Transgaming releases "WineX" 4.0 "Cedega"

visy writes "Transgaming has opened a new site at today and are announcing WineX 4.0, now dubbed Cedega after a unique variety of grape. Transgaming claims Cedega allows "Windows ® games to seamlessly and transparently run under Linux, out-of-the-box, with outstanding performance and equivalent game-play". Will we see a new era of game compatibilty?"

Comments

Support Codeweavers

[digitaltraveller]

I buy Codeweavers products. They give back to the community, unlike Transgaming.

Re:Support Codeweavers

[Anonymous Coward]

"The issue of contributing back to the community always shadows every open-source project. Transgaming does contribute back, but there are restrictions. You can see them in the statement from Transgaming's webpage:

"The source code to TransGaming WineX (minus copy protection related code, for now) is available through VA Linux's SourceForge website. You can examine and modify it to your heart's content, you can watch the changes we make as we go, and you can participate in detailed development discussions on our mailing list. The only thing you can't do is redistribute WineX code for any commercial purpose. The WineX code is licensed under the Aladdin Free Public License, which prohibits commercial use of our work. If you wish to use WineX commercially, please contact our sales team to arrange for alternative licensing arrangements.

Once we have reached our subscription goals, we plan to release all of the WineX source code under the Wine license, which will allow it to be directly integrated with the core Wine project code hosted at www.winehq.com. Until then, we will periodically submit selected portions of our code for integration with the Wine project.""

Re:Support Codeweavers

[mahdi13]

Are you saying that the CVS is incomplete? The only code that is 'removed' from the CVS is the CD-Copy-Protection code that is licensed and they are not allowed to distribute in a 'free source code' manner...

Only the binaries that they distribute under their subscription includes this code. Is it so bad that
A) they are trying to make ends meet (pay the bills)
and
B) keeping themselves from getting sued out of exisitance?

Re:Support Codeweavers

[FuzzieNorn]

SO WHAT

So they promised to release it under the Wine License and then didn't. (incidentally, I'm a subscriber..)

Re:Support Codeweavers

[SQLz]

I buy Codeweavers products. They give back to the community, unlike Transgaming.

Go to Wine website, download the full change log, and grep for @transagaming.com, then come back here and post an apology.

Re:Support Codeweavers

[AndrewRUK]

The only thing you can't do is redistribute WineX code for any commercial purpose.

While the license says that, consider what happened when Debian wanted to package it and include it in non-free. Transgaming asked Debian not to, with a threat to change the license to stop Debian distributing any future versions. Quoteth Gavriel State, Transgaming's CEO:

If Debian goes ahead and packages WineX despite our request, we will have to evaluate how that is affecting our financial situation, and determine whether we should change our license to restrict any future binary-packaged redistribution, regardless of commercial or non-commercial intent. It would certainly be our preference not to have to do so.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/05/msg02 463.html
Gentoo removed WineX for similar reasons.

Re:Support Codeweavers

[Greyfox]

I haven't been able to pull an update off the sourceforge web site in ages. Apparently they've moved the source code to their site and require you to agree to a license to get to the instructions on how to download it (CVS server names and passwords etc.)

Winex used to run Lotus Notes better than the wine package Debian's unstable branch, but as of the last time I tried it, the one Debian had was about even. I'd like to think that by the time I end up on another IBM contract they'd have come to their senses about Lotus Notes but I'm not particularly optimistic.

Re:Support Codeweavers

[Prior Restraint]

The question of whether GPL or BSD is more free depends on who we're talking about. BSD is more free if you're a developer, because you can basically do whatever you want with the source. The GPL is more free if you're an end-user, because you're always guaranteed not to get locked in to any particular developer to do your maintenance. It's apples and oranges.

Finally, the BSD license is not public domain, and people really need to stop making that rather ridiculous comparison. If you don't include the proper copyright notice, you are not allowed to redistribute BSD-licensed software.

Re:Support Codeweavers

[Fizzol]

They said they would realease the code when they reached 20,000 subscribers not once they had enough money. Last I heard they had 3,000 or 4,000 subscribers. Also the Wine license has changed since they made that promise.

