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."

Comments

How useful? / Machine Requirements

[jmusits]

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

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Re:How useful? / Machine Requirements

[Bios_Hakr]

I tend to agree. I was a subscriber for over a year. Games that were listed as "should work" never worked for me. I used RedHat, Debian, Gentoo, no good. I tried various Nvidia cards across Intel and AMD processors.

We even had geek LAN parties where we tried to get things to work. We eventually got BF1942 to work a little. And Rainbow6 worked quiet well.

But, looking back, I think that the vast majority of people claiming success with WineX were company shills. Either that, or people didn't want to admit that their $5 a month was a complete waste.

Re:How useful? / Machine Requirements

[0racle]

God help you if you want to play something that isn't as popular

You could always run it on the system it was designed for.

The ass-backwards solution

[billcopc]

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.

My experience with Cedega

[jb.hl.com]

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.

Why WineX will never be as good

[Myria]

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

Re:Why WineX will never be as good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's the DMCA's fault that Transgaming never contributed all of its non-copy protection code back to Wine, single-handedly forcing the Wine developers to switch licenses to prevent more parasitic behavior. It's the DMCA's fault that Transgaming went around threatening Debian and Gentoo for making builds of their public CVS available, despite the code not containing any of that copy protection stuff anyway. It's not that Transgaming isn't just a bunch of opportunistic fuckers at all.

DirectX on OS X

[Phantasmo]

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.