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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."
Oh no...I can see it now...the next version will be called 3.1, then 3.11 and finally WineX 95! It's happening again! Argh!
My journal has hot
The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success, all just short of actually being able to play the game
Only a die-hard WineX advocate would count ONLY getting installer to run as some degree of success. Everyone else would count such cases as complete failures - one notch above utter and complete failures (when the installer won't run). Actually, if the game itself won't run I'd probably rather have the installer fail.
I don't know about anyone else, but that wording didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in the 'success' of this project.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Please answer me this one question:
Suppose WineX becomes perfect. Suppose Linux gamers by thousands load up their games and enjoy the latest Windows games. Suppose as a result Windows game developers see incrementally better sales (less than 5%, probably closer to 1-2%). Now, why in the world would they suddenly throw away all the code, tools, and experience they have on their current platform to grab some tiny extra percentage by learning, developing for, and testing on a new platform?
After all they can happily tell those Linux people "You're unsupported. But try WineX!" When it fails, they simply say "You're unsupported!" They already have your money, after all, and it's your own fault for trying it on an unsupported platform.
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.
Look at Bleemcast (PSX emulator for Sega Dreamcast). It emulated the original games on a different platform, even with graphical enhancements, but it didn't convince anyone who already had a PSX to jump on the Dreamcast...it just made already-committed Dreamcast owners happier.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
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?
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.
You can read them here.
The review appears to be slashdotted.
.:diatonic:.
Since this article is games-oriented, why isn't it in the new, garish-colored games.slashdot.org?
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
You're right. Version number jokes never get old. They are repeated and repeated, year after year, but they are still just as clever and inventive as they were five years ago.
Let's make another 3.11 joke, shall we? The trigger-happy crackheads will be falling over themselves trying to mod it up fast enough.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Point2Play basically acts kind of like a registry for windows games. Not exactly what it does but a reasonable analogy. I wish you could add directories/executables directly to it rather than having to do an install, but other than that it's working well as a launch point for my windows games.
Over all I am pleased with wineX3. I thought the wineX3 preview was lacking but this version seams acceptable.
I do security
Hey, maybe you should do a little INVESTIGATION before you start posting:) WineX IS free. The source is free for download. If you want precompiled binaries and official support, that is what you pay for (and boy, is it CHEAP). Please don't tell me you can't handle ./configure; make && make install.
It's also a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a copy of windows to play.
If I had the money, I might not complain so rudely, but come on people!
Yeah, c'mon people! Why would you think that releasing your source is enough? Shouldn't you freely support and hand-hold every shlub that uses your product?
Just download the source and compile, and sate yourself with a little hard-earned fun, instead of complaining about nonexistant problems.
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
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.
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?
Has there been any interest in having the gaming companies support Wine during their test cycle, as well as printing Wine requirements on their shipped game packages? I'd be more tempted to purchase a game for use on Linux if I knew it was supported on Wine by the vendor. Having the information printed in the requirements box could be a big help in selling Linux as a gaming environment. Thanks.
-Bob-
"Once all the game developers have already stopped porting to linux they wont come back"? WHAT game developers are porting games to linux? C'mon! Virtually none. Id software produces linux binaries of all their games as a matter of tradition. Perhaps one or two other vendors may consider porting, but usually they are coaxed into allowing someone else to port.
Wine isn't hurting anything because there is nothing to hurt. All you need is for linux on the desktop to become more widespread and you will see linux ports from the actual game source rather than a bunch of hackers doing a port a year or two after the game has been out and played already by the rest of the world. In any case, it isn't as if game developers/companies are building FOR wine - most game do NOT work on winex or winehq or codeweaver's wine. It is practically an accident when a game does work. Thus, if companies were actually building for wine rather than for windoze proper (or linux), then you MIGHT have an argument, but even then it would be pretty weak. Why NOT build for a standard (wine) library so that you know your one game will run on windoze and linux out of the box? You don't HAVE to work to produce multiple versions unless you are also writing for Macs, then it would be two versions instead of 3 (best case): Mac, Windoze, and linux.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
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...
You can keep both version on your system if you like. Installing Winex3 doesn't overwrite Winex 2.2.1.
"We may save some fuss, but we are also telling game developers that we don't want native ports, which is not true."
No you're not. They have 0 clue that you didn't buy a game because you don't use Windows.
Nobody's going to make gamnes for Linux until the market is big enough to be successful. There is no Linux game market, that's why you're getting a trickle of cheap-to-produce ports.
If you want to send them the message you want Linux ports, using WineX is doing absolutely nothing to help you. It gives them an excuse to say "We don't need to do a Linux port then." If you really really want them to make games for Linux, then don't buy the Windows games period. If you feel that's unreasonable, then you're going to have to play by their rules.
I'm in the same boat. I want GTA Vice City. It's only on PS2 right now. I will not buy a PS2. I'm personally boycotting Sony because I was a salesman for their PSOnes when they originally came out. 1 in 4 of those things were defective and Sony absolutely refused to treat their customers (mostly kids) with respect over it. It's a long story, the important part is that I'm boycotting them for reasons similar to why a lot of people here won't buy MS software.
I could probably pick up a used PS2 for a reasonable price. Since it's used, Sony wouldn't see a dime of that. Cool, eh? No. I want Rockstar to prioritize PC development. I'm sending them the message that they have to develop for PC or they won't get money from me. (Essentially what I'm advising to you.)
The bad news is that I don't get to play Vice City, but the good news is that Rockstar's gone ahead and ported it to PC. I'll have it in my hot little hands in 2 weeks. It's been a loooong week. Sadly, there are other games on PS2 I'd like to play that I never will because I just cannot support Sony.
So I hope my point sort of makes sense. If you're really devoted to avoiding MS so you can get games made for Linux, then turning around and playing the games anyway isn't helping. If I had given in and bought the used PS2, I'd be sending the message "its okay to only support PS2, I'll bend over backwards to follow you."
"Derp de derp."