Re:Support Codeweavers

[Mold]

No, it's still public. It was moved to transgaming.org because of stability issues with Sourceforge.

The CVS page links back to transgaming.com though, for the actual download instructions, and it seems to be down right now.

For those wondering how to pronounce it...

[dark-br]

Cedega (Se-day-gah) - [noun] - a unique variety of grape used to make some of the finest Port Wines in the world;

Re:Too bad

[gspr]

I understand what you're saying, but Gentoo hasn't pulled all WineX packages from Portage. Transgaming forced them to remove the packages that fetched the open part of WineX from CVS and built it. If you are a Transgaming subscriber and use their binaries, there are still ebuilds for you.
I see your point though.

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

It's trivially easy to grab the WineX CVS sources with a custom ebuild. Just search forums.gentoo.org and it'll be in your face in less time than it took you to write that gimmie, gimmie, gimmmieeeee MOOMMMY message *sighs*.

Re:Too bad

[srwalter]

Transgaming only forced Gentoo to remove links to their CVS archive, which is publicly accessible. Their business model is based upon selling subscriptions to end users who want their product. The CVS repository is only there for developers, and they encourage developers to use it. Transgaming's argument is that having an ebuild that pulls from their CVS undermines their business model by giving end-users a free (as in beer) option to get releases.

Now, if they really wanted to be jerks, they could have just shut down their public CVS access. Seems to me, however, that politely asking (they didn't sue or anything) Gentoo to remove the ebuilds in question was a much nicer alternative. Could you explain what's wrong with this, exactly?

Re:Impressive, but...

[noselasd]

Just about any game I've run using winex starts fullscreen, and
the games usually allows one to set the resolution.

They forgot to mention...

[__aahlyu4518]

"Windows ® games to seamlessly and transparently run under Linux, out-of-the-box, with outstanding performance and equivalent game-play"
They forgot to mention that small detail about all the bleeding-edge hardware you need to run the latest games.... THAT will give you the biggest part of the oustanding performance....

Re:They forgot to mention...

[nahdude812]

This is not at all true for most games unless the game requires the same under Windows.

I have played a number of games that actually had improved framerates under WineX 3. It seems all that Windows backend stuff puts a higher tax on the system than most people realize, since the dev team for Windows focuses on making things feel responsive at the cost of overall performance. When it comes time to do purely heavy computations (such as in games), this approach costs CPU time that would otherwise have gone to the computation, ultimately resulting in lower framerates.

OpenGL games require very little emulation from the WineX engine since most of those calls are 1-to-1 Windows OpenGL to Linux OpenGL calls, and the performance cost is a fraction of a percent for these games. Almost all OpenGL games would perform better under WineX Linux than they do in their native Windows environment.

Even DirectX games which require a fair amount more emulation since DirectX and OpenGL do not line up on a call-to-call basis suffer very little if any performance loss for most games.

There are notable exceptions. American McGee's Alice was talked about elsewhere, and this relies heavily on kernel synchronization calls. Because of an architectural difference between Windows and Linux, there's no way to accomodate the same thing directly under Linux (there are other methods to accomplish the same tasks) with out a kernel patch, which is of course very unportable. Early reports state that Alice has a significant performance increase under the new WineX, "Cedega."

Also, some people are not aware that you must have an accelerated driver for your video card in order to do OpenGL with any level of performance. Basically for most systems, the driver you get by default is a non-accelerated driver, optimized for 2-D performance. The reason for this is that most card manufacturers (such as nVidia) have proprietary drivers which you need to download from the vendor themselves. Nvidia's are available here for 32 bit Intel processors. If you do not run an accelerated driver, you'll see terrible performance as all of the 3d and graphic computations are done by the CPU with out being able to use the video card for any of these tasks. It's akin to trying to run a game in Windows using the "Generic VGA Driver," but the difference is that Windows wouldn't let you do this at all since they have no software based GL emulation layer like Linux does. Linux will at least let you try to play the game.

