Slashdot Mirror
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..."
here are the 10 points if you can't get to the site
# Performance
Cedega is designed to maximize compatibility with Windows games. However, many users find that their favorite games work poorly in Cedega, if at all. While TransGaming offers voting services to determine the most popular games, there are still hundreds of games that are not playable in Cedega. For games that are not officially supported by TransGaming, users may find that the performance of Cedega is "hit or miss."
# Pricing
TransGaming charges $5 a month for the use of the commercial version of Cedega, yet makes a development version freely available. The commercial version has additional support for games that use copy-protection methods such as SafeDisc, among other features. The commercial version of Cedega requires a minimum subscription of 3 months, and all games that it can be used with must be purchased separately.
# Progress
TransGaming's list of supported titles has not grown significantly since the first release of WineX in 2001. Today, less than 10 games have been given a 5-star rating, meaning that they can be expected to run without problems. Many games run with only minor annoyances, but they are not officially supported. TransGaming has also been criticized for slow release times, with 3 month subscriptions starting and ending without seeing a new release.
# Potential
TransGaming has stated that their goal is 100% compatibility with Windows games. However, it is highly improbable that they will ever attain this goal. Windows and Direct3D are in active development, and TransGaming developers will always be playing a game of "catch-up", while at the same time trying to find and fix current bugs in Cedega. In a sense, Cedega's destiny is tied to Microsoft as much as it is tied to TransGaming.
# Priorities
While TransGaming still offers Cedega to Linux gamers for the time being, it is clear that their primary interests reside elsewhere. They actively produce titles for Mac OSX, and their website advertises plans to support XBox and PS2 in the future. TransGaming has stated that no income from Cedega subscriptions is used to fund their other ventures, but while their finances may not be divided, the same cannot be said of their interests.
# Promises
TransGaming began with the promise to release their changes to the Wine project under an "open" license when the number of subscribers reached 20,000. Shortly after this, they introduced code into the project which they are not able to release openly due to contractual obligations. While the current number of subscribers has not been publically announced, it is doubtful that TransGaming would be able to release all of their changes when this milestone is reached. TransGaming has, however, given code back to Wine at various times.
# Packaging
While TransGaming offers a free development version of Cedega, they have repeatedly threatened Linux distributions that have offered packages of it to their users. Debian and Gentoo have both withdrawn packages of the development version of Cedega at the request of TransGaming, who stated that they would no longer offer the free version if it was packaged by third-party Linux distributions.
# Portability
TransGaming advertises Cedega as the world's foremost portability solution, and they claim that it can be used to migrate applications seamlessly between platforms such as PC, PS2, and even PDAs. These claims are sketchy for a variety of technical reasons. One example is that most PC games use over 100M of memory, while the PS2 has only 32M of main RAM. Cedega's strategy of reinterpreting runtime calls is likely to add more overhead than it can reduce, and is not sufficient for this task.
# Propaganda
For as long as TransGaming has had a website, it has been filled with dubious claims about the company, about the game industry, and about porting software. Unsurprisingly, most of these claims paint TransGaming in a positiv
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Could someone explain me why if nobody here RTFA, it is slashdoted already? Aah, I know, you all load the link but close the eyes. Evil people!
Every time a program tries to access the CD-ROM Cedega crashes in KERNEL32.DLL.wine_get_unix_file_name. I would love to play Red Alert 2 using the official CDs I bought, but I'm forced to use a cracked version off FastTrack.
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.
I'm sick of these halfwitts sledging a real contributer to the gaming industry in Linux.
/rant over
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.
*mutter grumble* *kicks cat*
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
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.
I purposely built a linux box as a firewall between my other Windows machines and the internet. If I was running linux machines and wanted to play Windows games, I would have built a Windows machine for that purpose too.
Of course the best solution is a XBox, as it (hopefully) carries many Windows-also titles.
So if Cedega's fees are higher or close to a XBox or a Windows license, it won't be too attractive at all.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:X7e-egvZJeoJ: curmudgeongamer.com/article.php%3Fstory%3D20040904 215153278+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
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.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
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.
