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Cedega 5.1 Released
Gamasutra reports that Cedega 1.5 has been released for Linux gamers looking for a Civ IV fix. From the release: "TransGaming Technologies has released Cedega 5.1, which features support for some of the newest PC titles such as Sid Meier's Civilization IV, FIFA 06 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Cedega allows games originally created for the Windows platform to run on Linux, straight out of the box. Other titles supported on Cedega 5.1 include Battlefield 2, Dungeon Siege II, City of Villains, Madden NFL 2006, World of WarCraft, Half-Life 2, Guild Wars, and many others. Cedega 5.1 builds on this growing list of game titles with new features that improve overall game play."
Wine 0.9.8 was released today.
Cedega is starting to look a bit redundant due to some of the recent developments in WINE.
I've been off Microsoft(TM) for about 8 years. I fooled around w/ Cedega a while back and although it could install games I wanted to play (X-Wing Alliance, Command & Conquer). It would always segfault when I tried to run them. Now my hardware is nothing spectacular, but these games are older and shouldn't require the latest and greatest. I actually had better luck w/ dosemu to play another version of X-Wing vs. TieFighter that was DOS based instead of Win95 based.
I was wondering how much more taxing the games are on hardware than when running natively on a Win based machine. Also does Cedega have requirements itself?
Jason
-- 42
-- 42 --
From the blurb:
Gamasutra reports that Cedega 1.5 has been released for Linux gamers looking for a Civ IV fix
A bit of editorial nostalgia, perhaps?If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
You must mean Wine 8.9.0
Last time I tried Cedega it didn't work. Textures were missing.
This was playing WoW on an AMD64 in 32bit mode, on a motherboard with a Via chipset and an AGP ATI Radeon 9200 (Gigabyte)
I upgraded my bios and tried so many things and eventually gave up. I have a windows machine now. So have they fixed this?
I was just evaluating Cedega 5.x the last 2 or 3 days with Battlefield 1942 and it worked pretty good but there's still plenty of issues with Punkbuster unfortunately. After a day or two of messing with manually updating Punkbuster (I think) I may have actually successfully updated it and was able to get on a few Punkbuster servers without getting the annoying O/S privileges messages. A good tip is to change your profile to WinME or Win98 if you have it as WinXP or Win2K. I'm still debating if I want to actually subscribe or not though. I would almost be able to run Slackware full time now that I have Windows 2000 running satisfactorily in QEMU. A Cisco VPN client and about 5 or 6 games are all that's keeping me dual-booting these days.
I have Cedega 4.1 and got Steam working in it (before they changed the skin) and Anarchy Online. I didn't even need to do anything; just fired up cedega and ran the executable.
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
when they stop charging you like a mmorpg.
The link is labeled "Cedega 1.5" while the title and summary clearly state it as "Cedega 5.1". Can we fix this please? Thanks.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
I hate to yank everyone back to reality here, but if you can't get your favorite Windoze games to run with Cedega, and you REALLY want to play those games, why not dedicate a true gaming PC running XP and not munge your clean Linux system with all this patchy crap ? Yes it costs money, but Cedega costs money, and games cost money. You have to pay to play. Either that or invest in an Xbox/Playstation.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Wouldn't it have been easier to just simply port Civ IV to linux?
I tried Cedega once. TransGaming claim to support Half-Life 2 through it, so I gave it a go.
Steam installed fine, so did HL2. After everything was ready to go, I ran the game.
Hard lock up.
Rebooted the PC, started again. This time everything worked fine, except I got maybe 1fps. This on a not spectacularly fast PC/graphics card, but one more than capable of properly running HL2 under Windows. Even turning down details, resolution etc until everything was at the level of a NES game didn't help. Frankly pathetic.
This is why I use Windows...simple tasks, like running a game, just work properly and with a minimum fuss. I can hear everybody going "Well get Valve to release a Linux version then." Well, when they do, and I doubt they will, maybe we won't need stupid hacks like Cedega, which barely work.