Support Wine

[ospirata]

Codewearves gives back to community as much as Trasgaming: almost nothing.

Don't forget that Codeweavers products are closed source, different from Transgaming.

OK, Winex CVS version is not that compatible as commercial, but it is because of the proprietary parts.

The only true OS project is Wine.

Re:Support Wine

[Dave2 Wickham]

They have to release all of their changes to the WINE tree (under the LGPL - they use the current tree), and they do. They also hire developers to work on WINE, and this can get merged back into the public tree (depending on whether it's accepted into CVS).

Re:Support Wine

[Zardus]

Transgaming doesn't use the current tree, though. They started out way before Wine was changed to LGPL and when the change happened, forked Wine to Rewind to avoid the LGPL. Since then they've been using the Rewind sources.

I'm against what Transgaming is doing, but they are on sound legal footing open-source-wise, I think.

Re:Shared Wineserver

[Papineau]

Currently, there's only one wineserver process launched to serve all Wine threads for a given user. What happens though, is that there are at least two context switches for each request to the wineserver. A shared memory wineserver architecture allow a Wine thread to access some data without any context switch, by only reading part of the shared memory of the wineserver. Thus the speed increase.

At the last Wineconf in January, Gavriel State (of Transgaming) showed a short demo of American McGee's Alice with a partial shared memory wineserver, and the increase in the fps was about two fold (yes, double of what it was with the current design).

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

The original wine licence was more like the bsds, so when they got pissed off with people not contributing back they changed it.

WineX is a fork of the old code.

Re:A couple of questions...

[Joel Carr]

You can install both. Infact, you can install and run multiple revisions of the WineHQ Wine at the same time.

---

Re:A couple of questions...

[adam.skinner]

I set up MDK10 w/ cvswinex for my daughter's computer. She was able to run Pajama Sam, but not a couple of her other games. So it's pretty much a crap shoot when seeing if a game is going to work with winex or not. However, that's not to say that we haven't seen significant improvements with Winex 4.

Btw, if you want to get cvswinex up and running, follow the instructions at linuX-gamers.net

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad they didn't do "functionally the same thing" - if you'd taken the trouble to have a browse through Wine's source code, you'd see a slew of contributions from Transgaming.

This is *my* observation, and *directly* related to the parent in the interests of clearing up an instant judgement/misconception.

Got it

[Dreadlord]

I was lucky enough to grab the new version before the /.'ing, TG says that this version adds support for some DirectX 9 features, like Pixel Shaders.

I've tried a couple of new DirectX 9 games, and so far I'm quite happy with the results, first game is Far Cry, it used to work with the previous version, but now the performance is much better, with less artifacts and more effects.

The other game is PainKiller, it runs quite well too, I had all kinds of problems trying to get this game running with the previous version.

I know I'm going to be flamed for this post, but I wiped my Windows partition a while ago, and WineX (Cedega whatever) is doing a very good job giving me my gaming needs, it's still much better than having a Windows gaming partition.

Re:Shared Wineserver

[Joel Carr]

At the last Wineconf in January, Gavriel State (of Transgaming) showed a short demo of American McGee's Alice with a partial shared memory wineserver, and the increase in the fps was about two fold (yes, double of what it was with the current design).

Just thought I'd mention that this game is one of the corner cases that is drastically affected by reducing the number of context switches. A shared memory wineserver would not automatically give this sort of performance boost to any game/application. Not that you were implying it would, but just so people know.

---

Re:Too bad it's not

[Chris_Jefferson]

The problem with designing most styles of games is that they don't lend themselves to open source tactics.

Having worked in a few betas, often a 90% finished game is still quite unplayable. Also for a good game you really need a group of people to decide what the goals are for the game and then reach these and release.

Open source does lend itself to simpler more open ended games like nethack, but games more than anything really aren't much good until they are almost totally finished, and also most people won't play a game through more than a couple of times no matter how good it is

Re:A couple of questions...

[ecliptik]

I run (and pay) for both of these, and they do work well together. Transgaming wine's binary is 'winex3', soon to be winex4 more than likey, and Codeweavers Crossover's binary is just plain 'wine'.

