcorn is not illegal in the USA, is it? No.
BUT, anybody who sold popcorn along with instructions on how it could be used to make copy protected CDs non-copy-protected CDs, would be violating the DMCA.
Each individual API probably doesn't represent anything that can't be defined as fundamental.
However code that simulates the SET OF WINDOWS APIs in such a way that it PROVIDES THE SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENT PROVIDED BY WINDOWS, is not fundamental.
Just because you don't like it, you are trying to justify it. That is my whole point, and what I *expected*.
Parallel with the rip off of a Cisco product - if you bought all those bits, and sold them without the Cisco software to go with it, on the basis that it would be useful to run Linux, there probably wouldn't be anything wrong with that. If you put a note in the box saying, 'Oh, by the way, buy a copy of the Cisco software, and you can use this cheapo bit of kit in to the same machine as Cisco are selling for $15,000', how well do you think that would be received?
I have Halflife and Halflife-Opposing Force running quite nicely under vanilla Wine, and running as well as native. Perhaps I might be able to give you some pointers? What problems are you having?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Ever painted an image via command line? Well, I prefer Gimp for that task. Beside that I have seen to much broken config-files with '#' instead of ';' comments, line-breaks where there shouldn't be one, incorrect formated values, typos, etc. Why is that? Because the files are plain text, no syntax checks is done by the editors and the user can see error only after he started the programm or even worse only find the error message in a deeply hidden logfile (and only after enabling debug=1). And well under a GUI I have tooltips and context-sensitive help under command-line I have 200 pages long man-pages, where I have to search half an hour before I find what I need... Command-lines are nice for a few thinks, but they suck at a lot others. The reason that I still use them often is just because the GNU/Linux GUIs currently suck even more.
I certainly see your point, but I don't think that fun and other people making money are entirely incompatible.
:-)
I send in patches to Linux software that are packaged and used to make lots of money for RH, Mandrake, and others. The attitude I have is "As long as other techies can grab this for free, I certainly don't have any problem with RH making a buck off of making it accessable to other users." It's kind of a trade, too -- I make patches, improve their product (and have fun in the process), and they give me an ever-improving free product for download.
I do want to say thank you, a big thank you, to isolation for his mingw and WINE work. I use both frequently (mingw in two commercial settings), and I deeply appreciate them. They've let me and others escape the MS monopoly and still get work done, and they are both technically impressive pieces of software.
I do sort of wish that WINE could have stayed BSD-licensed -- there were a lot of people pretty comfortable with it, and developer groups and companies were relying on that license. I, in general, prefer the GPL (well, the LGPL) to the BSD license, but in this case, I'm kind of sad about the switch. It fragmented the WINE developer community and started a lot of fights.
OTOH, I also have to take my cap off to Transgaming -- the gentlemen there are taking enormous personal financial risk (throwing their own money that they can't really afford) into trying to make a commercially viable company that gives away source to a product that lets you play Windows games. I know one Linux user who has only a single Windows game that he wants to play -- Max Payne -- and Transgaming has let him do that.
Anyway, every line of code put out there, by anyone, is helping an awful lot of people. It's also pulling off some darn impressive technical tricks -- WINE is one of the few things that really blows my mind -- I'm amazed that the developers pulled it off. Here's to more coding -- and less politics.
May we never see th
Another good article
my head is spinning from the leaps from one level of illogic to the next.
i'm still trying to get the jump from popcorn to cd's to dmca.
it seems to me that to restate your abouve quote
"Just because you don't like it, you are trying to make it seem illegal" you still haven't said a single word to help support your argument.
and JUST BECAUSE YOU 'YELL' DOSEN'T MAKE WHAT YOU SAY ANYMORE COMPELLING.
wait, why am i arguing with an AC. silly me.
What on earth are you talking about? WINE isn't illegal in the least! What law do you think they're breaking?
Trademark? It'd be tough to show that WINE infringes on "Microsoft Windows".
Patent? I really doubt it. I can't imagine that there is any patent that could keep you from implementing an API.
Copyright? This was already tried by MS, arguing that they owned the header files, and duplicating the information in them was infringing. It didn't work.
EULA for reverse engineering? The WINE guys at least put up a pretense of clean-room engineering, and I think it'd be hard for MS to prove otherwise. You really don't need to disassemble Windows to implement the Win32 API as documented by MSDN. Finally, the right to reverse engineer is expressly granted in many locales for the purpose of ensuring compatibility. In the EU, this would make even a non-clean room impementation okay. In the US, it's a little more dicy, as I believe the laws only apply to compatibility over a network protocol between two different hosts, but there's still a general trend towards allowing people to produce compatible products.
