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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?"
"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.""
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.
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?
Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4
Just about any game I've run using winex starts fullscreen, and
the games usually allows one to set the resolution.
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).
Btw, if you want to get cvswinex up and running, follow the instructions at linuX-gamers.net
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?
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
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.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
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.
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
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).
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'.
.deb and Crossover with ther install sh/rpm package.
I am using Debian unstable, and installed winex with their provided
Both wonderful projects and make my GNU/Linux use almost seamless with windows progs.
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
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
SO WHAT
So they promised to release it under the Wine License and then didn't. (incidentally, I'm a subscriber..)
Go to Wine website, download the full change log, and grep for @transagaming.com, then come back here and post an apology.
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.
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.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
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: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/05/msg0
Gentoo removed WineX for similar reasons.
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.
"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
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
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