I am using Debian unstable, and installed winex with their provided .deb and Crossover with ther install sh/rpm package.

Both wonderful projects and make my GNU/Linux use almost seamless with windows progs.

Re:Is it ok?

[mahdi13]

Yes, it $15 for the first 3 months (minimum) and $5/month afterwards.

You are free to cancel after those first 3 months anytime

You are free to browse and download as often as needed during that time. I don't have a copy of the license available, but I believe it is a per-user license. But I'm not sure...I have it on two of my machines at least

Re:Is it ok?

[aeaas]

Once you pay, you get access to their private site, where you can download winex plus their GUI frontend Point2Play (not necessary to use Winex).

Once you download it you can burn it to cd and use it forever, though you do need a current subscription to download new winex versions using Point2Play or to access the private site. There is no computer limit that I know off, I have installed it on three machines successfully and have never seen something that said I couldn't.

Here's the slashdotted text

[Anonymous Coward]

[posted as AC to avoid karma whoring]

Toronto/Ottawa -- June 22, 2004 -- TransGaming today unveils the milestone release of version 4.0 of its flagship product, WineX, which has been renamed to Cedega. Cedega allows Windows ® games to seamlessly and transparently run under Linux, out-of-the-box, with outstanding performance and equivalent game-play. Cedega 4.0 includes support for Microsoft ® DirectX ® 9.0, significantly broadening the scope and availability of the latest triple "A" titles for avid Linux gamers. The landmark release of Cedega 4.0 adds support for new blockbuster DirectX 9.0 titles such as EA's(TM) Battlefield Vietnam(TM), Eidos'(TM) Hitman: Contracts ©, and LucasArts' © Star Wars(TM)Galaxies(TM), bringing the total number of games supported under Cedega to well over 300. Furthermore, Cedega features unprecedented support for NCSoft's ® recently released massive multiplayer online game, City of Heroes ® and Blizzard Entertainment's ® unreleased but highly anticipated World of WarCraft ®.

Cedega (Se-day-gah) - [noun] - a unique variety of grape used to make some of the finest Port Wines in the world; an innovative portability technology developed by TransGaming that allows Windows games to run on Linux.

"Cedega 4.0 represents an amazing evolution of our Linux product. Thus, it was only fitting to give it a new name; a name that is representative of our product's maturity, complexity, sophistication, and elegance. The new name, Cedega, is meaningful and reflects the significant growth that both the product and TransGaming have enjoyed over the last few years," comments Vikas Gupta, Co-CEO and President of TransGaming Technologies.

From a technical standpoint, this release sets a new benchmark for the support of games on Linux. "The Cedega 4.0 release contains more technological innovation than any previous TransGaming release and truly represents a milestone in game software portability. Cedega 4.0 supports titles that make use of the DirectX 9.0 API as well as advanced Pixel and Vertex shaders. Cedega 4.0 also includes a new advanced inter-process communication architecture that can double the speed of games which make heavy use of Win32 kernel synchronization primitives," remarks Gavriel State, CTO & Co-CEO of TransGaming Technologies.

To keep pace with the growth of Linux worldwide and to more effectively meet consumer demands internationally, TransGaming is also pleased to announce the European launch of Cedega 4.0. European customers and subscribers can now pay in Euros, a feature that has been much anticipated and will cater specifically to the rapidly growing Linux community in European countries. Cedega 4.0 includes an updated version of its user friendly interface, Point2Play, with multiple language support for English, Dutch, Danish, Portuguese and German.

About TransGaming Technologies Inc.

TransGaming Technologies is a global leader in the development of software portability products that allow game developers and publishers to develop games for one system and deploy them across multiple platforms - faster, cheaper and better than anyone else.

