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WineX Install Goes Sour for LinuxWorld Editor
jg21 writes "LinuxWorld's gaming industry editor apparently grappled with TransGaming's latest WineX release, now renamed Cedega 4.0, to such an extent that she "lost" half a day of her life. A trip to the Dark Age of Camelot site for a 7-day free trial ended in tears and installing Diablo II didn't go much better. Dee-Ann LeBlanc may have coedited Linux for Dummies, but she suffered more black screens than a multiplex during a power outage. Is the problem simply that she uses Fedora Core 2 - can't someone help her out?" Are these one-off problems, or symptomatic of a bigger issue?
That said, am I stupid for thinking that most people aren't going to switch to Linux primarily to play Windows games?
Sure, it might be nice to be able to play some games once you've already jumped ship (and you're probably either knowledgeable in Linux already or willing to work at it to make things happen, as with quite a bit else you might have taken for granted in Windows), but I'd think that by that time you've done your research and made a commitment to switch, you aren't about to run crying back to mommy because that mean Linux beat you up and took your quarter to play at the arcade after school.
As Othium says, 'Hard tasks need hard ways'. Cedega may be a commercial and Linux may be coming of age, but I'm a little surprised at the (lacking) level of effort here for something as complex and demanding as running recently developed games tailored for a completely different operating system.
Perhaps I unreasonably expect a seasoned veteran with ten years of Linux experience plus twelve books and over one-hundred articles beneath her belt to be made of a little sterner stuff and perhaps a touch more resourceful -- but what does a rube like me know -- I just post on the internet.
A few days ago I did the following:
1. Installed Debian i386 unstable in a chroot on my Debian amd64 unstable machine.
2. Installed Cedega in the chroot.
3. Installed the Nvidia 6106 x86-64 drivers and copied the 32-bit OpenGL libs to the i386 chroot.
4. Installed Battlefield 1942, including the Desert Combat and Forgotten Hope mods, using Cedega in the chroot.
It plays great on my Quadro FX 4000, not just vanilla BF1942, but also DC and FH -- pretty impressive considering it's running a 32-bit Windows binary using 32-bit OpenGL drivers using a 64-bit Nvidia driver on a 64-bit kernel. Kudos to Transgaming, Nvidia, and the Debian project.
I'd much rather see a native port of BF1942 to GNU/Linux, though.
Fact seems to be that most recent bleeding edge distros are very crippled as far as that gaming support hasn't caught up to them yet.
:(
Also, ATI just don't seem to have an Xorg driver yet.
Here's my experiences (I have a P4 with ATi Radeon 9700)
Red Hat 9/Fedora 1 - both burp when they see my onboard RAID. I don't get far at all. Don't get me started on lack of NTFS and MP3
Fedora 2 - I simply refuse to install that while that dual boot bug exists
Slackware 10 - Too much tweaking needed to get the ATI driver working... like recompile the kernel in a different GCC and change certain module functions. It's also missing a ton of libraries.
Mandrake 10 - ATI in there by deafult! Except that there's no sound!
Knoppix - Can't install the ATI drivers without having to convert the rpm to a deb, at which point that fails anyway
Gentoo - Now if I could only figure out the installation...
Damn there's just no decent and painless distros out there for my hardware to do gaming any justice.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Well then she should at least know that the DAOC trial is NOT on the supported games list. There isn't even a forum for it. The full version of DAOC classic or DAOC gold runs just fine however. I installed it earlier today.
It didn't play for shit on a Geforce 2 but that's no shocker, it doesn't play for shit on a Geforce 2 on windows either. I can't think of any game with higher requirements. I popped in a FX5200 and away I went with a happy not laggy or buggy in the slightest DAOC experience.
Okay dude, do you remember what video game retail stores looked like back in 2001? Now compare them to how they look in 2004. See any difference? Oh, yeah--the stores in 2001 had nearly half their shelf space dedicated to computer software, and in 2004 you'd be lucky to see even a single shelf in the back dedicated to PC games. Seventeen years my ass. Perhaps games have become somewhat easier in the past 10 years, but they haven't in the past 5--for God's sake, they still sell multi CD games when consoles have gone DVD for quite a while. For the past 5 years both consoles and PCs have stayed the same in usability terms (consoles way the fuck easier to use than PCs), but the consoles are nearly caught up with PCs in terms of power. (Strangely, that still seems true even though the consoles came out years ago)
Speaking of Diablo II and Cedega (whoa, this is on-topic!)...
Is it possible to get Direct3D working with Diablo II under Cedega? It works with no issues at all in standard DirectDraw mode, but trying to use the VidTest app to set it to Direct3D causes X to hang every time without a fail on my system.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I first read her as a Lockergnome Linux newsletter subscriber. Let us be kind here and say that I was underwhelmed by her knowledge of linux. To not be kind - there is a reason she wrote Linux for Dummies
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
It's a Radeon 9600XT. Transgaming have noted occasional issues with the Radeon so I figured it would be somehow related to this.
I won't post the config file because the damn thing is huge. :-)
If you're not on NVIDIA, I will submit this issue to TransGaming support I think.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Because I know Dee, she's a smart person and this kind of review is exactly the kind of thing I like to see.
The lesson: Fedora core 2 and Cedaga don't play well together. And here's why, with every step along the way. Clear, detailed, and with some personality to it, even.
I don't have infinite amounts of time to screw around with half-baked code that doesn't get the job done. If I'm going to plan out a Linux machine, I want to know, does this work, right out of the box, or does it require minor tweaking, or does it require sacrificing a chicken in the light of the full moon?
This article told me exactly what I needed to know.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Well, I've known Dee for well over a decade, and she's quite computer literate.
I thought the article was helpful: if I was considering running Cedaga on Fedora Core 2, it would tell me what I needed to know. Namely, Radeon cards aren't well supported, and expect to get your hands dirty.
It's an afternoon saved, from my point of view.
Lsatly, your "ghostwriter" comments are so much sexist crap. And you really are a coward for not signing your name.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
There is a such a huge bias against female techies. She reports that she had difficulties getting a couple of games to work, and the male chauvinists shoot their mouths off. She might not be the most knowledgeble Linux user in the world, but she's written several books, many articles, and taught some Linux courses. If she was a dumbass, she would be out of a job. There are far too many skilled Linux users out there fo LinuxWorld to waste time with someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Shit like this happened when Eugenia from OSNews.com wrote an unfavorable review of Fedora Core 1. Any time a complaint was made about the way something was implemented and the little boys jump in, denigrating the female as being stupid and not knowing what she was doing. You would hope that you wouldn't see this kind of immaturity in techies, considering that the majority of them are intelligent and well educated, but it persists even today.
With Windows, you put in the CD, and it works.
Hmmm... yesterday I installed Ground Control 2, it installed okay, ran, started the tutorial and it froze dead. Apparently I need the new drivers for my card. So I go and grab the new drivers, install them, GC2 works.. So later I play Thief 2... only I don't because it won't work with the new drivers until Ichange a directive to a text file to tell it to ignore the texture memory use. And don't even get me started on the amount of messing around it takes to get Thief 3 running properly.
That's "it works" eh?
(check's in the mail, Transgaming...) and I can see where she's coming from.
My biggest gripe is the fact that the emulation has a problem with breaking copy protection. Best I can tell, the first thing you have to do to get a WineX game working is go find a no-CD crack. (Make sure your cookie and pop-up shields are up; you're gonna need 'em...) Since most folks think of no-CD cracks as evil pirate stuff, no "legitimate" board would ever serve them (hey, Transgaming... your product kinda _requires_ 'em, why not chase 'em down and make 'em available to subscribers?) and they seem to be tough to find. Google for a civilization III no-CD crack and most of what you get are forum posts asking where to get one...
But even before you run into that problem, you find that you're still missing parts-- Installshield, ferinstance, uses parts of DCOM98, which aren't emulated by WineX. That's OK; you can get your hands on those directly from Microsoft.
Once you've got that working, part of the nature of the beast is that the error messages are going to be cryptic. Back to the Civilization example, when I'd run
cvswinex c/Program\ Files/.../Civilization3.exe
it crashed horribly, basically telling me "Hey, you should probably fire up a debugger..." Not WineX's fault, mind you, how is it supposed to know that your current working directory needs to be the same place as the Civilization executable, and Civ crashes if it ain't? Oh, and when you ran it before the no-CD crack, it was happy to actually hand you a window that said, "Hey, I refuse to run in a debugger because I think you're trying to break my copy protection!" So you're thinking the no-CD crack is broken up front, which sends you barking up the wrong tree.
None of this, mind, is documented in the Civ forum on Transgaming's site, aside from the need for a no-CD crack.
Now that it's running, it works pretty well (I've found one minor broken feature), but it was a chore getting it that way...