Wine’s been around for awhile, but when I first tried it a couple of years back, I couldn’t get it to work, so I abandoned it as an idea whose reach exceeded its grasp. Wine isn’t an MS Windows emulator so much as a Linux program that imitates Windows’ system-calls and attempts to run them natively in Linux. The idea was that eventually, it’d be possible to use those pesky Windows-only apps without having to reboot into a Windows partition.
When I tried it, it was a pain to install and a nightmare to configure. In the end, it just didn’t work. I hadn’t given it much thought since, until I heard from a friend who was using a Wine-based program called Cedega. He had World of Warcraft as well as several other Windows programs running seamlessly on a Suse box, so I figured I’d give it a try.
The folks at TransGaming distribute a program called Cedega, as well as a graphical frontend called Point2Play that handles everything from the installation to the actual program functions. I tried it on a Fedora partition and had nothing but trouble. Fedora 3 likes to overwrite my fstab, which was a problem, and the Nvidia drivers (which are a pain to install in Fedora as it is) kept getting hosed by the system. Add to that a number of other hassles that occur because of Fedora’s noncompliance with standards, and it’s no wonder it all went wrong.
I tried again on a Slackware partition, and lo and behold, it worked like a dream. Simply tell the installer where to find the installation disc and setup file, and the whole thing looks (and acts) like a Windows install. I haven’t tried it on anything else yet, but a friend runs Debian (which is also LSB compliant), and everything works fine for him.
The games I’ve tried so far (Battlefield 1942, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft) all run 98% perfectly. Battlefield 1942 was the only one that’s given me problems, and those are extremely minor. The loading screen flickers something awful, but the flicker’s gone after a couple of seconds. While City of Heroes and Warcraft run fine either in fullscreen or in a window, Battlefield 1942 pretty much insists on running fullscreen. In all cases, I experienced no crashes, and on all three games, the framerate was noticeably faster than on a well-tuned Windows partition. What’s more, I had a Seti@home client running in the background and xmms playing high-bitrate Ogg files the whole time, and nothing ever stuttered (which is good, because when I’m living out my Enemy at the Gates fantasies of being a Russian sniper in Stalingrad, it’s just not complete without Shostakovich blaring in the background). Chalk it up to better memory management, I guess. Stuff that I’d expect to hang from the emulation, like serial-number registration and network connections (these are MMORPGs, for the most part) worked flawlessly.
The TransGaming software isn’t free, but that’s not surprising, given that you’d need a full-time staff dedicated exclusively to something like this. Look how long it took Mozilla to get off the ground. What is surprising is the fact that it’s very nearly free. TransGaming refers to it as a subscription service, which means you pay fifteen bucks for the right to download the software, and you get three months of support. This is indicative of the semi-professional model that OSS uses to turn a profit–make the software free or nominal, then charge for support, and it works far better than if it were marketed in a box for $99.95 at Bob’s Computer Warehouse.
Well, needless to say, I’m a happy camper. That Windows ME partition that’s been lurking at /dev/hda1 can finally be used for something decent, and what’s more, I don’t have to deal with the lurking worries about system-compromise or catastrophic failures. Here’s a few screenshots:
