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Feature: Games
Cedega and Linux: Let the Windows games begin
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CommentsFor a mere $5 a month (with a minimum subscription of three months) you can get the latest version of the software, support, and the right to vote on which games TransGaming should work on to improve Cedega.
Browsing the TransGaming.org Games Database, you can spot blockbuster titles such as World of Warcraft, Civilization 4, Battlefield 2, Need for Speed Most Wanted, Half Life 2, Counter Strike, and Fifa 2006 -- just to name a few of the officially supported titles. In addition, the database includes more than 1,300 games that are reported to work -- more or less. Since Cedega is nothing more than a translation layer -- it translates DirectX and Windows API calls to OpenGL, OSS/ALSA, and Linux APIs -- not everything runs perfectly.
Installing Cedega is easy, but installing a game under Cedega isn't always simple. For example, to play Civilization 4 you have to install it configuring Cedega to emulate Windows 98, so the installer will copy some additional DLLs. You also need to install the DirectX version shipped with the game, then run the game using the Windows XP emulation -- and pray. If you wish to update Civilization 4 with the latest patch -- don't! Bringing the game up to version 1.61 means more crashes, so stick to 1.52 if possible. Even so, I haven't been able to play Civ4 under Cedega; the menus worked great, the intro movie as well, but as soon as it is finished loading a scenario or a quick game -- crash, boom, bang.
On the plus side, Doom 3 runs really well under Cedega, with no visual artifacts and no bugs at all -- but why anyone would want to run Doom through Cedega, when ID Software offers a Linux binary for Doom (which needless to say runs better since it's native), is a good question.
Need for Speed Most Wanted? Sure, but after you get it installed (which involves similar caveats to installing Civilization 4, or most games for that matter), use the lowest setting for shadows, and avoid "high" details if you don't want visual artifacts. Other than that, the game runs well and is playable.
| Licensing issues |
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Cedega, which uses code from a lot of sources, is released under a mix of licenses, which means that the source code to most of Cedega is available via CVS. Yet while Wine is now released under a LGPL license, Cedega is proprietary software, which naturally creates some controversy around TransGaming and its flagship project. While Cedega is using parts of the Wine project, it hasn't contributed much back to the project, simply because Cedega is not free software, and having a free alternative would harm business. What's more, while creating precompiled binaries from the Cedega source code is both possible and legal, it is strongly discouraged by TransGaming "as it affects TransGaming's ability to continue to improve and develop the code," so "TransGaming reserves the right to change the license under which TransGaming-owned copyright code is made available, and will not hesitate to do so if non-commercial distribution of pre-compiled binary packages adversely affects the financing of continued development." This has come close to happening in the past, when Gentoo and Debian wanted to include Cedega in their repositories. |
For older games, sometimes Wine alone is a better option -- and sometimes not. For instance, Pocket Tanks runs perfectly from Cedega while Wine has serious sound issues with it. Jazz Jackrabbit 2 runs OK in Cedega, though with no fullscreen mode, yet works perfect with Wine. With Atomic Bomberman, you'll have no luck with Cedega, but perfect performance in Wine.
Generally speaking, games do work with Cedega, but most of the times (even for officially supported games) you should stay away from "high" details, and expect crashes. Yet that's better than not being able to play a game at all under Linux.
Commercial concerns
With Linux improving more and more as a desktop operating system, and with entertainment playing a big role in the life of a desktop operating, it's quite a vicious circle having gaming companies waiting for Linux to gain more popularity and users waiting for gaming companies to release Linux games to switch to a Linux distro.
There have been some first steps made, with ID Software, for example, which offers Linux binaries for games such as Quake 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom 3, and Quake 4. And then there's Cedega. But, as some users would argue, Cedega isn't encouraging gaming companies to develop games for Linux.
If nothing else, Cedega is a hybrid, much like the hybrid automobiles of today -– not the answer to pollution, just better than ordinary gas automobiles, until something better comes along. Similarly, Cedega may not be the answer to games under Linux, but it's better than not being able to play at all, until gaming companies notice Linux users as a market and release games for Linux.
The sad part is that even as an intermediate solution, Cedega is still more like "plug and pray" than "plug and play." Yet it deserves a look if you're into PC gaming.