Look-and-feel? Look-and-feel was an approach specifically shown by MS to not be a valid case for suit in the US legal system when they butted heads with Apple.
MS would have a *hell* of a time trying to prove that no one could implement a compatible product, which they'd have to do to nail the WINE guys. The antitrust guys would have a field day on MS.
Finally, WINE is not an emulator. "Emulator" has a specific meaning in the computer world -- it would reimplement the hardware that the software runs on. This would almost certainly cause a performance hit. WINE carries no such required overhead. At least in theory, WINE can run just as fast as (heck, faster) than Windows.
Given your AC nature, I'd almost say that you're trolling, but I can't quite be sure.
May we never see th
Actually, the chances are much better than that, if you first consult TransGaming's database. The games that worked were rated four or five (on a five-point scale). The games that didn't work were rated lower, if they were rated at all.
If you have a large game collection, then you may find that WineX runs even less than half your games. However, TransGaming focuses on good, popular games, and the database is fairly accurate.
My 2 cents. I was using Pentium III 600 Mhz with 512 MB of RAM, GeForce 2 Pro, SB Live Platininum, and Red Hat Linux v7.2. I checked this WineX. Here's what I noticed:
1. D2X with the latest version was very slow (less than 10 FPS at 800x600).
2. Some of the sound enhancement were disabled like EAX.
3. Sometimes clicking on shortcut doesn't give me D2 screen, just my desktop. Running from terminal works.
I wasn't impressed and will continue to play Windows only games in Windows. Q3A and RTCW are installed in Linux since they have Linux ports.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yes,
Thanks to Transgaming, there will be no port of such games like WarCraft 3, the publisher will ignore Linux market.
Thanks to Transgaming, Microsoft will take over all the Software Market, by killing some brilliant companies that try to port some Native Linux Applications.
Thanks Transgaming, carry on, Thanks to you Microsoft will rule the world !
2. Some of the sound enhancement were disabled like EAX.
You can't emulate EAX support in Linux sound card drivers. Creative needs to put this support in the live/audigy drivers before they'll be available.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Heck, I have a swap partition > 2 GB.
May we never see th
Slashdot sends Linuxorbit into orbit
-- Wibble
How's THAT for an eye-catching headline? :-)
Seriously, though. You go out, you buy a WINDOWS game, you spend ages trying to get it running under Linux/Wine, and what happens? The developer sees huge sales for Windows-only games. Result? They keep making games for Windows, and you have to keep playing with Wine.
A much better solution would be games under Linux of course. As a useful intermediate though, how about this idea: Everyone who plays a game through Wine should write to the developer and explain to them that they'd much rather the game was written for Linux in the first place. A thousand letters (or ten thousand) is hard to completely ignore.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
They also see the linux zealots who, although a minority, are the most vocal and color all of the Linux user base as 'anti-corporate' and unwilling to pay for anything.
One name: Loki. They proved (as have idSoftware) that linux users ARE generally unwilling to buy games. We HAD native linux games from Loki and what happened? Some of us bought them but too many were infantile and simply could NOT delay their purchase of a game, just HAD to have it NOW - so they bought the windoze version. As for id, they tried selling a linux version and Linux users stayed away from it in droves AND BOUGHT THE DAMN WINDOZE VERSION.
I bought games from Loki and would have continued. I would have bought more id software linux games too. Fortunately, idSoftware is NICE enough to produce linux binaries anyway that linux users can download and use IF they buy the windoze version in the store. Guess what that does? Keeps the windoze game purchase numbers up, skewing the number of gamers towards windows even though a number of them will run the linux version. Other companies see this and think there is no linux game market. Thanks to linux users who refuse to A) wait a few months or B) pay for anything that is made for linux, there are no linux titles and wont be for a long time, if ever.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
For all you linux geeks out there. Why do you need to be doing this. If you think Linux is the way to go and that Windows is the antichrist, then why are you using programs that to emulate windows? Why don't you create your own games (and I don't mean the basic ones that come with every distro)? Until you do this, stop mocking windows when you are emulating it to do the things that you want!!!
