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WineX (And Warcraft3) On FreeBSD

Dan writes "Kenneth Culver has implemented the Linux ftruncate64, truncate64, and mmap2 syscalls in the linuxulator on his computer, (mostly cut 'n pasted the mmap2 from regular mmap with a couple of changes) and with these changes it is possible to run the Linux version of WineX (the one you have to pay for) to run Warcraft 3 on FreeBSD." If WineX is interesting to you, this earlier article on playing Windows games with WineX (under Linux) may be worth a read.

54 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. WineX by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'd love to try this, but I don't have a *nix system.

    Will there be a port to Windows any time soon?

    1. Re:WineX by billybob2001 · · Score: 2, Funny

      All Windows users should have
      cygwin

      It's the law!

      Ok, it's not, but it should be.

    2. Re:WineX by StefMeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is just silly. If one wants people to use Linux, you've got to eliminate barriers keeping them from doing so. WineX is a solution (although it may not be perfect) for lowering one of the most important barriers: 'Can I still use that Windows app that I use so much when I switch'.
      Read this interesting article by Joel Spolsky, about removing barriers for more info.

      Furthermore, do you really think there are less people developing OSS because there's WineX. I don't think so, maybe fewer developers will try to rewrite a win application that works perfectly wih WineX, but they will develop something else instead (work enough if you ask me).

      Stef

      --
      "Son, in a sporting event, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get" - Homer J. Simpson
    3. Re:WineX by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Informative
      Will there be a port to Windows any time soon?

      Actually, yes

      Ha! Gotcha! :)

    4. Re:WineX by packeteer · · Score: 2
      --
      unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
  2. Where is the WineO port though? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm just waiting for the WineO port so I can sit on my park bench and game all evening.

    *hic*

  3. Performance by jorleif · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Anyone actually tried this?

    What is the performance like when BSD is emulating linux which is emulating windows?

    1. Re:Performance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The FreeBSD Linux emulator isn't really an emulator as such: it substitutes a different syscall table for the FreeBSD one and runs the ELF binary as if it were Linux. Sometimes it's slower than Linux, sometimes it's faster. Performance should be much the same as Linux.

    2. Re:Performance by dubstop · · Score: 4, Informative

      I don't think that BSD actually emulates Linux. My understanding is that BSD exposes a Linux ABI. I suppose that there might be a little bit of manipulation behind the scenes when a Linux function is called, to adapt it to an underlying BSD call, but not to the extent that it would be called emulation.

      If this is the case, there shouldn't be too much of a performance hit.

      I could be wrong though, OSX is more my sort of thing.

    3. Re:Performance by burts_here · · Score: 3, Informative
      What is the performance like when BSD is emulating linux which is emulating windows?

      Wine Is Not an Emulator.

      and quit wining.

      --
      Burt "Out of my mind back in 5 minutes"
    4. Re:Performance by Jimmy_B · · Score: 5, Informative
      What is the performance like when BSD is emulating linux which is emulating windows?
      No emulation is occuring; WineX implements the Windows API, and this article says someone implemented some Linux API calls on BSD. It doesn't involve any translation of machine code, which is the slow part of emulation; theoretically, it should run at the same speed as the Windows version, if the device drivers are of equal quality.
    5. Re:Performance by evilviper · · Score: 3, Informative

      For one thing it's not emulation, just a compatibility layer that intercepts and converts syscalls.

      I've experienced absolutely no noticable speed drop when running Linux apps under FreeBSD/OpenBSD (not that I run a great deal of programs that way).

      In fact, the catch-phrase always being touted is that some Linux apps actually run faster under BSD than they do on Linux. I thought everyone had heard that, but I guess not.

      Feel free to ask a die-hard Linux elitist to try and explain that some time. :-)

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    6. Re:Performance by MouseR · · Score: 4, Informative

      My understanding is that BSD exposes a Linux ABI. I suppose that there might be a little bit of manipulation behind the scenes when a Linux function is called, to adapt it to an underlying BSD call, but not to the extent that it would be called emulation.

      [...]

      I could be wrong though, OSX is more my sort of thing.


      Mac OS X does just that when you launch a CFM-based Carbon App.

