10 Points About Transgaming's Cedega/WineX

jvm writes "Attempting to raise the level of the discussion, Dan 'theoddone33' Olson has put together a list of ten critical observations that every potential Linux gamer should consider before buying Transgaming's WINE-based product Cedega (formerly WineX). Dan invites credible rebuttals to the points he's raised. The debate over the value of Cedega/WINE as a solution for the nascent Linux gaming community continues..."

Comments

Slashdotted, but I bought it last month, so...

[26199]

Have to say I was impressed... I can now play Counterstrike without rebooting, which is very nice. Doom 3 works too. It's cheap, it works, haven't seen any reason to complain.

It actually makes me think of Linux as a viable platform for games... not a viable platform in five years' time, but a viable platform now.

What the hell is /. doing posting this tripe?

[marcushnk]

I'm sick of these halfwitts sledging a real contributer to the gaming industry in Linux.
These guys have a good history, yeah its not squeeky clean but so bloody what?!?
They contributed to Loki's technology, Gavriel is on good Terms with Ryan (Icculus) and there are many other linux NATIVE technologies that owe their success in part to direct help from Transgaming.

FFS, if you don't like them then DON'T BLOODY use their product, stop stabbing the poor bastards in the back. /rant over
*mutter grumble* *kicks cat*

Re:What the hell is /. doing posting this tripe?

[rpdillon]

The real problem is that half the people say:

"Yeah, everything runs great! WTG Trangaming!! Best $15 I ever spent!"

and the other half say:

"What a piece of shit! Nothing runs, and I tried 37 games! Screw Transgaming, I want my money back!"

And that was my finding...that some people get it to work, and other simply cannot (often, but not always, how much time you want to put into trying to work out all the idiosyncracies).

But that is enough of a problem: if I *pay* for a commercial product, I shouldn't have to pay and THEN find out if some games I want work for me...performance should be consistent. Further, it IS commercial; if I made you pay for software, you'd expect it to work...not that you'd have to spend 6 or 7 hours every so often to get your money out of it.

Don't get confused: we are used to Linux and other free software (as in beer) that we don't have to pay for, but have to spent hours configuring, learning and tweaking to get it to work sometimes. And its worth it, because we learn, and we get free software, and maybe can give something back to the community.

But with Transgaming, its NOT free software, and I shouldn't have to spend hours at a time trying to get acceptable performance out of games I *already* paid for once. Now I have to pay twice, AND spend a lot of time screwing around with esoteric settings, and in the end, it may or may not work, and I don't know if it will EVER work.

Name one other commerical program that charges you monthly (to the tune of $60 a year), simply to use their software which may or may not work as advertised, whose performance varies so wildly that you simply cannot predict whether it will work for you or not until you pay up. I'd say it takes a full work week of my spare time/year to try to set up games I want to play and find out if they will even run - often without success.

Man, I just convinced myself to go cancel my subscription.

Windows games = Windows community

[Trurl's Machine]

The debate over the value of Cedega/WINE as a solution for the nascent Linux gaming community continues..."

I think this debate is pointless. If you purchase a Windows game, you are a member of the Windows gaming community, period. It doesn't matter if you play it on native Wintel platform or on Macintosh emulating x86/Windows via Virtual PC - or Linux emulating Windows APIs. The next logical step is to quit all your Linux activity and reboot your computer to MS Windows, the same game will run even better then. The *only* way to build Linux gaming community is via native Linux ports, just as the relatively small Macintosh gaming community does. Mac users got used to waiting months or years for native ports to be released. They don't complain paying premium prices for games whose Windows ports are already in bargain bins. There will be no "Linux gaming community", not until Linux gamers accept similar solution.

No problems here with the games I play

[ScottGant]

Actually, I agree with you.

I spent my 15 bucks...15 measly bucks...and installed it. It works great for me on the games I play with it...the same ones that I used to play when I had XP a year ago. Everquest runs faster for me than it did on XP...Warcraft 3 runs great, Steam/Half-Life/Counterstrike runs great also...there are some bumps with Steam as it updates itself...but they fix them.

I have no complaints with my whopping 15 bucks I spent on this. If I didn't like them, or they were not doing what I wanted it to do, then I wouldn't buy it anymore. Plain and simple.

And besides, most of the other games I play have a native Linux client on them anyway.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[JohnFluxx]

Hmm, is this the best top 10 they can do?

I see nothing particulary evil or bad of transgaming. Seems like a small company struggling to get along. They provide a service, and some people pay for it. $5 a month is next to nothing.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[ScottGant]

# Performance
The games I play actually run faster on my system than they do on my wife's XP system. I guess I'm doing something wrong.

# Pricing
15 bucks...wow...that's like...3/4 of a $20...

# Progress
In the 3 months I've "subscribed" to it they've had 2 major releases.

# Potential
True, they play catch up with MS...but what else can they do, they have to see where MS is going so they know how to emulate the calls MS is calling for etc etc. They can't just make the shit up and hope MS follows THEM? Right?

