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."

Comments

Doesn't Inspire a Lot of Confidence

[goldspider]

"...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..."

I don't know about anyone else, but that wording didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in the 'success' of this project.

Question

[AnimeFreak]

Even though the licence that Bochs uses and the licence that Wine uses are different, why can't the Wine developers write a portion that allows usage of x86 emulation enabling the usage of Windows programmes under different processor architecures?

Re:Question

[Mitchell Mebane]

They are working on it, the project is called Qemu, but it seems the site is down right now.

Re:Question

[BlueGecko]

Just the overhead from swapping the endianess must be impressive

Actually, the engineers at IBM were a genious when it comes to handling endian issues on the PowerPC. Although the PPC by default is big-endian, the PowerPC 603 and later added the ability to natively work either way. That's a large part of the reason why Virtual PC can operate as fast as it does, and similarly, might make this Bochs-WINE hybrid feasible for non-CPU-intensive apps like Office, etc.

Nice but still useless

[Alcoyotl]

Playing a game should not require the user to spend time installing and configuring it, and pull his hair whenever the game or computer crash.
This is why game consoles should remain the only serious way to play.
Ok people, we all have great PCs with lots of computing and video power, and we know how to use them, but really, the focus should be on average users, guys who want to play right now, children.
While this is a step in the right direction, Linux is nowhere near being the platform of choice for gamers and will remain the realm of computer savvy users for a pretty long time. Anyone saying otherwise should try to emulate the ease of use of your average playstation.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[RdsArts]

Actually, that's not a good example.

Bleemcast! never came out. The company producing it was sued out of existance by Sony before the first version even hit shelves.

I actually work with someone who had a press preview of one of the disks, one that worked for MetalGear Solid, and it supposedly worked quite well.

Now, Bleem! for the PC didn't make anyone mass-exodus from the PS2, but then, that's really apples and oranges.

Does WineX let you enable sound enhancements?

[antdude]

I am unable to read the link to see if the sound support was improved.

I tried v2.0 and wasn't impressed. I tried to enable EAX and 3D Sound in Diablo 2 and other games. The audio sounded plain and boring in my favorite games. I was forced to go back to Windows to enjoy my audio with my old Sound Blaster Live! card. Does v3.x let you do this now?

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Suppose WineX becomes perfect. Suppose Linux gamers by thousands load up their games and enjoy the latest Windows games."

If this will happen, then Linux marketshare would be at least 10-15% after a couple years. This marketshare will be big enough to make native ports.

Without WineX Linux will be never popular in the desktop market and without popularity there won't be many native ports worthwhile.

If you don't believe me, just look at Windows 95. After all it was backwards compatible with MS-DOS games, why would anyone make native Windows 95 games?

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[DonkeyJimmy]

Let's be honest: Isn't WineX just a bandage for all those Linux users (former Windows users) that can't give up Windows games? It isn't bloody likely to convince anyone to leave Windows, the platform for which those games were made in the first place.

Of course it will! The only reason I (and many like me) hang around on Windows is because we want to run things-- and the main thing that isn't replicated just fine (or 10 times better) in some open source format on Linux is games. When WinX becomes reliable at running most popular games, I will make the switch over and never look back. I already have a Linux box, but it's for coding/serving, Windows is for using things (it has to be the better machine because games require the good hardware).

Just because you don't respect Windows, doesn't mean that all the high budget (and is most cases, best) games aren't made for it and only it. And those of us who do play games need a system that can run them. I hate x-box, but when Perfect Dark Zero comes out for it, I will buy it. You need the medium to use the app.

Dreamweaver with WineX (my experience).

[rxed]

I had success installing Dreamweaver 4.01 with version 2.x of WineX. Dreamweaver was very slow, and some of the tools like layers didn't work (crashing WineX).

It would be interesting to see if WineX 3.x can runner Dreamweaver in a productive way. Any takers?

I LOVE WineX

[James Littiebrant]

There are alot of posts trashing WineX because it supports only about half of all games, this is just as good if not better than Win2K or WinXP because it supports almost all of my favorite DOS games and alot of the recient games for the windows platform. WineX was made to remove the uneasyness of going to the Linux platform by allowing newcomers to have all of their games on Linux, it also allows people who only single boot with Linux to be happier with their Linux machine.

WineX on OSX?

[WatertonMan]

Big question, how hard would it be to recompile WineX for OSX? Yes I know you'd have to combine it with Bosche or more preferrably a JIT x86 -> PPC compiler. I'm just curious if WineX itself is written in C or if there is x86 assembly in there. Are there "big endian" issues?

Umm yeah...

[NanoGator]

...so why's it so hard to just dual boot with Windows?

I mean seriously, every time I see these WineX threads I'm reminded of why I went from DOS to Win95 in the first place. I got sick of having to set everything up, then troubleshooting the inevitable problems that would arise. That's gone in recent years. Now installing a game on XP or 2k is "setup.exe, ok, ok, ok, play." Now you guys are talking about adding steps to that if the game doesn't work straight away.

Seriously dudes, if you really want to play games that badly, just dual boot into Windows. Save yourselves the fuss.

Re:Umm yeah...

[NanoGator]

"This is an opinion, and I disagree with it."

I appreciate that, but I disagree with you as well, please read on.

