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CrossOver Games for FreeBSD

Posted by timothy on from the to-the-other-side dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Jeremy White from CodeWeavers has made the announcement that an experimental build of CrossOver Games is now available for PC-BSD users. However, this unsupported edition should also work on FreeBSD or DesktopBSD, allowing users to play Windows games on their desktop. The FreeBSD version of CrossOver Games can be downloaded here (registration required)." From the attached notes: "Remember this is an experimental build! If you are on FreeBSD 6.x, you will need to apply a system patch from http://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine to enable wine to function properly. Users of FreeBSD 7.0 and higher do not need this patch."

35 comments

  1. The REAL announcement by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Funny

    Further, we feel strongly that most of our customers are best served
    by the stable, shipping version of CrossOver. That's right folks, CrossOver claims to have customers. That's the scoop! :)

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:The REAL announcement by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 4, Funny

      They only plan on porting zombie games, as we all no BSD is dead!

      p.s before you mod me down, remember this is slashdot not youtube, you do get sarcasm here!

      --
      IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
    2. Re:The REAL announcement by Bronster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've been paying for it for years - it's the only piece of software I am paying for on Linux in fact.

      I find wine very much worthwhile as a "gateway drug" - in fact I was running Win32 perl driving a Windows OCR package under wine on one project - under linux.

      So yeah, they have customers. I don't have a clue how many, but I'm planning to renew again next year.

    3. Re:The REAL announcement by overkill1024 · · Score: 1

      Don't worry, if you're modded down it's just the moderatoers being sarcastic. Certainly that's why all of my youtube comments score at least a negative eight.

  2. What? by CSMatt · · Score: 1

    There's a CrossOver Games? How did I not know about this?

    1. Re:What? by hedwards · · Score: 1

      It's a new product. I think that it's only been around for a few weeks.

      I do have to say that I'm a bit surprised that crossover games is being made available first, I can only assume that it was easier to get running, or is likely to require less work to maintain. Otherwise I really don't get it.

      I'm definitely going to have to give this one a shot, even if it doesn't work in the near future, I can always just use the Linux version.

  3. Windows User by KnowledgeEngine · · Score: 1

    I think there next business move should be to *sell* a product that lets linux games be played in windows. Take this with some sarcasm as intended, but I'm suprised they are not trying to charge for the "privledge" to do that too.

    1. Re:Windows User by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, just wait. This is just mindless speculation, but don't you think it is interesting that VMWare bought Thinstall?

      All of a sudden, you have an application that can emulate a whole machine, merging with something that can take an application an all its dependencies and wrap it into a single executable. Call me crazy, but I think you will start seeing a product where you can wrap your favorite app, along with an underlying supporting OS running on a virtual machine, to target any other OS you want.

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    2. Re:Windows User by calebt3 · · Score: 1

      I am pretty close to being a n00b, but can't the source simply be recompiled for Win32?

    3. Re:Windows User by LingNoi · · Score: 1

      If you built an app properly in the first place you wouldn't need that.

      The problem is developers saying "lets get it working on X first then we'll port it to Y and Z". The problem with this being that by the time you come to release it only works on the OS you chose and porting it becomes much more expensive then it would have to write portable code all the way through in the first place.

    4. Re:Windows User by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

      I am pretty close to being a n00b, but can't the source simply be recompiled for Win32? Win32 and UNIX have different application programming interfaces. Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Business and Ultimate, and Windows Server can run recompiled UNIX apps through SFU (pre-Vista) or SUA (Vista and later), but the software that allows this is not available for Windows XP Home Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic, or even Windows Vista Home Premium. So you have to do it The Hard Way: either implement one set of functions in terms of the other (Wine or Cygwin) or make a generic API implemented in terms of both (wxWidgets or Allegro) in order to get a program to compile on both.
    5. Re:Windows User by raddan · · Score: 1

      Tell that to an IT department that wants to stop using Windows. There are some applications that you cannot get rid of, without great pain, e.g., payroll software. Thinstall looks very appealing to them.