Ah. I guess I have a reason not to play games in Linux yet. RTCW & Q3A don't have 3D sounds, so that won't be a problem.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I constantly see people making all sorts of incorrect statements about WineX, and to those people I say try it before you speak. You don't have to install the games in Windows, and in fact, WineX tells you NOT to. You install it to a Linux partition and windows isn't needed for ANYTHING.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Transgaming to doing a very good service to Linux, and here's why. Many keep windows around to play games. If Transgaming can fully implement DirectX (still quite a while off), then that gives people one less reason to keep windows around. True, the games won't be native linuc games, but if you really want linux to succeed on the desktop, you people need to realize it'll take baby steps. First, you take away the reason for people to have windows. If they want windows to play games, then create complete compatibility with windows games. As people play windows games in linux, they stop having a MS OS to play games on. When this number of people hit critical mass, game developers can then start to write native Linux games and be assurred it has a large audience. It won't happen overnight, but it won't happen at ALL without full windows compatiblity first. Be patient.
Khyron
VESA? No wonder you're worried about "hardware diversity"... does ANYTHING still run on your 486? :P
Move 'sig'. For great justice!
Right.... So Wine was developed like that, was it? Get real.
I am a linux fan (I use it at work and at home exclusively) and a gamer. I cannot afford to use windows XP for the simple reason that I am a tinkerer. Almost every time I buy a new piece of hardware, all my computers fly into a cloud of parts and condense back into better optimized computers. Having to grovel to Microsoft everytime I move a motherboard or change a video card isn't worth it to me. It REALLY isn't worth having to give Microsoft another $300 every time they think I'm a pirate just so I can play a $35 game.
I'll spend the money on the hardware but, to me, Microsoft isn't worth it. If the choice comes down to spending $300 on XP or $300 on faster hardware which will make up for any slowdowns in WineX, it's pretty obvious which way I'll go.
It's time to renew my subscription. Pay up or shut up, money makes things happen and Linux'ers tend to be pretty cheap.
and just switch hard-drives if you don't want to have Dual Boot. Why go thru all the trouble of setting up Winex when you could just use a real version of Windows that you probably already have lying around somewhere?
I have had some successes with Wine (mainly with the installer). I run Cerulean Studios Trillian as my ICQ client in Linux. The setup program even placed a launch icon on my Gnome desktop. I run a chat program in Wine (pueblo) and I have used wine to setup newer DOS games (steel panthers 3, SPMBT)so I can play them in freedos/dosemu. I play Empire Deluxe using Wine. I have also had some abject and disappointing failures, mainly with Talonsoft's Campaign series, East Front II, West Front, Rising Sun) due I think to safe disc or some copy protection scheme. The point to the above is that Wine is advancing albeit slowly in running Windows games Transgaming is doing a fine job in catering to the more popular games, and I say that not just because I am a subscriber. The economic/ statistics apparently do not support concentrating effort on the Campaign Series, but that doesn't stop me from getting the latest Winex and giving it a whirl. I would love to see these games ported to Linux via Winemaker myself but I think you need the source code of these works to do that. Not being a developer, I don't know. But a Linux version if these games would be awesome; I think East Front II running in a Linux enviroment would blow away a lot of other games just becuase of their multi-player capabilities. It would certainly be a boon to wargame clubs on the internet to be able to host online tourneys. Maybe this is just a cry in the wilderness but I think that Transgaming is doing a lot for games be they Windows or Linux.
Dawn of the Dead
My brothers duron 1ghz, 192 mb ram, and gf3 ti200 runs GTA 3 WAY better than my 1.2ghz, 384mb ram, and radeon 9000 pro. This to me, suggest the game is optimised for nvidia video cards. His comp runs the game at 1024 x 768 x 32 and there is only the occasional stutter which from what I've read is due to the crappy programming. My computer, on the other hand feels like a slideshow. Every other game I have though, my comp runs them faster than my bro's.
My argument relies on the fact that however it was done, clean room implementation or not, a derivitive work of the Windows APIs, has been created by observing their behavior, and duplicating it imperfectly.
Derivitive works are prohibited by Title 17, Chaper 1.
Derivitive works are defined in Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec 101.
Wine is based upon a preexisting work, specifically the Windows APIs, which are protected by copyright.
The clean-room implementation argument is meaningless - I argue that the APIs can be treated as atomic, and that you need only observe the values passed to and returned from them to re-implement them. Therefore the re-implementation is a *translation* which is specifically mentioned in Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 101.