" WineX helps create this market, because it allows people to stay and game under Linux when they otherwise wouldn't be able to."

I just don't see this happening. What I do see happening is the game company in question digging their heels into Windows. "Well, if I make this for Windows, it'll probably run on WineX. Cool. If I make it for Linux, there is no LineX for Windows to play the game. I lose a huge chunk of my market. Hmm. No Linux port here."

Sorry. It just won't work. The best chance that Linux has at creating a game market is to create a game distro. That's right, create a distro that is not only conducive to gaming, but it also comes with a bunch of free games. Give it away at places like EB, or get a deal to have magazines to insert the CD into their next publication. Then, a good gaming SDK needs to be made that works with both Windows and Linux. It needs to be like DirectX, but platform independent. It needs to cover 2D, 3D, Audio, and input such as Joysticks. It needs to be royalty free so that a game company can just use it without having to worry about signing anything. Heck, if the community is willing to really work on it, make it so that it's easy to travel across processors as well. Make it a recompile to have it work on PS2.

Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent. I don't think there's a lot you can do there, unless you can program in the Linux environment. My point stands. WineX makes it easier to play games on Linux, but it also solidifies the choice to develop games for Windows.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[JWhitlock]

Yes, a perfect WineX will not convince developers to start developing for Linux. But, it if is cheaply or freely availible, they may be convinced to load up a workstation with WineX, and make sure Linux+WineX can run the game through development. Game developers are programmers, and programmers in general like the free software movement - if you can ensure your program runs on Linux with little effort on your part, why not?

So, WineX might become the standard for cross-platfrom gaming. Not that developers will make games specifically for WineX, but they may adopt the rule of thumb: if WineX supports it, then it's a good feature, and if WineX doesn't support it, then maybe there's something wrong with it. Since WineX should be able to support any well-documented feature of the Windows or DirectX API, WineX might be a good standard to determine if a feature is well-documented and straight-forward - if it isn't, there may be some hidden features that Microsoft isn't talking about, which may go away with future versions.

Here's an example - there are some games that I have that play decently under Windows 95, but appear broken under Windows XP. Others work as well under XP as they do under 95. My guess is that the "broken" games used some advanced feature that Microsoft abandoned with later versions of Windows/DirectX. A emulation suite like WineX may have indicated that these features weren't fully fleshed out, and steered the programmers away from them.

So, if a subset of the API becomes "easy" to simulate, programmers may be encouraged to only use that subset. Hell, they may even get addicted to the WineX environment, which may give them some debugging capabilities they didn't already have. When Microsoft offers new features, programmers may refuse to use them until they've passed the WineX test - they are well-documented and stable enough to be reliably emulated.

Would they ever make the leap to native Linux games? Probably not. But by restricting themselves to a subset of the API that is easy to emulate, the WineX API becomes a de facto cross-platform standard. Eventually, it may be possible to optimize away many of the inefficencies of an emulator, and the Win-native games may run just as fast on Linux.

This little scenario may be nice, but it's not realistic. The best we can hope for is getting 90% there, and hoping the industry meets us halfway. My best computer runs Windows, because I need the horsepower for games. Until I can play those games on Linux, I'm booting XP on the main box and Linux on the older boxen. A perfect WineX may allow users like me to finally see what Linux can do with modern hardware.

What happens when

[HanzoSan]

Linux users eventually begin to match or even outnumber windows users worldwide?

China, India, Africa. They can make games too.

Re:Gaming

[Lumpy]

Funny, i recently bought UT2003 from Toys-r-us and on my linux box typed setup.run and it installed just fine..

in fact I'm playing faster than the copy I have on the Windows 2K box that is indentical in every way (well except the W2K box has hardware raid0 on it so it SHOULD be faster with those 2 drives)

Linux gaming is really easy, and only a silly fool that doesnt know anything about linux gaming would say otherwise...

now trying to get a windows game to run in a non-emulator like wine? that is for the person that want's to have that pain... otherwise buy the linux native games and be content that you have more games available than the Mac people.

regular windows apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wondering, does WineX have the same win32 compatibility as CrossOver's product does?

For instance, if I purchased WineX, could I then run Office 2000 without issues?

I realize WineX is a fork more directly targeted for game compatibility, but it seems to me it should be more-or-less equivalent to the version that CrossOver uses...

Re:Installers???

[rifter]

This kind of crap is exactly why I switched my gaming platform years ago. Really I don't know why people say they keep a Windows machine around "for games" playing games on windows sucks, big time. Speaking of which, just can't wait to get this particular little jewel

Re:Installers???

[Breakfast Pants]

online play. there are only a very small number of ps2 games that play online. there is a large number of games for windows that have online play. there is a reason where you said you couldn't find one. try and dispute it.

Re:Installers???

[Nick_dm]

Really I don't know why people say they keep a Windows machine around "for games" Possibly because there are some genres which play pretty badly (or at least significantly diferently) on consoles? I need a PC (or mac) for the games I play; quake3, unreal tournament 2003, warcraft3 and such. I'm pretty picky about being able to customise things and atm there aren't even decent options for using mice on consoles so I can't see myself jumping ship any time soon.
I have a PSone my brother has a gamecube and I play on other consoles with friends, but they aren't an replacement for a pc yet, only an alternative.