      CFM ("Code Fragment Manager") is the old ABI of Mac OS. When the Finder launches a CFM-based application, withint the native Mach-O -based Mac OS X ABI environment, it actually launches another application called "LaunchCFMApp" and passes your app as a parameter.

      LaunchCFMApp does exactly what this Linux ABI thingy does on FreeBSD: it loads the "foreign" application's ABI, creates a vector map in memory and connects all function calls from the "foreign" ABI to the "native" entry points.

      This is not emulation, but rather, dynamic re-linking.

  4. Is this legal? by Max+Romantschuk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't think it's wrong... but according to the law, is this legal? I have no idea myself, anyone?

    --
    .: Max Romantschuk :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/
    1. Re:Is this legal? by seann · · Score: 2, Insightful

      what is this a press conference?
      Of course it's legal, why would it not be?
      They are providing a Free interface for a Free enviroment on FreeBSD, so people can Buy a product from the company and use it.

      If that's not free, I don't know what is.

      --
      I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
    2. Re:Is this legal? by Max+Romantschuk · · Score: 2

      Good point... Nowadays the inter-license jungle is getting more and more difficult to navigate :)

      Thanks for the info!

      --
      .: Max Romantschuk :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/
    3. Re:Is this legal? by mark_lybarger · · Score: 2

      who should really pay much attention if it's legal or not? home users? (this software doesn't seem to attract much business domain). if the software works , then it's got an advantage on 90% of the software out there that is legal. me, i'll use whatever works before i wory about weather it satisfies the 200$/hr. lawyer's conclusion.

    4. Re:Is this legal? by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2

      It's absolutely legal. Wine and WineX are clean room implementations and as such protected by law. The only problems that might arise are patent-related, but as there's practically nothing in Windows at the API level that hasn't been done before I doubt there is much risk of that.

  5. "bsd is dead" blah blah by mackstann · · Score: 5, Funny

    i can picture all of the AC's scurrying to open up ~/text/bsd-is-dead.html to begin pasting away.

  6. Xgames by katalyst · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Games seem to be a major factor when it comes to choosing an OS (or even a console). Thanks to apps like Wine and orgs like Loki, we'll have em all someday on the *nix systems. Things are looking up. I got hold of The Return to Castle Wolfenstien beta for linux before I could get a Windows version. And if you're targetting Linux , why not the rest of the *nix distros. It's all moving in the right direction. How about a KILLER game for the *nix platform which can NOT be run on windows........

    --
    |/________
    |\A|ALYS|
    1. Re:Xgames by dr.Flake · · Score: 2

      "How about a KILLER game for the *nix platform which can NOT be run on windows........"

      couldn't one just chance the licence: "this source may naver be compiled for running on win32 compatible platforms".

      --
      Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
    2. Re:Xgames by Rew190 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Microsoft will find ways to break Wine support.

      They won't simply let nix develop game support without any resistance.

    3. Re:Xgames by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've noticed this problem as well. It's almost a given at this point that the best *nix software will eventually be ported to windows. A friend of mine made a good point when he came over and pointed out that almost all the programs I had open were available for windows, in addition to all the windows software. It's the OS2 problem all over again.

      It becomes even more of a problem because if you're a windows developer who dosn't release source and states that you'll never port outside windows very few people will have a problem. But if you're not developing for windows and you either don't release the source, or you forbid windows ports...well, you've seen what happens already in this small thread.

      We're planning instead on making the non windows versions of our game just a little bit better. The unregistered windows versions would have a couple less levels, an occasional "please register" nag screen on startup, and a release date a couple months later than the registered windows version and the *nix releases.

      The hope is that it'd be too much trouble for too little to even bother compiling the *nix version for windows, and there's even a small chance some of the windows users might shell out a few bucks instead of warezing it.

      I veiw it more as giving the thing out for free to people of a like mind than crippling the windows version. We'll probaly still get labled elitist bastereds for it, but it's the best way I could think of to support diversity in OS use and not screw over the windows users.

      --
      Everything will be taken away from you.
    4. Re:Xgames by evilviper · · Score: 2

      That is a big problem actually. For microsoft to break wine, they have to break a great deal of Windows backwards compatibility.

      If they do it in small steps, then the wine developers should be able to keep up with the changes. If they do a great deal of changing all at once, they may drive customers away from Windows.

