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WineX 3.0 Examined
GonzoJohn writes "When I first subscribed to Transgaming's WineX 2.1 product last year, I was pleasantly surprised that nearly half of the games I had were supported to a degree. The games that did run ran pretty flawlessly. The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success, all just short of actually being able to play the game (the installers seemed to work). With the release of WineX 3.0 from Transgaming on April 17th this year, it looked like it was time to revisit the wonderful world of Wine. This time around, Transgaming WineX 3.0 has some new tools as well as improvements in the number of games supported and gaming speeds. In this article, we're going to take a look at the new features of WineX 3.0, with a focus on their new GUI installer called Point2Play."
I would appear to me that line was in reference to WineX 2.1, from a year ago, not the current release, which is really the focus of this article.
You can read them here.
The review appears to be slashdotted.
.:diatonic:.
Some of the NVidia drivers seem to run into problems in conjunction with WineX and some version of glibc. When I switched to Gentoo, using the 4191 NVidia drivers, with glibc 2.3.1 (not positive of that, though), WineX would segfault on me something awful, whenever it would try to enable the DirectX. Running installers worked fine, but games would just crash. Reading the support pages, I read the suggestion to roll back to the 3123 NVidia drivers. Worked like a charm.
Of course, nowadays, I seem to be able to run WineX 3.0, with the same version of glibc, and the 4363 drivers. So, I imagine someone somewhere has worked out a bug or two.
Ermmm..minor point: Wine Is NOT an Emulator. :)
My journal has hot
Incidentally this has been my experience installing games on Windows (not just on Wine). Many games are picky about which version of Direct X you have installed. I used to have multiple versions of Windows installed just to play my games. Some only worked in Win 98, others only worked in Win2000, and I had one that would only work in win95. It was really annoying and put me off gaming.
Last thing I heard the NPTL support code wasn't yet in CVS, you have to buy it from them. It will get there eventually, but it's tied up with their copy protection proprietary stuff.
WineX is only designed for gaming, not running business applications, browser plugins, etc.
well to get wine to work with redhat 9 i have to
.bashrc file. If anyone knows what bad side efects this will couse let me know
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
strangly enough this will also couse realplayer 8 to work properly under redhat9 , i just addded it to my
Let's see... last time I checked, you can download the source for free. The membership is 5 bucks a month ($60 a year) for a pre-packaged wine (rpm, deb, and tgz) with all the correct dll's in the right place AND a voice in what area WineX will be developed in next, plus support. Now they have an installer available (and IIRC, it's source is freely available) that is prepackaged for members. They keep adding benefits to WineX membership, but the price stays the same. Sorry, but that seems pretty reasonable to me.
Published by LinuxOrbit.com April 28, 2003
by John Gowin, Linux Orbit Editor-in-chief
It seems just like yesterday I was cleaning up my office and realized I had a bunch of games I could no longer play because of my complete Linux conversion. Although I don't buy a lot of games, the ones I had represented a decent cash investment, and I didn't want them to completely go to waste. This led me to Transgaming's WineX. When I first subscribed to Transgaming's WineX 2.1 product last year, I was pleasantly surprised that nearly half of the games I had were supported to a degree. The games that did run ran pretty flawlessly. The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success, all just short of actually being able to play the game (the installers seemed to work). All of this we detailed in our review of WineX 2.1 last August.
With the release of WineX 3.0 from Transgaming on April 17th this year, it looked like it was time to revisit the wonderful world of Wine. This time around, Transgaming WineX 3.0 has some new tools as well as improvements in the number of games supported and gaming speeds. In this article, we're going to take a look at the new features of WineX 3.0, with a focus on their new GUI installer called Point2Play.
The software
If you're not familiar with the Transgaming WineX sales model, you have 3 choices. You can subscribe for $5 US per month, with a three month minimum subscription. You can also choose a longer subscription term, such as one year for $50 US (essentially 2 months for free). Transgaming also gives access to the CVS releases of WineX to subscribers and non-subscribers, but the copyright protection code needed to run most games is missing. They also offer no support to those who build WineX from source. Once you've subscribed, you'll find pre-built packages available for download in RPM, DEB and TGZ formats. If you're familiar with your Linux distribution, installing the package for your system should be a breeze. This time around, you'll need to install 2 packages however, one for WineX and one for the new GUI tool Point2Play. The instructions for installing both are on the downloads page at the Transgaming website (once you've created an account and logged in).