There is absolutely no mention in the whole of Title 17, (yes, I read it, that is why I took a long time to reply), of a requirement for a work to include any part of the orginial work in order to be treated as a derivative work.
If I translate song lyrics from English, in to English, such that meaning is preserved, but no words are repeated between the two versions, I have created a derivative work. That is no different, in principle, to what has been done with the Wine project.
Your comments, please...
Remember the old text adventure emulators? Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls . . . a JVM for games, before its time. It inspired competition (heh heh . . . competition in America?) and made the games (and their emulators) better.
This is strictly my opinion, but flashy game performance ([frankenstein] Emulation SLOW, BAD for FPS! [/frankenstein]) needs to take a back seat for awhile - then gaming will become an art and a science as opposed to art and hacked-together-maybe-it-will-work science (Apologies to Carmack, Molyneux, and Abrash). Game companies that latch on to latest/greatest technologies before they're proven are asking for a one-time, guaranteed to become a legacy game. Remember Glide? Yeah, neither do I . . .
To Sum Up: Emulation Good for Business, Game Performance at the expense of portability Bad.
Just want to throw one word into the air - Lindows.
Now correct me if I am wrong, but this is an example of taking Wine even further and winning against microsoft.
Codeweavers has their own page which contains ~200 games and lots of apps.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
It's a drag they failed, but the way I understand it they were poorly managed. One thing's for sure, they greatly overestimated the rapid widespread adoption of Linux.
I myself never bought a Loki game but I was eager to try some out (I used Ximian at the time and they were offering a Loki channel). Mostly I was waiting for XFree86 to include a driver for my video card, about 4.1 or so. By the time it came, Loki was going under.
The state of hardware support under Linux has improved tremendously over the last couple of years. There may yet be room for a seller of games that run natively in Linux. Put it together with a distro (Mandrake, Icepack--haven't tried it but they have a lot of games--,Ximian) and that would be worth paying for, you bet.
I've never used wine myself, because I have a seperate computer for gaming. However I'm wondering since Mac OS X runs a BSD kernal and there has been much success compiling other nix stuff on it, if you could play your windows game in Wine on OS X? It would be cheaper for all those who have windows games and other windows software then buying virtual pc for the apps. I'm still trying to focus on games though. So what do you think?
- DenialX
Wine is based upon a preexisting work
Wine is a piece of code. No code from any Microsoft implementation of the Windows API has entered the Wine CVS repository.
Wine is based upon a preexisting work
Define "based upon". The statute fails to define based upon; can you provide any elaboration in case law that supports your position?
specifically the Windows APIs, which are protected by copyright.
"In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work" (17 USC 102).
If re-implementation of a standard were forbidden by copyright law, then every BIOS publisher would be in violation, all the way back to the first PC clone, and the International Organization for Standardization would control all implementations of its standards.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's *obvious*, re-read my post, and all will be made clear.
Don't forget Hyperion, who have publically stated that their *AMIGA* ports out-sell their Linux ports.
Yegods, Linux users must outnumber the Amiga user base by at least 1000:1
i'm still trying to get the jump from popcorn to cd's to dmca.
If Jane sells popcorn and markets it as capable of circumventing access control, then Jane has violated 17 USC 1201.
Will I retire or break 10K?
VESA? No wonder you're worried about "hardware diversity"
OK, you figure out how to support all video cards made by NVIDIA, ATI, and Matrox in the past, present, and future. You figure out how to support all sound cards made by all manufacturers in the past, present, and future.
does ANYTHING still run on your 486?
Yes. The DOS version of TOD is playable all the way down to a 486.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Unless you like using the same program under linux and windows, I am almost certain that gaim for linux provides equivalent functionality to trillian (with the possible exception of file transfers and the extra inclusion of some cool plugins)
Might be worth it for you to give it a try. And I know installing/running it would be easier than installing/running trillian through wine(x).