      It's not as simple as them flipping a switch and killing all of Wine's progress. They need to hurt themselves to harm wine.

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  7. This is not a dupe by Old+Wolf · · Score: 5, Funny

    Note - this is not a dupe

    I feel that this is informative, due to the extremely high dupe story rate on slashdot in the last few days.

  8. Linuxulator? by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's a "linuxulator"?? Hmm.. Sounds kinda like my nick.

    Anyway, can't they just call it an "emulator"? Or is an emulator running under Windows a "winulator"? *sigh*

    Sorry if I'm picky, but it's just adds unecessary confusion. Or *is* actually a "linuxulator" something different than an emulator running under Linux, so there's actually a reason for this word?

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    1. Re:Linuxulator? by putte_xvi · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think "linuxlator" refers to the Linux compatibility in FreeBSD. So, yes, it is something different than an emulator running under Linux. It's not an emulator, and not running under Linux.

    2. Re:Linuxulator? by Jugalator · · Score: 2

      Oops, sorry, I seem to had got it all backwards. heh

      Don't know why I babbled about Linux when this is a FreeBSD topic. :-) I guess it was because they played Warcraft through Windows through WineX through Linux through FreeBSD. :-P

      Aagh... I should've kept quiet instead of making my poor brain hurt.

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    3. Re:Linuxulator? by McFly69 · · Score: 2

      Jugalator? Did you go to BC High? There was a thing called Jugs that you received when you got detention. There was one guy doing this and we called him the Jugalator!

      --



      NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
  9. Dogma by khakipuce · · Score: 3, Funny
    If I buy a big electric motor and a fan and connect it to the grid, I can use it to drive my wind turbine continuously to produce light to power the solar panels on my roof to produce electricity for my house.

    I have many tools in my toolbox, this saves me having to drive nails with a screwdriver.

    --
    Art is the mathematics of emotion
  10. Re:pay-for-winex vs winex cvs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    1) its harder to install
    2) the pay version has some properitry extensions.

  11. Wine compatibility problems by Woogiemonger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've only tried wine with various installations of Redhat Linux .. various versions of wine too, including WineX. This was a year ago, and maybe things have changed since, but I remember wine being a joke of a technology. I could not get it working right with absolutely anything. The funniest was, as luck would have it, with a Blizzard product, Starcraft, which apparently was one of the easier applications to get working. Well, I managed to get everything working except the mouse. It's hard to play Starcraft without a mouse. There was something fatally wrong with each and every software I used, no matter how simple, except for Windows solitaire. Maybe getting that working was just a delusion. Admittedly, my hardware was not completely standard, but with absolutely nothing working right, it's ridiculous. I do remember one thing though. Wine was pleasantly fast. Unfortunately, that doesn't quite fit the bill.

    1. Re:Wine compatibility problems by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Informative
      Check out some screenshots I took last week of Wine on RedHat 8 - these are not faked, Wine runs all those apps (not always perfectly though).

      There are more here

      I use Wine almost every day to run IE6 with the Adobe SVG Plugin and it works great. How do I do this? Simply, I got a copy of Crossover (a commercial distro of Wine) and pointed it at a build from Wine CVS.

      Wine isn't yet easy enough to setup for most people, so Codeweavers do it for you. Think of them as the Redhat of Wine. It is possible to do anything you can do in CrossOver with WineHQ wine, but it's a lot harder. Wine is scheduled to get "ease of use" some time around 0.9 and 1.0 which are happening probably sometime mid to late next year.

    2. Re:Wine compatibility problems by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Tried Wine 2.2.1 under Mandrake 9.0 yesterday, mostly in order to get mIRC running ;) lots of errors first time it ran, and a couple of font issues to work out, but if even a complete linuxn00b like me can figure it out, anyone can.

      --

      People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
    3. Re:Wine compatibility problems by Spoing · · Score: 4, Informative
      I've followed Wine for a couple years, and it just started to become practical for a wide variety of programs in the last 6-9 months. Before that, a few programs worked well enough for normal use.

      Over the last year, I've bought Codeweavers Crossover (both Plugin and Office) and a subscription to Transgaming's effort. Take a look at the programs listed in the main Wine tree and at Transgaming's site.