The hardware
Here is a quick overview of the hardware which we used to test WineX 3.0:
In our tests, we ran WineX 3.0 under Red Hat Linux 7.3, but according to the Transgaming web site, the latest Linux distributions should be fine, provided they support the following:
(In our previous review, we also tested WineX on a Gateway PII 400 with a Riva 128 video card. That system is currently occupied with a Debian dist-upgrade to Sid over a dialup line, but that is a different article altogether.)
Once we installed the necessary RPMS for Winex and Point2Play:
Point2Play-1.0-0.i386.rpm
winex3-3.0-1.i386.rpm
we were ready to start testing.
Editors Note: In our previous review of Transgaming's WineX, we covered a few technical notes for configuring XFree86 on your GNU/Linux system. I
I think perhaps you don't understand. Wine doesn't need Windows. You can buy 3 good, modern games for the price of Windows alone.
You are wrong, some of their code is copyright so (as you could read in their site like everyone else) when you download WineX from the CVS portions of the code are missing and bad patched, from my experience sound wont work at all with CVS sources.
From Transgaming site:
Pre-built packages of WineX contain components licensed from third parties, and may not be redistributed in whole for any reason.
But is not like im bitching about it, Im a TransGaming suscriber, is not expensive and at least i know im helping to keep the project running, i mean, i play Counter Strike without any problem, worth the $5 per month.
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Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
"* TransGaming writes incredibly enthusiastic pieces of propaganda which are mostly discussing software they did not write. The LGPL wine (the original codebase) has been developed for 9+ years, but TransGaming forked their version very recently, and does not contribute code back."
Not true
"# TransGaming has consistently claimed that their approach is superior to native porting in every manner."
I've *never* seen that claim made.
"# TransGaming once promised to give back code to what was Wine,"
TG has given code back.
"# TransGaming encourages the misconception that their product is not an emulator, despite the fact that the founder of the Wine project refers to it as such. In order to replace the term "emulation", they refer to WineX as a "portability technology", stretching definitions of both "portability" and "technology". If TransGaming really wishes to avoid the term "emulation", they should replace it with a phrase that actually reflects what WineX does, such as "compatibility layer".
WINE is not an emulator, and besides that, how is what term TG uses to describe WineX a reason for boycotting?!
"# TransGaming has willingly stripped out all methods of debugging the Wine source base in their packaged releases, greatly slowing down the process of fixing bugs."
Not true.
"# Support for games varies wildly between releases, and even their vaunted "DirectX 8.0 support" is already one rev behind and about to be a second rev behind. It still doesn't provide access to all the nice features that the cards, DirectX, and the games support."
Of course it varies between release, mostly better. And again how is this any reason for a boycott?
"# TransGaming promises much, yet delivers little.. . Still, there are many problems with the Half-Life emulation. The most notable of these problems is that the menus do not work, causing a significant drop in user-friendliness."
TG mostly delivers exactly what they promise. The menus in Half-Life don't render exactly correctly but they work just fine.
"# These same Counter-Strike players couldn't play online for some time. Valve had implemented new anti-cheating software which detected Wine users as cheaters."
And TG quickly worked with Valve to have WineX gamers recognized as legitimate clients. Problem solved and bravo for TG, how is this an arguement for a boycott?
woops, heres the link.
The facts in your bleemcast argument isn't correct in any way, form, or manner.
-Bleemcast in it's original form (emulate all/100/50 psx games) NEVER CAME OUT
-a total of 3 bleemcasts came out, each doing A SINGLE GAME. That means to play the game, you had to pay 15$ for the bleemcast, plus 25-50$ for the game (depending on which one)
-EVERY bleemcast disc that was released sold out almost instantly. They couldn't keep them in the stores!
-By the time bleemcast came out, PS2 was already out. PSX people had already bought a PS2, and possibly skipped the dreamcast altogether. The GT2 bleemcast was out only a month before GT3 for the PS2!!!!
-bleemcast died due to sony's lawsuits in the end
You can manually add games to Point2Play. Read the Release notes, where they say how to convert an existing WineX installation to P2P. Of course, if you only copy it from a Windows installation, the registry entries might not be setup correctly and the game might be upset, the same way that copying it from a Windows box to another (without installing on the second one) would make it upset. Not much you can do about that part...
You can keep both version on your system if you like. Installing Winex3 doesn't overwrite Winex 2.2.1.
Which is why they put the compatibility thing in XP. Except for some really lousy games that actually check for Windows and DirectX versions, I can still play just about anything using XP and the DirectX that comes with it. So far the same applies for all the games I've tried under Longhorn...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.