  4. Better than regular Crossover for games? by DurendalMac · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Or is it CrossOver with everything else whittled out? I tried Crossover on OS X and was very disappointed. Sure, Half-life 2 ran...at half the framerate and with DX8 support so everything looked like ass. It was pathetic. Also, if your program isn't on the supported list, don't expect it to run. I'll stick with VMWare and Boot Camp and leave CrossOver out of it.

    1. Re:Better than regular Crossover for games? by Moridineas · · Score: 1

      I tried Crossover on OS X and was very disappointed. Sure, Half-life 2 ran...at half the framerate and with DX8 support so everything looked like ass. It was pathetic. Also, if your program isn't on the supported list, don't expect it to run. I'll stick with VMWare and Boot Camp and leave CrossOver out of it. I haven't used VMware for running games, but I have tried Parallels desktop and have had minimal success--that is, even very old games like the 7th Guest don't run horribly well. Is VMware that much better?

      And Boot Camp is kinda an entirely different boat.
    2. Re:Better than regular Crossover for games? by bain · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's Crossover with focus on games. you can still install office etc if you want, there is just no support for it.

      Maybe the problem is OS X and Apple not Crossover. I run HL2 and a number of other games with more than decent frame rates and everything looks fine.

      --
      Sanity is a majority vote.
    3. Re:Better than regular Crossover for games? by nawcom · · Score: 1
      i assume you are referring to VMware Fusion? from what i read, directx support is better on that. I haven't tried it out, for i only have a gma950. Don't expect to play games that well that need graphics acceleration, for the intel gpus are pretty damn weak.

      I did see someone play portal via vmware fusion, it was on above-average graphics settings, 1280x800, and it wasn't lagging. If he ran it on windows though, he would have the highest settings set. Still, it was pretty impressive, the quality was the same as when i run portal on my single core athlon64 with an nvidia 7600gt.

    4. Re:Better than regular Crossover for games? by sc7 · · Score: 1

      I was also very disappointed with Crossover on OS X. I couln't get anything that wasn't on the "supported" list to run, whatsoever, they all seemed to exit with some kind of an error. Unfortunately, IE6 isn't really what I needed on my Mac, so I headed to VMWare Fusion and Unity mode.

    5. Re:Better than regular Crossover for games? by chrish · · Score: 1

      Parallels seems sort of hit-or-miss for gaming, which is to be expected, really. I bought it for my wife's MacBook... she mostly plays the Nancy Drew adventure games from Her Interactive. The Creature of Kapu Cave worked great, but the next one in the series (The White Wolf of Icicle Creek) is having all kinds of issues. The mouse flashes at about 15Hz, audio/video aren't synchronized at all, etc. They "upgraded" the game engine for the first time in years and broke it. Haven't upgraded her to Leopard yet, so she's out of luck for now... no BootCamp.

      Even more annoying is the fact that Her Interactive actively ignores/rebuffs attempts from Mac gaming/porting houses to contact them and make native OS X versions of the games. This is a stupid business decision due to the facts that Mac users generally seem more receptive to adventure games than "traditional" PC gamers, and that Mac use in homes seems to be rising quite a bit.

      Not to mention the fact that maintaining a code base for more than one platform and compiler will help flush out all kinds of weird bugs.

      The same goes for NC Soft... give me an OS X client for City of Heroes/City of Villains! Blizzard has had an OS X version of the WoW client since release, and it hasn't hurt their bottom line.

      --
      - chrish
    6. Re:Better than regular Crossover for games? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure, Half-life 2 ran...at half the framerate and with DX8 support so everything looked like ass. Is that Dennis Franz ass or Christie Brinkley ass?
      It makes a difference.
  5. Shameless Plug by Hemogoblin · · Score: 1

    Speaking of non-Windows-only games, the guys at S2games have released a native binary of Savage2 for Linux. I could always use more people to play with, so grab the free 5-hour full demo and come play a great FPS-RTS with me. /end plug

    1. Re:Shameless Plug by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wasn't aware Savage 2 was released, they certainly should throw some bucks to advertise. I played Savage 1 because it ran on Linux, I may just pick this one up too.