Ati on linux http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/03/ 1313221&tid=152&tid=106
# 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.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I decided to try out TransGaming's Cedega product shortly after it was released. In addition to their modified wineserver, they have come out with a game manager, Point2Play. This tool has made it _easy_ to install and configure games.
I think that the fact that TransGaming has been able to successfully negotiate with vendors providing copy-protection and other proprietary code for use with Cedega is a big step towards making Linux a more predominant gaming platform. (I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of my titles, such as Warcraft III, ran better with the Cedega emulation!)
While I prefer the idea of native Linux builds of games, there are also many (older) titles that simply will never be ported over. The best thing that we can do at this point is to vote with our wallets. For now, that means TransGaming will keep getting my subscription!
That is very true, however its a truth about WINE, not necessarily about Cedega. WINE is also very useful for its debugger, which is an extremely good reverse engineering tool along the lines of SoftICE. As well as winelib, which is a library that you can use to assist you in porting Windows code to Unix. I've used both, and had great success with them. Cedega on the other hand is a toy strictly for playing games. And WINE isn't limited to 16 bit applications.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article raises some good points, but is focusing on the wrong things - Lets face it, transgaming wine/x is a neat hack, and what it does is very cool.
I am a pretty regular gamer, and have wasted far too much time on 3D FPS titles like q3a, RtCW, ut2004 etc - and I have the doom3 linux version pre-ordered. I use linux, and really don't have any plans to set up a pc just for gaming, as the games I like are available natively on linux. I feel that the market should decide the success of transgaming - if you like it, feel free, but count me out, thanks!
The reason I'm not interested in in running windows games in linux via wine is that if we take that to its logical conclusion, there will be no market for native linux games - idsoft has it right, their games are written in a portable fashion, and have pretty much the same performance on linux/X11/DRI as on the simple pc GUI used by ms windows. Let's face it, once a gamer plays native linux games, he will be dissatisfied with the emulated variety, and it would be a real shame if that's all there was.
All in all, the wine solution is a nice hack, and useful as a temporary kludge, but we are sunk if that becomes the norm and all game development becomes ms windows centric, and we become the new OS/2, inhabiting a shrinking niche and dying a slow death. Fsck that! The native linux gaming market is the thing we need to support with our wallets, if we want to see it thrive.
... to develop a "wrapper" (forgive my bad terminology if its wrong, I couldn't think of the name!) so that you could run two OS's at the same time and task switch between them like you do with windows programs?
I never got the whole "linux bit" windows is Mass market, linux will never be MASS MARKET! I'm sorry it just wont at least not for a long time. It may become mass market in emerging markets and developing countries but Consoles come first, then windows, then if you're lucky linux gets the scraps. Why anyone would want to run games on - non-native systems does not make very much sense to me, can't you just dual boot?? Is it really that difficult to wait reboot, and wait ~20-40 seconds for XP to load and run the game? If this is your leisure time you waste all of maybe 2 minutes, 1 going into windows, 1 rebooting and going back into linux.
They've also been dishonest about not competing with native ports. Yet Quake and RTCW were, last time I looked, on the list of supported games.
I'm glad you're having such good luck with the product. For me, even games with a '4' rating generall work horribly, or are such a PITA to install that it's not worth it.
You're also very lucky to get one new release with a three month subscription. I'd feel way less decieved by these guys if they'd just sell the product for 10 or fifteen bucks and not pretend that I was becoming a 'member' of something.
Since the article is slashdotted, here's a list of games that I run successfully under WineX 3.2.1 (not even the current version):
- Age of Empires II
- Icewind Dale
- GTA 3
- GTA: Vice City
- Baldur's Gate II
- Diablo II
- Starcraft
- Warcraft II BNE
- Fallout II
- Max Payne
- Thief (Gold)
- Thief II
- Deus Ex
- Grim Fandango
Not all of these work perfectly; for example BGII network play is not available. However, for the most part these are totally playable and sometimes even run better than the same games running under Windows. I really wish Transgaming would put more effort into supporting older games, but I guess more gamers want to play Counter Strike 2, not Diablo I.Complain, complain, complain. A short rebuttal of some of the more ridiculous points:
#Performance:
Complaining that unsupported games don't always work is ridiculous. That is what 'unsupported' means.