Comments
on Cedega and Linux: Let the Windows games beginNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
Welcome to the club -_-
X supports basic graphic functions but doesn't take advantage of the the card's potential. Maybe with ATI under AMD's roof, we'll see accurate chip specs or at least some vendor written Linux binary drivers.
ATI tv tuner support finaly comes to X natively in 7.1 (think it's version 7.1 anyhow) but this is still guess work by some smart developers instead of ATI supplied binaries.
Please ATI, PlEEEase; don't make me switch to nVidia with a third party tuner board.
Say, what's the linux friendly best in bread tv tuner board or usb box these days?
I'm just now mucking with the NeverWinter Nights linux binaries from it's enlightened developers. We'll see how this experiement plays out.
ATI makes a good chip or at least continues to play leapfrog with nVidia. The benchmark for my next machine upgrade is going to be gameing and virtualization (read; monstrous multimedia and ram). Show me that it's going to include an ATI GPU.
Considering that Cedega is from the Wine codebase (it was previously called Winex), and that Cedega makes money of it, I think that it would be good if Cedega contributed back some patches, or donated a little money back to the Wine project.
Wine has getting improvements lately, Google contributed 200+ patches when they ported Picasa, and there been some work on Direct3D stuff on Wine lately.
I think that iD Software is the best game company ever, they like to use OpenGL, they make Linux binaries, and sometimes they even release the source code to their games after a while...
Another thing I think would be cool if Cedega had a "community edition" of Cedega, such as other open source companies do have such as MySQL, etc.
It could have a Cedega version that is dual licensed, one under the GPL but maybe it gets released after their other version of Cedega. Then those who are serious about gaming, and use it alot will pay for it, and subscribe and they always get the latest version, and can vote on what games to support while those who use the community edition get an outdated version for free, and they cant vote on what games to support. I almost never do play games, but it is nice to play sometimes...
Cedega, less problems than the article claims
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on August 01, 2006 08:41 PMWorld of Warcraft runs great in OpenGL mode (specify -opengl on the command line), and I have no issues. If a game can use OpenGL, do so, as Cedega will just call the underlying OpenGL layer with no translation. OpenGL coding is stricter than coding in DirectX, which DirectX tends to tolerate sloppy code.
The problem with Civ4 is that Cedega had to code something new to get it to work. I remember when Guild Wars came out, all the armor was black, and you could not map to a spot on the map.
There is no Bandaid on the cutting edge.
Unreal 2k4, Doom 3, Quake 3 and 4, and Neverwinter Nights all have native linux clients, and run amazingly well, more native clients should exist.
Making games seems to cost so much money these days that the game companies only try to make blockbusters for the general public and still many classic game companies have gone bankrupt. I like simulations and other kinds of games that most people don't understand. There are very few good realistic and difficult simulations published nowadays, no game company takes risks and tries to please minority crowds even with Windows games.
Being a programmer, I however realise that porting games to other platforms is not that expensive(you don't have to redraw the graphics and rehire the voice actors etc.). I think they fear support issues with the many versions of free operating systems. This is where Wine or Cedega, emulating many versions of Windows would be a very good platform to test and publish games on.
Re:Cedega, less problems than the article claims
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on August 01, 2006 10:02 PM
For example I got Civ4 right after it came out. It took quite a bit of work to get it running at first. Once it DID work, things were fine, it was all installer issues. I haven't played on Windows (don't even own a copy) so I can't say if its faster/slower etc, BUT I can say that on my 256meg Nvidia 5200 card it runs pretty well, and I run in fullscreen dual-head 2650x1200! As typical with other games there are some really minor issues. The in-game animations don't work too well, and once in a great while a ship looks a bit odd, but then again the game has plenty of bugs on Windows too from what I hear, and its a HUGE resource hog! Still, its perfectly playable, doesn't crash often, and installing it is no longer a big hassle.
It seems to me Cedega is providing a decent service to Linux users. It would be NICE if there were Linux ports of games, but there aren't, and thats just the way it is. Personally I doubt that will happen until game consoles adopt Linux and OpenGL, which may or may not ever happen. PC game vendors just don't have any reason to develop expertise with Linux, they don't have distribution channels for Linux games, etc. For that matter it looks to me like even the PC game market is slowly loosing out to consoles.