System Requirements
If WineX becomes popular enough, the game developers will make certain that their games work with it before they ship. This would wrest control away, not towards Microsoft. WineX could be the tool that breaks the trend. Of course, don't expect and Microsoft-branded games to do this; but I wouldn't be surprised if 3rd party developers take a look at WineX and think to themseleves "hmm, it would only take an extra month to certify my game with this and then all the Linux/BSD crowds could buy my game".Pentium or Athlon 700Mhz
3D Video Card with 32MB RAM
256MB RAM
Microsoft Windows 98 / 2000 / XP
or
Transgaming WineX 2.5
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
This won't work, since the games consist of 80x86 machine code instead of PowerPC machine code. While you could implement the Win32 API on a PowerPC, the games themselves are still intel binaries. BSD or not has nothing to do with it. FWIW: Mac OS X does not have a BSD kernel, it has a Mach kernel. Only userland is part FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Donate free food here
I am no longer a subscriber to transgaming, thus cannot give you the exact links to the forums. I I too have a redhat system and running blizzard games proved to be choppy. Trolling the forums in transgaming, I found some interesting posts of how the developers tried to work with redhat, Alan Cox, and discovered that redhat's kernel has some patch in it that causes the choppiness, where as other distros work much better. The solution, in quite a few cases as indicated by others posting and the developers, was to roll your own kernel. Apparently, the same is true for redhat 7.3
...and the best will be running a software designed for Windows, tweaked for Windows (because that's where 90%+ of the users are) *under* Windows.
Or were you only counting linux-zealots looking for the best *running on Linux*? Kinda big difference.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Its just like Mac users. My friend is always mad that he has to wait a couple extra months so he can get the Mac version of the game. But he waits. Why? Because he has no alternative. (Most) Linux users have the ability to run a Windows dual-boot. Hence, they can play the games right away, and don't complain as much as say, a Mac user who is limited by the hardware.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
"Piece of shit API"? FUD alert! You clearly are spouting shit. SDL is maybe 1/50th the funtionality of the DirectX suite. Do All linux advocates have only 3 brain cells? Or just you?
I only have one copy of Windows that came bundled with a computer, and that's Windows 3.1. Are you suggesting that Windows 3.1 will run these games better than Wine?
-- $SIGNATURE
Plz help, where can i get that image he is using as his xchat background ?
This is the one i mean - thanks!
Very good point, x86 hardware would definatly make that diffence. Mach kernal? I understand calling it BSD is wrong because it was a rip off of the BSD Kernal, but are you saying that it's called Mach?
- DenialX
I am talking about the letter of the law, and you are talking about the spirit of the law.
I am talking about the law that the judge will apply to a case, which is the only law that has any force.
17 USC 102 does not apply if you treat the APIs as atomic
I still do not understand what you mean by "atomic". Look up "idea-expression dichotomy" some time.
Why do you think that there are very few Apple Macintosh clones?
Executor, one of the few Mac emulators, contains a complete clone of Classic Mac OS. Were it illegal, its publisher could not sell it. In addition, ARDI sells Carbonless Copies, a PC-based Mac emulator designed to be linked directly into an application.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wine helps Linux break out of the Chicken / Egg stage, where nobody wants to try the OS because there aren't enough well-known applications that run on it, and nobody wants to port their apps to Linux because not enough people have switched.
Since buying a 3-month subscription to WineX, I can now use enough of my old apps (and new games) that I have deleted my windows partition. Furthermore, I've been slowly converting my friends and family to Linux. This is ONLY possible because they can run the apps they know and love as-is.
I think BeOS proved that a great OS won't survive without plenty of apps... we should make it as easy as possible to port applications from Windows to Linux. If that means Wine, then fine. I agree that it's not as nice as a source-level rebuild, but your grandparents don't care HOW their copy of GenericWindowsApp2000 works... they just want it to work.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
make a site for developers of windows games in which they ask that certain functions or routines arent used?
for the most part, the developers shouldnt mind
That would allow more new games to be developed that winex supports
you must not know anything about SDL. your "1/50th" is far far off base. also, i spoke not of linux. you inserted that word yourself. ive used SDL primarily in windows, although it was exciting to watch the same code compile in linux without a hitch. why don't people who have switched from DX to SDL reply to this and provide us with some real life examples?
2 reasons why SDL is superior to DX:
1.) extreme portability
2.) simpler (thus the "Simple" in SDL) more intuitive handling of music and image files
Now, back on topic...
Donate free food here
Sometimes they are slow to update the 'working' status when a game is made to run. I can run Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment under WineX, yet both have a 'working rating' of Zero.
There was also at least one game (a free DDR clone) that worked in an older version of WineX (apparently) but does not work in the current version (or at least I couldn't make it work).
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Interesting. Let's imagine that Wine(X) is perfect for a moment.