TransGaming's flagship Linux product, Cedega, supports hundreds of the hottest and most popular games on Linux, out-of-the-box, including hit titles such as Max Payne 2(TM), Battlefield 1942(TM), Battlefield Vietnam(TM), Medal of Honor(TM), Diablo II ®, EverQuest(TM), Star Wars Galaxies(TM), City of Heroes ® and many more. TransGaming has also ported such blockbuster titles as TRON 2.0 ®, James Bond 007(TM): Nightfire(TM), Law & Order(TM), Indiana Jones ® and The Emperor's Tomb(TM), just to name a few.

TransGaming has a research and development center in Ottawa, Canada, with business, strategy, and operational activities conducted at the Toronto, Canada office. TransGaming was recently honored with inclusion on the Branham300 List of top IT companies in Canada for the second consecutive year. More information abou

Re:City of Heroes?

[Morklebb]

Feel special.. New Features ============ Cedega 4.0 ---------- * TransGamers can now enjoy playing Battlefield Vietnam, City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies and Hitman: Contracts.

Re:Too bad

[SQLz]

The main problem was that people were downloading the CVS version (which did not contain any of the main features of WineX) and then giving others the wrong idea about WineX, namely that it didn't work. Not to mention, CVS is a developers tool for version control, not a method of mass distribution.

Hardly any games ran with the CVS version at all anyway. You need the commerical version to do anything.

Re:Too bad

[Alexis de Torquemada]

Microsoft did ask the wxWindows developers to rename their project, stating that pepole might confuse it with Microsoft Windows, and there wasn't much of a fuss about it. Ok, but then that may partly be owed to the fact that MS paid them a monetary compensation.

Yes, it does

[SilentReproach]

From the article:

TransGaming's flagship Linux product, Cedega, supports hundreds of the hottest and most popular games on Linux, out-of-the-box, including hit titles such as Max Payne 2(TM), Battlefield 1942(TM), Battlefield Vietnam(TM), Medal of Honor(TM), Diablo II ®, EverQuest(TM), Star Wars Galaxies(TM), City of Heroes ® and many more. TransGaming has also ported such blockbuster titles as TRON 2.0 ®, James Bond 007(TM): Nightfire(TM), Law & Order(TM), Indiana Jones ® and The Emperor's Tomb(TM), just to name a few.

I was a subscriber for many months, and quit my subscription. I cited that the only game I was interested in was SW Galaxies, and that until it was supported, I would no longer subscribe. I contributed a chunk of change, and now I'll have to put my money where my mouth is and re-subscribce to run the game I want.

Re:Yes, it does

[TrancePhreak]

Microsoft actually does work on DirectPlay, if you read the release notes for DirectX 9.0b you'll see that they made big changes in the underlying code for it. The interface remained the same, but enhancements to how it does things were made.

The second thing I'd like to note is that not many games use DirectPlay. The last one that comes to mind is Dungeon Siege, which did indeed have horrible online play.

It's Slashdotted

[ciryon]

Here's the info from the site:

Toronto/Ottawa -- June 22, 2004 -- TransGaming today unveils the milestone release of version 4.0 of its flagship product, WineX, which has been renamed to Cedega. Cedega allows Windows ® games to seamlessly and transparently run under Linux, out-of-the-box, with outstanding performance and equivalent game-play. Cedega 4.0 includes support for Microsoft ® DirectX ® 9.0, significantly broadening the scope and availability of the latest triple "A" titles for avid Linux gamers. The landmark release of Cedega 4.0 adds support for new blockbuster DirectX 9.0 titles such as EA's(TM) Battlefield Vietnam(TM), Eidos'(TM) Hitman: Contracts ©, and LucasArts' © Star Wars(TM)Galaxies(TM), bringing the total number of games supported under Cedega to well over 300. Furthermore, Cedega features unprecedented support for NCSoft's ® recently released massive multiplayer online game, City of Heroes ® and Blizzard Entertainment's ® unreleased but highly anticipated World of WarCraft ®.

Cedega (Se-day-gah) - [noun] - a unique variety of grape used to make some of the finest Port Wines in the world; an innovative portability technology developed by TransGaming that allows Windows games to run on Linux.