# Priorities
Oh, so a company can't have two areas where they're branching off? Apple released the iPod, did everyone start screaming saying they were going to abandon the Mac or now their interests lay elsewhere? Come on.

# Promises
Sounds like a wash here. No opinion either way. They do release back to the community though, but perhaps not enough it seems.

# Packaging
Agreed here. They should let the distos have it as a package at least. The development package.

# Propaganda
Sounds like this point is propaganda itself. Notice that he offers no proof that they "fail to hold up under scrutiny". Ok, how so? Honestly, I'd like to know...break it down for me because frankly I'm too lazy. But then again, I don't belive 90% of the claims of any product...even the ones I like. lol (i'm joking people...don't get your panties in a bunch).

# Prevention
He states: There is speculation that Cedega... Ok...SPECULATION? So, how is this a bad mark on their part? I could speculate also doesn't make it true. And as we can see, companies are still making ports for Linux. But he did pull it together at the end.

I don't know...he makes some points to make one think...and they would be worth thinking if it weren't for the fact that Cedega cost me all of $15 bucks and it works great with the games I throw at it.

And that's kind of a hard thing to complain about...if it works, it works. And for me it works. Doesn't work for you, not much I can do about it. I can't rally around something that works for me and doesn't work for others. I mean, how can I do that? I would just be repeating what others are saying and not going from personal experience: "Boo...down with Transgaming! BOOO...Yes, it works for me on the games I play...but I've heard that others have problems with it...so BOOO!"

I'd sound like and idiot! Ok...perhaps I already do.

Doom 3 but no QuickBooks?

[copponex]

This is sad... people can play Doom 3 on their linux partition, but they can't run QuickBooks?! It makes me wonder of the linux community *really* wants the desktop business market.

I have my boss and all employees on Firefox/Thunderbird. I've removed the little E icon but pinned it to the start menu for dumb sites like Ingram Micro and - unbelievably - slashdot. If there were a bit of software similar to a multi-user GnuCash that could import quickbooks files, I cannot tell you how many businesses I could have switched by the Q4.

We have a small window of time before MS breaks all the wine/crossover compatibility with Longhorn. Don't miss it.

Re:Doom 3 but no QuickBooks?

[IamTheRealMike]

Disclaimer: I work for CodeWeavers.

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm doing my best to support Codeweavers, but it's hard sometimes. I get especially frustrated when I see them concentrating an entire release on making iTunes work instead of something like Quickbooks.

Actually, we are almost always working on multiple things at once. Often quite a few of us are working on bugfixes for large, corporate proprietary apps - this is mostly separate to our CrossOver work where we focus on the home/enthusiast Linux users market. The contract work we do for such programs isn't public but the patches go back to WineHQ immediately just the same as work for CrossOver does.

Often these bugfixes are the sort of thing which affect many GUI desktop apps, including things like QuickBooks. So you could say we are working on it in an indirect way.

But I know, I know, you want us to work on QuickBooks specifically, so it runs in CrossOver. Believe me, we'd love to do that too - the only Windows machine in our office is used by the secretary (or as we call her, our Chief Non Geek). She's said she'd be happy to run Linux. So why doesn't she? Right, you guessed it - we use QuickBooks ourselves.

Unfortunately, being a (small) company that isn't exactly rolling in money, we have to focus entirely on what our customers are most willing to pay for. As you can see from our top voted apps list iTunes comes first by a long way with 118 votes, and QuickBooks Pro comes in at number 22 with 16 votes. We can't magically divine what CrossOver users are willing to pay for, so we have to go via these sorts of lists.

I hope that explains our slightly odd focus. Unfortunately Linux on the corporate desktop hasn't taken off yet: given the huge resources Red Hat and Novell are marshalling behind it I'm hoping it has to happen soon, but currently, it hasn't. That means Wine development is driven mostly by personal users.

I noticed in their bug list the other day somebody asked them to support UPS Worldship, which is a *simple* app that would be perfect for running on Linux. Their response was "no" without even considering it

Our bugzilla isn't public so I guess you are talking about the C4 site I linked to above. Our experience shows that there is no such thing as a "simple" app when it comes to Wine - even very straightforward and apparently simple programs can make use of obscure functionality or hit edge-case bugs in Wine that mean they don't work right. By definition if somebody asked us to support it, it doesn't work correctly. We can either choose to spend the time tracking and fixing those bugs, or the bugs that affect high profile, popular apps.

Fortunately we're supported by (and in turn support) the Wine community. We resync with WineHQ regularly (every few weeks usually) so it's definitely possible that a fix for UPS Worldship will make it in from there, or we'll fix it in the course of making other apps work. We term this "collatoral damage", somewhat flippantly - basically it means that as we work on improvements for one program, all the others start working better as well. For example, Office now runs about 50% faster (according to officebench) in the upcoming CrossOver 3.1 relative to 3.0 due entirely to optimizations developed whilst working on iTunes.

OK, I hope I explained how we set our priorities well enough. Thanks for supporting us and the Wine project!