      If you want to roll your own, most of the code is available in some form from both branches, though the commercial distributions are more polished. If I were to deploy Wine over a large number of machines, I would probably go back to building my own just to cut costs.

      --
      A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
    4. Re:Wine compatibility problems by MsGeek · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually if someone is such a mIRC junkie that they want to get it running under WINE, they should take a look at XChat. XChat is a fairly faithful Open Source replica of mIRC.

      What I want to see is a IRC client for Linux/FreeBSD that behaves just like IRCle, a client for Classic Macintosh. I just like it...it's the IRC client I've used for years and it's as comfy as a broken-in pair of jeans for me.

      --
      Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
  12. Cool: This is what open source is about by Paul+Bristow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I do not run *BSD, as I know Linux and am comfortable with at after some 9 years of use. However, it is a great testament to the power of the open source concept that this is possible at all. I am tremendously impressed with the BSD guys for achieving this.

    Remember, it is a Good Thing tm to have a computing infrastructure made of diverse systems. So the more code that can be run on Linux , *BSD, Hurd, OSX and others the better.

    Today, Wine is probably no less compatible with a random version of windows than any other random version of windows.

    --
    - Paul
  13. They could of called it LINE by gatesh8r · · Score: 2

    LINE Is Not an Emmulator or LINux Emmulator.

    --
    Karma whorin' since 1999
  14. wineX from cvs(for free) by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://frankscorner.org/wine/modules.php?op=modloa d&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=6 8&page=1
    title says it all;
    "If you don't want to spend 5 bucks on WineX, you can always try compile it yourself, but the CVS version of WineX is a little different from the commercial version:
    * no support for Installshield installers
    * no copy protection code

    To install WineX from CVS you must have CVS installed on your computer."

    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    1. Re:wineX from cvs(for free) by muyThaiBxr · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, I actually compiled it on FreeBSD, but due to some linux-isms that I didn't bother porting properly and just wanted to see if it would compile (or better yet run anything). The version I managed to compile on FreeBSD wouldn't run anything, so that's why I went ahead and plunked down my $5 per month and got wc3 working on FreeBSD :-)

    2. Re:wineX from cvs(for free) by gl4ss · · Score: 2

      cd cracks exist though, the cd protections don't like all cdrom drives even, i dunno what the copy protection code does though(really). it could just as well be simulation(crack, circumvention device) like in some of the virtual cdrom drive progs for win*.

      well, yeah, one could say that the cracks are evil and yadda yadda warez kiddies yadda yadda, but there is good purpose in them too..

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  15. pay? by Jacek+Poplawski · · Score: 3, Informative

    to run the Linux version of WineX (the one you have to pay for) to run Warcraft 3

    Pay for what? Isn't Warcraft 3 working ok free WineX version? You are allowed to use WineX from CVS without any paying.

  16. Re:9 years of linux? by Paul+Bristow · · Score: 2

    Started on Linux kernel 0.99 pl 14, back in the days when you had to make a bunch of floppies from the single-speed CD and really work at it... Not like these namby pamby graphical installer things today. Oh God, am I really only 34?

    More seriously, being based in Europe and paying per-minute charges for internet access I couldn't afford to spend time surfing slashdot until I got broadband a few years back, then I got my sadly large-numbered slashdot id. :-(

    --
    - Paul
  17. Re:Recurrrrrrrsion by nurb432 · · Score: 2

    Read closely -> NO emulation takes place .. just translation..

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  18. Re:Lack of BSD software by quantum+bit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's no wonder that BSD lacks behind linux in software when it is missing important system calls!

    No, BSD just got it right the first time :-P

    From a freebsd-emulation mailing list post:

    To me, it looks like mmap2 takes an offset that's a page index, rather
    than a byte position. Since linux passes the offset with a 32-bit
    long, rather than a 64-bit off_t like we do, they need to do this in
    order to be able to map offsets larger than 4GB into a file.


    So mmap2 would be redundant on BSD...

  19. wineX is nothing more than a novelty for games by t0qer · · Score: 3, Funny

    Running your windows games using winex is like trying to swim laps wearing a 3 peice suit.

    WineX is not a replacement for native ports.

  20. Re:IF WINE THEN WINEX ENDIF by jasonditz · · Score: 2

    http://www.pcguide.com/ref/cpu/fam/g4C5x86-c.html

    That's what a goddamn 5x86 is, dumbass.