I take Lycoris, which looks very much like Windows XP. I integrate it with Wine, add the NTFS driver, recreate some of the apps and use the Windows Media drivers that are now floating around the net. I have just recreated a simple version of Windows, have I not? In this case, if it's possible for me to recreate Windows, then sell it, without the permission of Microsoft, does this not mean that Windows is effectively an open standard at least in some respects? If anybody can make and sell a competiting implementation, then presumably they can document it as well, making it an actual open standard.
Not a troll, just perhaps food for thought.
Win32 is sort of an open standard, if incomplete. MS has published documentation on it, and while they may not have defined behavior for all situations, you can follow the documentation.
The problem is that occasionally the documentation differs from Windows, and if it does, everyone only cares whether software works correctly with Windows, not whether it follows the documentation.
Finally, there is no "frozen" version of the documentation that serves as a standard for MS to conform to and release patches to bring their products up to spec with.
I'd call Win32 about as open a standard as Postscript -- we know how to follow the docs, but there's only one implementation that 95% of the people out there care about.
The same is becoming true with HTML and Internet Explorer -- the HTML spec could say one thing, but authors are going to primarily care about compatibility with the leading implementation of that spec, rather than exact compliance with the spec.
May we never see th
More info or reference? I'm interested in this because it doesn't just affect MS.
Also, in your argument on patents, look at it this way: there is nothing preventing MS from coming up with a patented method of doing something and then building an API that invokes that method. They can't patent the API, but they could sue anybody who duplicates its functionality.
Oops -- it was not, in fact, MS. I had been skimming something a long time ago that was talking about it, referring to MS's header files. It turns out that there was actually a different case that set precedent, and that this was then mentioned in reference to Microsoft.
I'm not sure what the original document was where I read this, but it's also talked about a bit in this recent WINE->GPL thread.
The crucial sentence in the court's decision:"When specific instructions, even though previously copyrighted, are the only and essential means of accomplishing a given task, their later use by another will not amount to infringement".
Now, before Slashdot people start going ape all over this ("But this is the *only* way to compress MP3/compress GIF files so we should be able to do it"), keep in mind that this refers *only* to copyright, not patent law.
Interestingly enough, this passage may give carte blanche to MS to steal whatever chunks of machine code from AOL Instant Messanger they want to to allow interoperability between MSN Messenger and AIM. The same goes for cryptographic signatures containing copyrighted information (*cough* X-Box), and whatnot.
May we never see th
You have more knowledge of U.S. copyright and patent law than I do - I live in Europe.
I see now that I may well be wrong about the legal status of the Wine project, and if I was I appologise, I was NOT trolling, as the mod to my original post suggests, (which I consider an *insult* in any case, because although my claim is probably false, that does not make it a troll, it just makes it *wrong*).
Just to clarify a few things:
1. Atomic
Cannot be split up in to smaller parts. I maintain that you cannot take a piece of code out of a Windows API, and have it be any use in an emulator on it's own. It's like an atom, you can't split it. This is standard terminology in the U.K., but probably not worldwide, so I should have defined it.
2. Spirit of the law/Letter of the law
I believe this is another instance of U.K. slang. Case law is often called spirit of the law in U.K. English.
3. Executor, the Mac emulator
There was a lot of debate over the legal status of Executor when it was first introduced. I didn't follow it closely, so there again, your knowledge is greater than mine.
So there you have it, I apologise for being wrong, (which I assume I was), so now please give me at least some credit for intellegence and mod my original post to something other than troll - please!
Incidently, I still think that the Wine team violated the Microsoft EULA, but that is not law, and thankfully, (HOPEFULLY), will never be, so it is a non-issue here.
Also, I would like to point out that the Wine team suggest that people, copy files over from their Windows installation to use on the emulator. This also violates the EULA, unless you purchase a second Windows license, as far as I can tell.
So, yes, I now believe that you are legally correct, however, I do still believe that the Wine team are behaving in an inappropriate way with their development efforts.
For companies who don't have the resources to come up with a true gnu/linux port of their software (yet) this could be a possibility. They'd simply test their games/applications against wine and try to avoid windows api calls that do not work properly in wine(x) and thus have a gnu/linux port without much effort.
No. Developers can simply ignore the issue of WineX incompatibilities and rely on the fact that the WineX developers are continually making improvements and fixes. Developers can continue to do what they do now, concentrate on Win32 and let the Linux community fill in the missing pieces themselves. It's a formula that works. Why spend the time and effort when the Linux community will do it for you?