Re:Cedega, less problems than the article claims
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on August 01, 2006 10:54 PMCedega is definitely providing good service, and it definitely is worth the money if you want to continue playing games when you've moved to an all linux computer setup, but yes, native clients require support, and with the toolchains still differing in quality (which is why some people have problems), it may be a while when the industry finally sees linux as a gaming platform. In my opinion they should all just take a leap of faith, release the clients (even for WoW, War3, and Half Life 2), and see how many people actually move to linux. They don't even have to provide support, just release them. List the toolsets used, and let the community go to work.
Sony released a linux distribution for PS2, even the compiler name was gcc-EE-binutils, so it has happened. Xboxes can also be hacked to run linux, but then it's just like a regular distribution.
With Cedega and Wine I can emulate both Windowses and these games will continue to work for years to come as long as Cedega and Wine are supported. Wine at least will probably live forever and at some point perfectly emulate Windows up to XP level.
Meanwhile, in the future with my kernel 3.0, many of the current binary-only native Linux releases will cease to work, since propriatary games are never supported for a long time. Then I probably have to use a virtualized old Linux installation just to play them..
Re:Classic games are an issue on all platforms
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on August 02, 2006 11:49 PMLB2 is a win95 games which ran great on win98 until it took issue with newer hardware. I'd love to get it working under linux emulation but I think I'm stuck with building a win95 custom box for it.
Transgaming, please be more honest the next time. We've heard enough of your marketing slogans.
Your forums are full of people complaining the games don't work, and your support system is a farce. Also, anyone considering buying Transgaming may want to look around their website. The money for "support" is just being funnelled into things like SwiftShader, of no real benefit to Linux users.
Transgaming are bad for the Linux gaming community and fundamentally, their business will fail the more games get natively ported to Linux.
And as for Gav's "working closely with WINE". The only talk I've heard about WINE lately is borrowing more code, and even having the cheek of wanting to integrate WINE into Cedega's rubbish GUI.
Transgaming used to have innovation, but now they just seem to hack titles to get them to work. I simply don't thing their team has the skills to EVER get stuff like DirectX9 working, or being backwards compatible.
At the end of the day, all Transgaming will be is a bunch of proprietry copy protection measures, as WINE have already overtaken them in covering the DirectX9 API.
While you claim to be working towards making gaming available to Linux, you have taken this technology made freely available to you by free software developers and sold it in fact to port Windows titles to the Macintosh and other platforms without making them available to Linux. This is certainly within your legal rights, and you may feel moral right as well, but it certainly makes clear that making games available to Linux is not your organization's priority.
Other examples include the initial outset of your organizations commercial ventures included publishing Kohan: Immortal Soveriegns, a title which had already been natively ported by Loki. Although Loki may have been unrecoverable at that point, a duplicate port of an inferior, unconverted nature certainly did not help any investors in that project recoup their costs for native games on Linux.
Lastly, you do not address the issue of Transgaming's threats regarding the packaging of the "open" source in the public CVS. While I can respect an organization who chooses not to make their code public, I cannot respect one who pretends to make it public, but yet threatens to take it away the moment it is made more broadly available.
In general, as you can see, the public actions of Transgaming have been gray in a variety of cases, and in some cases I would say willfully two-faced. I urge Transgaming to reconsider these various actions, and to make substantive changes to more significantly support Linux as an open platform, as well as to more honestly represent themselves.
In the meantime, I urge linux users to refuse to support the deeply problemed business model of Transgaming. By all means, support WINE development by purchasing product, but purchase it from developers who will contribute back open code to WINE, such as Codeweavers.