  21. Native ports not viable yet by AHumbleOpinion · · Score: 2

    WineX is not a replacement for native ports.

    To Windows game developers and to the majority of Linux gamers who would otherwise dual boot to Windows it is a viable option. The market for native ports is only those very few gamers who would never dual boot or emulate, i.e. the new sales. People who dual boot or emulate are already customers, they buy the Win32 version. There is no economic incentive to sell them a Linux version, i.e. replace a Win32 sale with a Linux sale.

    1. Re:Native ports not viable yet by AHumbleOpinion · · Score: 2

      You make it sound impossible to port games to other o/s's...

      No, some OS's do provide a financial incentive. MacOS for example. Unline Linux the Win32 version can not be used, they can't dual boot to Windows, they can't effectively emulate (they have to emualte the CPU instructions, not merely the OS API calls). If Linux users could not run Win32 programs then it might make sense to port, but they largely can and do so they are already customers. Look at OS/2 2.0, excellent Windows support was a double edged sword and greatly reduced the incentive to write native apps.

      The quake3 engine runs on all platforms

      IIRC in a Game Developer Magazine article Brian Hook of Id stated that the Linux ports don't make business sense, that Id does them because they think it is cool to do so. Secondly, game sales are not Id's sole source of income. There is also licensing the engine. Their games are in part demos of their engine. This also helps justifies things that don't make business sense.

      Unfortunatly commercial companies are still inclined to use their own in house API's because they smoke crack

      Various Mac ports prove this theory wrong.

      Sure open source is great but who you gonna call when it breaks

      This is the other major hurdle. How do you QA and support an OS that has a numerous parallel versions, can be patched daily, and is alterable by the end user? It is a QA nightmare and creates a huge overhead.

      Linux is a great OS, but that does not mean it is well suited for all things.

  22. sequencing and softsynths on wine? by cenobita · · Score: 2, Interesting

    while i know everyone will be hurriedly trying to run things like warcraft 3 and rtcw, i'm curious..has anyone had good luck running high-level audio apps on winex or regular old wine?

    i had tried getting native instruments reaktor up on my freebsd box awhile back, and while it *did* install and startup, i couldn't get sound, and performance was pretty lagged.

    if anything, the lack of software like reaktor and cubase, not to mention the many vst/dx plugins, is what keeps that little voice in my head that says, "y'know, you really should just switch back to windows, since those programs are what you use the most." it really sucks to be torn when the operating system you love doesn't run the apps you require. i think a lot of you can empathize, as often times, "clone" open-source versions just don't measure up. let's face it: gliv, audacity, etc. just don't hold a candle to stuff like spark xl and cubase sx.

    we're at a strange turning point, i suppose. on one hand, more companies are slowly starting to support us (nvidia, etc.), but methinks it's going to be a long while before companies like steinberg and adobe jump on our train.

  23. Where's the bits? by Piquan · · Score: 2

    So... where are the bits? I wanna run this. Did these changes get put into -CURRENT (yay, I gotta MFC), or does Kenneth keep them on his web page, or does he seriously want us all to email him, or what? I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing this. I have Warcraft 3 running fine on WineX under the Linuxulator, with a stock -STABLE box. Well, I say fine... there's a lot of sluggishness in the mouse, but I don't see fixing syscalls being a help for that.

  24. Who cares by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Its not considered emulation in the computer market. It is using translation, not emulation.

    End of discussion.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  25. No manpage for mmap2 by sanermind · · Score: 2

    It's supposed to be a linux system call? I've never heard of it, even a google search on "mmap2 manpage" only returns a few results, all in japanese.
    I use mmap in my programs, I would be curious to know of other options. Why is there no manpage?! Is it an internal system call only used by glibc to wrap the normal mmap call [but wouldn't it then be prepended by an '_' or something], or what?

    --

    ---
    the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
    1. Re:No manpage for mmap2 by ntp · · Score: 2, Informative

      You must be using an outdated man-pages package. I'm running slackware-current and the manpage is there.

      The function mmap2 operates in exactly the same way as mmap(2), except that the final argument specifies the offset into the file in units of the system page size (instead of bytes).

      It just allows mmapping of > 2^32 bytes.

      --
      I control the time!