#Pricing:
Boo hoo. Complaining that you have to buy the games is just STUPID. Did you expect to get your games for FREE? They cost millions to make, you know. And it isn't Transgaming who makes them.
Also, it seems to be a negative thing that they give things away for FREE.
#The rest
I'll stop here, since it does not get any better.
Transgaming is a company, and in the business of making money. If you don't like their product or policies, you are free not to buy from them.
Other people, who really like that a company works hard to give us something we really want, will certainly keep on subscribing. I am very happy that Transgaming exists. The other possibility would be that they did not exist, and I would not be able to play a lot of my games on Linux. I find it really hard to see how that scenario is better.
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.
I purchased it for 6 months. I was slightly disappointed. I am totally surprised that you can not install IE on it and there is not likely to be supported from what I read. Some games, like everquest, require IE for somethings. I was able to find winetools for wine to install IE 6.0 quite easily, why is it sohard for cedega to do the same thing?
Well, I own 4 copies of NWN + all exps, all of which are played on Linux machines. But the only way I knew to do this was to buy the Windows boxed versions, and copy the data over per instructions on the bioware site. So I suspect all my purchases were recorded as windows purchases.
:-(
Now, it also sounds like NWN2 is not going to be ported to Linux
I have subscribed to WineX for a couple of years now. I just have five bucks a month charged to my credit card via Pay Pal.
For some time now I have been considering dropping my support of this product for some of the reasons listed in the article. Another reason is the way in which WineX or Cedega is distributed. You download their Point2Play program and then from that program you install Cedega. Although Cedega is offered as a separate download I have never been able to successfully install Cedega/WineX unless I use the Point2Play program to get the copy off of their website. What this means is if I ever drop my subscription I won't be able to reinstall the software. Probably the whole point in making it that way.
I have recently upgraded my PC to a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 and am testing out Suse. I installed Point2Play and Cedega. I wanted to see if the extra computing power would make gaming through WineX more bearable but I can't seem to get it to work with Suse. It simply won't install anything anymore. Yet another reason to drop this product.
As Linux works its way into the mainstream desktop market, we'll see more and more games being written for Linux. I always considered Wine/WineX just a temporary bandaid to help Windows users make the transition.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
They're hindering progress by running a separate branch and charging for it when they could be working with the wine developers in creating a FREE solid application that would otherwise make people seriously think about switching to Linux.
Hello captain misinformed. Have you checked out thier CVS server? Its all there except for the copy protection code and other proprietary code they licensed. Check it out, ./configure; make; make install.
Not to mention, many of the biggest Linux software companies around have seperate commerical branches based off an open source codebase ot procuct....duel licensing. The same as Transgaming. The copyright holder can license under the GPL/LGPL/BSD/QT/etc then turn around and license the exact same work under a difference license to someone. Do you think money magically appears in their bank accounts?
Since my gaming system was "upgraded" to Windows XP from 2000, Starcraft decided that certain doors inside of buildings would cause a crash-to-desktop when opened. Seeing as how you must open some to get through the game, this was a bad thing.
I tried various tricks (disable sound/change drivers/reinstall/different media/3 different systems) and even contact tech support.
The *only* way I was able to get past these points was to run them in Cedega on my laptop.
Thus, in some situations, Cedega is more compatible with Windows games than Windows itself.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I use Cedega for some games, like CoH and SW:Galaxies en BF:Vietnam. Hmm, for the price of WinXP ( Non-OEM ) I would pay around 150-200 euro's, Cedega costs me about 50 euro's a year, so I can use it for 3 years before it starts to cost more. It isn't perfect, not all games run and sometimes it takes some work to get a game up and running. But it's good enough so I don't need a dual boot system for it. I can now join in for a "quick" game of BF:Vietnam without closing my browser, my editor, my 4 SSH terminals, my Kopete IM, my E-mail. I want games, I don't want windows, and I do REGISTER my games and add to it that I'm playing it UNDER LINUX, and would like to see a native port. I get to play most games, Cedega get's some money, and the game companies ( hopfully ) get more and more registrations stating there running on Linux. And I hope that one day someone says, hey, 10% of the registrations states they want a native Linux version, maybe we should look into it? Sure a lot of companies might say, nah, it runs fine through that Cedega thing, but my bet is that a lot will also say, those people aren't getting the 100% game experience, that gives us a bad name, let's make sure it runs 100% for those 10% userbase. Another great point is that I now am able to get my Dad on Linux, because he wanted to keep windows for EQ only. And I know a lot of people that just want to play that one racer, that one flightsim. Sure they won't be able to play the latest version right away, but mostly, give it a month or 2.