I really do wonder what the deal is with people saying they got speed increases from Cedega. My experience is...well, no way.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
"Are you kidding? That would require forethought, and research, and abandonment of the precious DirectX API! "
Or the more likely truth, that it would require an investment in a miniscule market*, that's noted for it's strong aversion to all things proprietary.
*A market that all commercial games have done poorly in so far.
Microsoft would bother trying to write a full DirectX port for Linux. Who knows? It may actually work for once, and there may be a boost in the software market, if perhaps it's done free. I'd buy software if I had the free tool to run it flawlessly on another OS. *Might have opened my mouth too late*
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What exactly qualifies as "patchy crap?" While I haven't always had Cedega work with my games, it tends to install under a fairly predictable folder structure, and it's never screwed up any of my other applications. As I'm a debian (testing/unstable) user, it installed easily and properly from the .deb file as well.
If you want to talk about patches, try getting the same system to work stably and without constant patching on windows.
People complain all the time about Cedega not being completely open-source. You can blame the DMCA and United States patent law for that.
The problem is that almost every game is copy protected. Pretty much the *only* current popular games that are not are WoW and Guild Wars. (CD keys don't count as the copy protection I'm referring to here.)
Because almost all modern copy protection systems rely on intimate details of Windows to make it difficult to crack - most of the modern ones even install kernel-mode device drivers - it is impossible to directly emulate/simulate the API closely enough that these protection schemes. As a result of this, you really have two choices:
1. Disable the protection. This works well, but it is very time consuming. More importantly, it is in direct violation of the DMCA, a felony.
2. Rewrite the protection. In this method, you implement the protection yourself, doing whatever CD check necessary and disabling the original protection scheme. This method has three legal problems:
a. The protection schemes are usually patented by the protection companies.
b. In order for this to work, you must disable the existing protection. Even though you are adding a protection system to replace it, the DMCA does not distinguish this, and so this is illegal.
c. Implementing it yourself means that it will be unobfuscated. Anyone with the source - which is just about anyone - can edit out the check in your code and the protection is broken. The fact that the protection is severely weakened might be seen as a judge as violating the DMCA. Considering the way courts have decided lately, I'd say it's quite likely.
The only legal solution is to have the protection companies make you a Linux version of the protection and/or describe how the system works so you can make a wrapper. There is absolutely no way this will happen without an NDA, something a fully open-source project cannot do.
Cedega is the best we'll have as long as American law is the way it is now. Everything points to the laws becoming even more strict over time - we haven't even reached the apex of the pendulum swing.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
WINE is still not ready for centre stage in that regard, yet...Though it is looking more like Cedega was just the warm up act as WINE(hq) and Xover Office will both soon have rather impressive implimentations of directx. I say this as a long time Linux gamer (three and a bit years now of no freelancer ): and a long time pirate (and more recently subscriber) to Cedega (I sold my soul in exchange for a stable way to play Eve Online...).
:)
Just an update on gaming in general under Linux - at the last LAN a fellow Debian user and myself managed to keep up with every game the Windows users installed at played using a combination of native games, Cedega 4.x and 5.x, and WINE. I will enjoy the day when I can remove the horrid taint from my system (Cedega) and be able to game with only native or WINE run games.
I ate your fish.
Maybe Microsoft should try to beat Cedega to the punch and port DirectX to Mac OS X? They could sell it for $30 per major revision, with free updates in between to keep things in sync with Windows. MS could start losing some serious business if Cedega ever gets "good enough" (although this doesn't seem to be the case so far).
Also, if it was done really well, it would discourage the development of native OS X games, which I'm sure they'd see as a nice bonus.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
But Cedega works fine for me. Most of the problems on this thread seem to indicate bad drivers *cough*ati*cough* and there's nothing Transgaming can do to help you. Why Linux drivers aren't always good and why they are sometimes a pain in the arse to configure *cough*fglrxconfig*cough* is a matter we should be discussing next. -Lauri
http://ati.cchtml.com/
If you are in X an are running gaming apps that grab control of the mouse and keyboard, and the application locks solid, you are usually locked right out of X altogether. *Sometimes* you can still CTRL-ALT-F(1-4) to get to a terminal, but more often than not, you need to reboot.