"Cedega 4.0 represents an amazing evolution of our Linux product. Thus, it was only fitting to give it a new name; a name that is representative of our product's maturity, complexity, sophistication, and elegance. The new name, Cedega, is meaningful and reflects the significant growth that both the product and TransGaming have enjoyed over the last few years," comments Vikas Gupta, Co-CEO and President of TransGaming Technologies.

From a technical standpoint, this release sets a new benchmark for the support of games on Linux. "The Cedega 4.0 release contains more technological innovation than any previous TransGaming release and truly represents a milestone in game software portability. Cedega 4.0 supports titles that make use of the DirectX 9.0 API as well as advanced Pixel and Vertex shaders. Cedega 4.0 also includes a new advanced inter-process communication architecture that can double the speed of games which make heavy use of Win32 kernel synchronization primitives," remarks Gavriel State, CTO & Co-CEO of TransGaming Technologies.

To keep pace with the growth of Linux worldwide and to more effectively meet consumer demands internationally, TransGaming is also pleased to announce the European launch of Cedega 4.0. European customers and subscribers can now pay in Euros, a feature that has been much anticipated and will cater specifically to the rapidly growing Linux community in European countries. Cedega 4.0 includes an updated version of its user friendly interface, Point2Play, with multiple language support for English, Dutch, Danish, Portuguese and German.

About TransGaming Technologies Inc.

TransGaming Technologies is a global leader in the development of software portability products that allow game developers and publishers to develop games for one system and deploy them across multiple platforms - faster, cheaper and better than anyone else.

TransGaming's flagship Linux product, Cedega, supports hundreds of the hottest and most popular games on Linux, out-of-the-box, including hit titles such as Max Payne 2(TM), Battlefield 1942(TM), Battlefield Vietnam(TM), Medal of Honor(TM), Diablo II ®, EverQuest(TM), Star Wars Galaxies(TM), City of Heroes ® and many more. TransGaming has also ported such blockbuster titles as TRON 2.0 ®, James Bond 007(TM): Nightfire(TM), Law & Order(TM), Indiana Jones ® and The Emperor's Tomb(TM), just to name a few.

TransGaming has a research and development center in Ottawa, Canada, with business, strategy, and operational activities conducted at the Toronto, Canada office. TransGaming was recently honored with inclusion on the Branham300 List of top IT companies in Canada for the second consecutive year. More information about the c

Re:Additional games support?

[Nosf3ratu]

Huh?
UT2004 runs on Linux natively. Read: "doesn't need an emulator," and "runs really good."

Where the hell have you been for the past six months?

Re:Additional games support?

[xchino]

"The two games that are really holding me from running Linux on my desktop full-time are Unreal Tournament 2004 and C&C Generals Zero Hour."

I guess you didn't pay for UT2K4 or you might have seen that it supports linux on the box. The Linux install binary sits right next to the windows binary in the root directory. It plays better on my Linux partition than it does on my Windows. C&C I don't know about and don't play, but ut2004 has NATIVE linux support, which beats playing a game under wienx any day

TransGaming Wine Contributions

[gavriels]

Indeed, Cedega is not software libre. We've never claimed that it was. It's a commercial product that includes components dereived from Wine and ReWind.

Despite that fact, and despite the fact that we have not yet reached the 20,000 subscriber number in our original plans, we have contributed and we continue to contribute to the Wine project in a number of substantial ways. These include major contributions or rearchitectures of: 2D DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput, DCOM, RPC, the WIDL IDL compiler, and wininet code, including SSL support. Additionally, we continue to maintain the X11 licensed ReWind tree, we've contributed code for a DIB renderer, and the Shared Memory WineServer.

Overall, we've contributed tens of thousands of lines of code under Open Source license term.

In particular, our DCOM, RPC, and WIDL work - required for use of InstallShield based installer - is extremely substantial work, and we are actively continuing to contribute that work to Wine and ReWind. We have probably spent as much engineering efforts on this as we have on our closed source Direct3D support.

If you want to see some of what we've contributed, just browse the wine-devel and wine-patches mailing lists.

-Gav

Gavriel State, Co-CEO & CTO
TransGaming Technologies Inc