  6. Patch? by JamesTRexx · · Score: 1

    Didn't know there was a patch for FreeBSD 6 stable. Just last night I grabbed a spare disk to install FreeBSD 6 and Wine to see if a few games I like would run. Unreal Tournament did crash a few times, so I'll try this patch.

    --
    home
    1. Re:Patch? by niteice · · Score: 1

      The native Linux versions of UT would run much better...

      --
      ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
  7. twm support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Last time I tried to get wine running under freebsd it freaked out with twm. And as most freebsd users are die-hard twm fanatics, this could be a problem. Have they fixed the twm stuff in wine now?

    1. Re:twm support by nawcom · · Score: 3, Interesting
      that's strange, wine, from what i know, has no direct link to the window manager you choose to run on X. hell, I have at times set up startx options so it doesn't run a window manager, it simply fills the root background black or whatever wallpaper i want, and it launches the game via wine.

      I'm the blackbox/fluxbox/enlightenment user myself, so I don't have any experience with using tab on freebsd; I'm just referring to what i know about the wine source code. If there is an issue with tab window manager, it has to have been fixed by now :)

    2. Re:twm support by Solra+Bizna · · Score: 3, Interesting

      twm's window behavior is different from what most apps expect, enough so that sometimes they explode.

      -:sigma.SB

      (twm user who is forced to use sawfish to get good workspace support)

      --
      WARN
      THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
    3. Re:twm support by makomk · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wine is very much dependent on a good window manager to work properly. ISTR one of the developers mentioning that using an unsuitable/poor window manager actually caused some of the tests to fail, since it affected window behaviour.

    4. Re:twm support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm the blackbox/fluxbox/enlightenment user myself Ah, so you're the one!
    5. Re:twm support by jandrese · · Score: 1

      "Most FreeBSD users are die-hard twm fanatics"? Where did you get this idea? About the only good thing I can say about TWM is that it doesn't require much in the way of resources, and it's installed by default I guess. Pretty much everybody installs a different window manager though if they can.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
  8. Finally there is hope by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    For Crossover on BSD. yea!

    Now if we could just get VMWare for it..

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    1. Re:Finally there is hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've read Virtualbox is in the pipe. Keep your fingers crossed.

    2. Re:Finally there is hope by nurb432 · · Score: 1

      Thats good news too.

      While QEMU is available and does work, it could really use some 'datacenter' type management tools.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  9. What OCR package? by emj · · Score: 1

    May I ask what OCR package, having an OCR that can be handled with Perl would be very nice.

    1. Re:What OCR package? by Bronster · · Score: 1

      It was an embedded copy of ABBYY that came with a scanner pen. It probably wasn't strictly within the terms of the licence, but it was only a proof of concept anyway unfortunately, the project died for unrelated reasons and I never had to scale it up.

      It was receiving faxed images via email, detaching them, splitting them into individual pages, OCRing the pages and identifying them into separate "buckets" based on the form that was on the page, then using the OCRed text of some IDs to classify them further where possible (thankfully there was a crc32 in the data, so you could tell if it wasn't scanned correctly and send to a human for clarification).

      Finally, a human would enter the hand-written text from the form fields, there wasn't much of it, and it was considered cheaper than trying to come up with a scanner that could read doctors' handwriting!

    2. Re:What OCR package? by Bronster · · Score: 1

      Oh - btw. I signed a non-disclosure at the time which I think was for something insane like 5 years. It's probably expired by now. For that I got given the API names of a couple of functions that didn't advertise themselves via COM - not particularly complex to guess though.

      And that was for READIRIS, which we didn't end up using anyway. ABBYY was more accurate and easier to drive.