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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
...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 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.
Well you have to buy VMWare, and a copy of Windows. Plus from what I last heard, VMWare doesn't support 3D acceloration.
Wine on the other hand has most of Windows' DLLs reimplimented internally so you don't need a copy of Windows. (But if you have one installed it can use the DLLs that it finds there to help itself along.)
Theres a serious problem, imho, regarding that solution. VMWare requires LOTS of hardware to run, not leaving many resources to the games themselves (which requires good hardware), games would not run smoothly on such configuration...
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
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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')
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.
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.
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.
You also have to buy Windows along with VMWare. Wine is a compatibility layer... Free, open libraries that are designed to run native Windows code. VMWare, if I am not mistaken, emulates a virtual machine on which you can run an OS within an OS. Wine is quite different, as it is just a wrapper that translates Win32 calls to native Linux calls. Wine doesn't require Windows at all, but some applications run better if they can use the native Windows DLLs instead of the Wine libs. But it is getting better. Wine libraries are getting more efficient and accurate every day.
Corel put a lot of work into Wine for a bit to get Word Perfect Suite ported this way.
Then their interest in Linux faded.
I still have an unopened box of Corel Linux.
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.
...and Might and Magic 6? I can understand why they didn't try the latest release, what is it 9 now? It is just so bad. I guess 6 was the first one to be an Windows application. Still IV and V were my favorite (installed at the same time of course).
How much did you pay for that game? You can get an old TNT2 , 32 Meg card for less than $50. I paid twenty dollars for mine. The Matrox G400 can only be used with open source drivers. The reason you need NVIDIA is they have released drivers for linux. Even a GForce 4 won't play Heavy Gear, Quake III or many of the other loki titles without the commercial drivers. Make it known to other companies that you will only use NVIDIA hardware until the situation changes. I'm eventually going to buy a GForce card but haven't had a reason since all the games I currently play work great. I can run run Grand Theft Auto 3 in linux under winex, but it is unplayable under windows. The game lists a GForce card as the minimum. But that's really only true in direct x 8 on windows.
Sorry, I meant to say that clean room engineering is legal
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
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
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
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.
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
The thing is: It doesn't work at all.
/dev devices:
Then I have to say you're doing something wrong. My machine is a P-III 800 with 512M RAM, and a 16M TNT2 card. I do use nVidia's drivers. I can play RTCW, Q3A, things like that better than they ever ran on a Win* box for me.
You might want to check the permissions on the nvidia
[root@aragorn dev]# ls -l | grep nv
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 195, 0 Mar 15 18:03 nvidia0
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 195, 1 Mar 15 18:03 nvidia1
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 195, 2 Mar 15 18:03 nvidia2
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 195, 3 Mar 15 18:03 nvidia3
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 195, 255 Mar 15 18:03 nvidiactl
They should be 666. At first, that's what was blowing up for me, only root had access to the devices. Once I made them 666, my user account SOARED.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Maybe in the future wine(X) can serve as a porting platform?
This is already (kinda) being done. Kohan and The Sims have been "ported" to Linux via WineX.
P.S.
I know "ported" isn't quite the right term for this, but...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Sounds to me like you don't have DRI configured properly -- if you don't have 3d working in the first place under Linux, it's not going to magically work on Linux because you're running a game under an emulator :)
Run glxgears (may be called just gears on some systems) and make sure your frame rate is appropriate for your system / graphics card.
i.e. On my box here at work I'm getting around 220 FPS (i810 and celeron 833)
My box at home gets somewhere in the low one-thousands, IIRC (ATI Radeon and Athlon XP 1.4GHz)
Run glxinfo and check two things:
1) make sure there's a line that says "direct rendering: Yes"
2) make sure the OpenGL renderer string is named for your hardware (this one says "Mesa DRI I810 20010321")
If those two lines aren't correct then you need to recompile your kernel and make sure you enable DRM for your graphics card. If that still doesn't do it, I'd say upgrade XFree86 and Mesa (if you install everything from binary packages) or download and compile XFree86 from CVS (if you're feeling brave).
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
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?
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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
And screw obscurity, it was a good game. There are a lot of "obscure" games that are really, *really* good -- Total Annihilation is *still* better (much more powerful order-giving abilities) than the current crop of RTSes. Fallout is a top-notch RPG. The Last Express was beautifully done. There are a bunch of really good Q3 mods that were overshadowed by Counterstrike, likek Team Fortress and Weapons Factory.
People should realize that a good chunk of games prosper based very much on their marketing. Blizzard, for instance, throws a *huge* amount of money into marketing their games -- it's very difficult for the competition (which I've often found to be superior) to compete. People buy games based on screenshots in magazines, based on the overwhelming number of ads they see, and on how compelling the box is. Few people play a game for a while before buying it.
May we never see th
I love wine.. and if you use it for basic things like the very few apps that havent crossed over yet like my list...
Delorme mapping
Quicken (No GNUcash doesnt work as a replacement)
C&C Red Alert (my favorite time waster!)
assorted 16f84 Pic tools
My avery label software
that's it.. it took less reading to get those to work than you think. and they work very well. C&C red alert is faster under wine than windows BTW.
Avoid WineX.. I have never been aboe to get that to work as stable for non-game apps.. what comes with RH7.1-7.3 is a no-brainer though.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
oh... oh yea... sorry, man...
:-) ) nVidia cards, that's one of the things you'll want to check first if you're having problems.
Still, for those WITH (
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
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
I'm impressed that an accountant is successfully poking around with WINE. Very heartening.
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).
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!
I love both Fallout and Fallout 2, but I just thought that it was odd they specifically enumerated LinksLS 1998 as a golfing sim, while not bothering to explain that Fallout 2 was a well-received but poorly-selling RPG.
Heck, I have a swap partition > 2 GB.
May we never see th
I know "ported" isn't quite the right term for this, but...
You're absolutely correct, it isn't the correct term at all.
Emulating Windows and profiting from uninformed Linux users is more appropriate.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
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.
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).
Codeweavers has their own page which contains ~200 games and lots of apps.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
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
...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.....
Dude, chill for a sec -- I didn't say this was "regular" or "standard" or anything like that. My system worked perfectly out of the box. So did my little brother's when I installed Linux on his computer for christmas last year. :)
I'm just saying that if it isn't working, there's a way to troubleshoot it and a way to fix it (namely, upgrade your drivers).
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
You know, I used to think this. Certainly, the TA engine is *much* more impressive and capable than the SC one. (I wonder how much it would cost to acquire and open-source the code??)
However, the unit balance in SC is very clever and makes for a more interesting game, IMO, because the units in SC are so specialized. The ways in which they're specialized aren't very obvious at first, which is annoying.
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
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.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
"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
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.