You might want to check yours. The code WAS returned to the original developers or publishers pretty much in it's entirety- at least that's what I've heard from ex-Loki developers and other parties that would know the exact details. The problem was that Loki's deals muddied the waters. There was some legal issues with regards to at least some of the ports that were done or were in progress at the time Loki shuttered it's doors. In the case of Kohan, Timegate was checking into the matter and considering going with LGP for the next set of versions, etc.- but while they wanted to do a Linux version, they didn't want to wait for the legal issues to settle on the Loki developed port. Enter Transgaming and the Winelib versions. As for DeusEx, they weren't spending ANY money on that- if you believe that, you don't know much about how porting goes. Loki spent all the money on the port up to that point and it was in Beta at the time Loki expired.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Like many of the posters in this thread, I have also tried WineX/Cedega a number of times in the past few years. While it does work for a few games, it's nowhere near the level needed for true gaming on the Linux platform.
My wife was using Cedega to play Zoo Tycoon last night in fact, I needed Linux to be up for some other work I was doing. Unfortunately, about 1 hr into the game it crashed for some unknown reason. Also, it didn't help that the text boxes were unledgable and all the dollar amounts were in a comma delimited format.
Emulators don't win platforms -- software wins platforms. When OS/2 tried to win users with a Windows emulator, the viability of a native OS/2 wordprocessor was obviated by the mere presence of this emulation tier.
Honestly - someone should take something like SDL and start building a suite of commercial games for all the major platforms.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
I'm not sure if you're being genuine or not, so I'll take the time to reply.
Virtual machines are typically required to run multiple operating systems at the same time, unless you have multiple systems on which you can run your operating systems and then just switch between the two with a kvm switch. The problem with virtual machines is that they need a place to run, which means they still need a host operating sytem. The ones I've seen that either use Linux or Windows just don't implement the child operating system fast enough for it to be viable with newer games.
Why not dual boot? I don't own a copy of windows. I'm not going to pay ~$200 for a copy of XP Pro (and I'm not going to break the law and pirate a copy.) Why? Because I don't want to have to take the extra time to secure the system, keep it up to date with patches that introduce more problems than they solve, and then still have random problems due to either my own lack of understanding of the internals of the OS or the inability of the OS to just do what I need it to.
Now that all those typical religious reasons out of the way, I never use my system *just* to play a game. I'm always doing other things at the same time. Even with fullscreen games I still run a messenger in the background, have a browser open for e-mail and a few forums, and some xterms where I'm idly modifying code or making notes as ideas occur to me. Not to mention downloads that might be running. I play more games, more often, when I'm waiting for something to download. Rebooting means I have to close everything I'm doing to restart. And it sure as hell doesn't take as few as 20-40 seconds to boot XP. If I wanted to download something reliably in windows I have to install cygwin (for wget) or use some third party app, otherwise when my downloads randomly die (as they often did when I was still using windows) I'd have to start all over again.
And what do you mean Linux will never be mass market? It already is. Just not as much in the end-user space. More game companies are slowly starting to produce Linux version of their applications and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the industry follows suit. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass to maintain multiple versions of software, but it's typically easier to develop under Linux (wider availability of tools, better tech/forum support). Wouldn't it be funny if industries started dropping support for windows and windows games due to the hassles of maintenance?
On second thought, mod the parent down. His/her post is no more insightful or interesting than my own reiteration of reasons that others have also used in the past.