Joshua Rodman (k8to)
jrodman at cedega_comments dot spamportal dot net
another thing that had put me off is the very limited choice in payment method... alot of gamer can't even get a visa due to ther age and other reasons or simply refuse to get or use a credit card. ther are more option transgaming can make available such as:
paybycash - a great method for me as even when i can find my cards(or if you don't even have an banking account of any kind you can send cash via post) i can make a payment via internet banking and certainly don't mind waiting the 3 day for it the clear. just to note paybycash is available on mmorpg's such eve online and neocron and this is why I know it is a good service
Paypal - great method that does not require credit card such as visa or mastercard to be able to charge up a Paypal account
it wud be nice for transgaming to include these different payments method and give the chance for thoughs people that simple can't use or refuse to use credit cards or just really dislike worldpay
But in a way its good. It shows these game developers that there IS a market for gaming on Linux and there IS people willing to dish out $50 on their game even if they have to play it half a$$ with a program like Wine/Cedega. And never forget the most important part on why it is good, we Linux users can finall play our games like Warcraft 3 and CS:S. On high end system they run pretty dang well on highest settings. I am able to run Battlefield 2 with every thing on high except no AA on.
All we can do is thank ID and Epic for making their game native to us. After Linux grows more (more Linux users over Mac users now) we will get more companies to join us.
In response to the comments on TransGaming's contributions to the Wine project, we began development of Cedega while Wine was still under a BSD-style license which fully allows the creation of proprietary derivatives. During the time before the Wine license was changed to the LGPL we contributed dozens of patches to the Wine project including key infrastructure for DirectDraw, DirectSound and DirectInput. The LGPL change made it more difficult for us to work closely with the WineHQ community, but nevertheless we continued to contribute code in areas such as DirectSound, OLE, COM, DCOM, the Wine IDL compiler, a 2D DIB rasterizer, and the WinInet APIs. We also made proposals for improving Wine performance through the use of a prototype shared memory WineServer. Those wishing to view our contributions can easily find them in a simple search of the wine-patches archives:
<a href="http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=wine-patches&w=2&r=3&s=transgaming&q=b" title="theaimsgroup.com">http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=wine-patches&w=2&<nobr>r<wbr></nobr> =3&s=transgaming&q=b</a theaimsgroup.com>
We continue to work with the Wine project, with Cedega incorporating several of the WineHQ DLLs under the LGPL license. Full source code to these DLLs is of course available from our website. We're also thinking carefully about how we can cooperate further in the future.
On the topic of ease of installation and use of Cedega, the TransGaming team has taken huge strides recently to make Linux gaming much easier. With the inclusion of the Game Disc Database (GDDB) using Cedega has never been easier. Simply insert a supported title in the drive and Cedega will detect the disc and use the optimal settings for both installation and game play. No more messing or tweaking with settings.
Is Cedega hurting Linux gaming development? This topic is hotly debated by armchair quarterbacks, however, as Linux gaming is our business, we have some pretty in-depth and intimate knowledge here. We have been talking to game publishers and developers for years and the fact is that most game publishers prefer to stick to the markets that they know and understand - standard console and PC projects. Working on other platforms would require not only a direct investment of resources, but also means fewer resources directed to traditional console or PC projects that the publishers already know how to make money on.
TransGaming works very hard to show publishers that exactly the opposite is true - that a vibrant gaming culture exists on Linux.
Unfortunately, the misconception that all Linux users believe that software should be free-as-in-beer makes many of the decision makers feel that even if they were to produce a Linux game it would simply be pirated rather than purchased. Fear of wide scale piracy plays a significant role in preventing quality commercial games from transitioning to Linux.
TransGaming is still pushing to prove the value of the Linux market and will continue to do so at every opportunity. Meanwhile we will continue our work to improve Cedega, to provide better support for more titles and to give customers the ability to play their favorite games on the platform of their choice.
Take care,
-Gav
Needless to say, there's going to be more and more of them!
I'm a happy user of cedega
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on August 01, 2006 03:24 AMThe real showstopper for games that are not offically supported is the copy protection on the cd:s. One has to try to find a nocd patch for the specific version of the game with google, or give up. Once again the copy protection is only stopping me, the legal owner of the game instead of the pirates.
Sometimes the game would work in Linux but the installer won't. Then I use an old Windows machine or a Vmware image for the installation and then copy the files to the Linux machine. Sometimes I need to search the forums about adding the correct Windows registry entries for the game to Cedega.
The Transgaming games db isn't helpful for helping other users get a game running. Also if I could change something in the world, the not so popular game classics (like Falcon 4) would get better support from Transgaming. Now the blockbusters win all the votes. However, I am satisfied since many of my favorite games can already be played and I don't have to maintain a modern Windows machine just for playing.
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