Sure, in theory you could probably SSH into your PC from somewhere else and kill X and re-start it, but not everyone has another PC in the house to do that with, and even if you do, it is probably far simpler and faster to just reboot than walk around the house to do that.
They announce they have full DX 9, Pixel Shader, and Hardware TnL support.
Until then, I will keep Windows for games so I can actually get the use out of my graphics card that I payed for.
You say you want a revolution....
... except for two significant details:
I'd much rather run Windows so as to run Win32 API software packages. Considering the fact that _most_ binaries run better on their native OS aswell, along with the fact that only ignorance would bring about one not running windows at all. However, although some prefer Unix based OSes and refuse beyond all measure to run Windows, I think it educates one when you delve between both parties. This is, however my opinion.
Don't confuse kindness with cowardice.
why go through so much trouble to run a modern game? I've always ran linux/*BSD along side a Windows machine. The Windows machine was for my gaming since it was a no brainer worry free solution.
When i could only afford 1 machine i'd dual boot. Linux for 1 thing and windows for gaming. Emulators and the likes are just too much a burden for me when the hardware/OS is so readily available. Dont want to give money to MS? Fine risk FBI visitations from pirating. In the end limiting yourself to a single OS is just that limiting. Each one is a tool and has a purpose. Windows = great gaming, easy to install and run.
THe irony here is i used Windows 98 for years. What cause me to upgrade to XP 3 years later was a sinple game... Xwing Alliance. It kept crashing on me to the point i shelved it one day. A few years later i wanted to play it again and it crashed my 98 machine a few times. Out of pure spite I installed Windows XP and SP1. To be honiest I've been very satisfied with the results. I could complete Xwing Alliance without a single crash in XP. It's now the mainstay of my Gaming life. I am a hardcore gamer through and through.
I'm a relatively new subscriber to Cedega -- I actually bought a HP workstation and installed Ubuntu for the sole purpose of running WoW under Cedega (my 400MHz Mac ain't gonna cut it) -- and I've been not unimpressed by it. I'm not going to say "wow, it's great!", but in my experience it's worked okay.
They definitely move from one "most popular" title to the next, and I've never been clear on exactly how many people they have working on it at any one time (it could be one guy, it could be 50 people, you'd not have any clue from their forums or site), but the end result works works okay for my purposes, given that WoW is really popular right now.
Getting it to work initially can be frustrating, though. I had a LOT of issues getting WoW to work (some weird mouse-clicking issue), and eventually fixed it by running with certain configuration options. Every time Blizzard puts out a new version, it's a crapshoot -- it might continue to work fine, or I might have to spend an afternoon tweaking its config files again.
Eventually I'm just going to buy a new Mac, and at that point I'll probably stop bothering with Cedega: I don't have any Windows-only games that I want to play -- I'm a one-game-at-a-time guy, and right now that game is WoW. I do appreciate that it exists though, and I might even consider continuing to support TransGaming for a while even if I wasn't actively using Cedega, just so I can keep voting for games I might be interested in playing in the future (once they reach the bargain bin at CompUSA).
It's $5 a month, and it doesn't make me feel like I'm kneeling down and sucking Microsoft's collective cock and running Windows every time I want to play a game. To me, that's worth it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
damn how did they know, these are the only games i need winxp for. !!!
w000t
i'm going to count all my pennies and see if i can afford a copy this pay.
noiche noiche noiche
Anyone interested in playing Civilisation 4 on x86 GNU/Linux ought to visit http://www.civ4linux.com/.
OLPC Australia
You can get the OEM version of Windows XP Professional for $137 from NewEgg. It is NOT tied to hardware. Now if you use this you can't call Microsoft for technical support - but who ever does that?
The best reason to run Cedega is that you don't want to run Microsoft software at all and you consider this important enough that you don't mind messing to get a game working on Linux. And of course realizing that some games won't ever run under Linux.
Another similar option would be gaming on a Mac. You reduce the total number of games available to you (including some that work on Cedega) but you don't have to purchase/install/maintain a Windows partition.
It's all about trade offs.
Sometimes my arms bend back.