"A company like ID probably can't afford to do it, .... Such a company's total operating costs would be less, and their shareholder responsibilities fewer."
But it could. iD software is wholey owned, and they have lots of money in the bank. John C. does it because he loves his work, and it offers him both the freedom of independant work, with the resources of a real company backing him -- even if the company is a handful of people.
They could certainly only develop for Linux and not go broke, but that's not John's goal. Neither is money for money's sake -- that's why they do the Mac/Linux releases at the same time as the Windows ones. He wants more people to see the work he's done.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I maintain that you cannot take a piece of code out of a Windows API, and have it be any use in an emulator on it's own.
The Windows API is defined through publicly available plain-English specifications available on msdn.microsoft.com. Parts have even been submitted to ECMA. I'm still not getting this whole "atomic" thing.
It's like an atom, you can't split it.
Heard of a particle accelerator? Besides, a fellow can split off Passport from the rest, or DirectX from the rest, or the Internet Explorer control from the rest.
So there you have it, I apologise for being wrong, (which I assume I was)
Apology accepted. In the age of the DMCA (which the UK is getting in the form of its EUCD implementation act), it's often hard to tell what's legal and what isn't.
so now please give me at least some credit for intellegence
Credit given. Note that I stayed calm while responding, unlike some other posters.
and mod my original post to something other than troll
I'll see what I can do in metamod.
the Wine team suggest that people, copy files over from their Windows installation to use on the emulator. This also violates the EULA, unless you purchase a second Windows license
United States law, 17 USC 117: "it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". So as long as a fellow uses the extra copy only with Wine, it's OK.
In any event, users are given a bit more leeway through the "fair use" doctrine (17 USC 107).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, I tested over 70 games, and about 7 worked, not 35. So this means that the working percentage actually drops with more games.
I don't buy "new" windows games, except maybe out of the bargain bin. I will, however buy new Linux games.
Clickety Click
But you can edit jpegs with a command line. ImageMagick has a slew of command line stuff, as does the Python Imaging Library. I have written Python programs which crop, filter, enhance, and zoom in preparation for automatic optical character recognition.
I admit, its kind of tough editing pictures when you can't see whats being done, but you can still do it.
Clickety Click
Yeah, but at this time no major player in the gaming area did step up for SDL. If no big title use it, then noone will take it seriously.
I wonder if there are pressure from Redmond on gaming company to use DirectX over anything else...
"As iD could do it, it would be interesting to see what the fallout would be if they *did* - even if only as a staggered release, such as putting out a Mac/Linux version of Doom III three months before the Windows version hits the shelves. My guess is that at least some people would be anxious enough to play that they'd give the Linux thing a shot. "
/etc (which has the font info, etc), and have a local .XFree86config which contains all the overrides for the user configured by the GUI. The entire thing should flush its configuration to disk everytime there's a change, while the control panels work with the in-memory structures (allowing complete on-the-fly updates).
This is exactly what happened when Quake 3 demo was released for Linux/MacOS only in 1998 and 1999. The problem was that 3D acceleration on Linux is pretty voodoo, so most people ended up using Macs for their demo.
XFree86's config file needs to be overhauled so that it's entirely GUI-configurable in a similar way to the Mac/Windows display control panels. Have the system-wide base part it
But no one else seems to be pushing for this, even though X is so hard to configure.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"Wine helps Linux break out of the Chicken / Egg stage..."
Unfortunately, this is not the case. IBM tried that path with OS/2 for Windows. For a few years I actually ran OS/2, and ran all of my applications under it. All of my _Windows_ applications, that is. Most of the time they worked really well, and sometimes they were a bit of a pain.
Ultimately, I gave up. OS/2 was a VASTLY superior OS, but I was using it to run the same old crap, and working harder at it. It just wasn't worth it. Eventually, the fact that you could run Windows applications on it was one of things that led to no native apps.
Ironically, Wine is part of the problem and the solution at the same time.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Atomic
I'd really like to see it updated. This static file maintained by a user who knows so much about their monitor and chipset and clock timing crap is beyond most people, myself included. And I have UNIX dreams :p
/.'s Quake section.
The Q3Demo was released for those platforms first to reduce the number of bug reports. The engine was not completely complete, so Mr. Carmack wanted to get some feedback without flooding iD with useless data. The first story is back here, in April of 1999. There are more if you just look through
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.