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

WineX 95?

[Surak]

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!

Installers???

[tmark]

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.

Re:Installers???

[Angry White Guy]

Sounds like the Iraqi Information Minister, doesn't it. We are Succesful! We have managed to get Halo installed on Linux! X-boxen are commiting suicide, hanging from our Kernel hooks!

Re:Installers???

[aoteoroa]

Sentance 1:The games that did run ran pretty flawlessly.
Sentance 2:The games that didn't work had varying degrees of success all just short of actually being able to play the game

Umm. The way I read that is that some games worked. Those were a success. Others looked like they installed but didn't work and were considered failures.

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.

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.

Re:Doesn't Inspire a Lot of Confidence

[indros]

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.

Ok, WineX Lovers

[jvmatthe]

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.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[TClevenger]

On the other hand, if WineX is rather successful, the game manufacturers, who wouldn't dare throw away all their existing codebase to develop for Linux, might provide a bit of tweaking to get the game to run under WineX, since such code probably wouldn't hurt the game under the Windows platform. If enough people are using WineX, and can say so to those game manufacturers, they might just start making WineX one of the environments they test under, just to ship those few extra units.

Re:Ok, WineX Lovers

[Devil's Avocado]

"""
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.
"""

I don't think WineX is intended to convince windows users to convert to Linux. It's intended to make already-committed Linux users happier, making a little money for its authors in the process.

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.

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?

WineX 3.0 Release notes

[diatonic]

You can read them here.

The review appears to be slashdotted.

.:diatonic:.

WineX3 has been good to me

[Gyorg_Lavode]

I subscribe and wineX3 has been supprisingly good. It's running the games I am really interested in. I'm back to playing Everquest (maybe not a good thing), Warcraft3, Jedi Knight 2, and Baulder's Gate 2. I'm also using EQIM with it. All of these work basically transparently. There's of course the overhead and minor things, (names over character heads are not very legible in everquest though I hear cvs fixes this), but really it doesn't bother me one bit and I don't have to boot out to windows to play these games.

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.

Re:Buzz off

[phoebusQ]

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.

Re:RedHat 9

[Squarewav]

well to get wine to work with redhat 9 i have to

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 .bashrc file. If anyone knows what bad side efects this will couse let me know

Re:Buzz off

[BryanForbes]

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.

Re:Umm yeah...

[NanoGator]

"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."