A little addendum to the above post... I've recently purchased and installed Cedega, and It really is that good. The difference between playing Windows binaries in regular WINE and Cedega are like night and day. WINE tends to have quite a bit of sound latency, whereas Cedega is dead-on. Also, on most games Cedega uses up to 75% less CPU utilization. On the games I've tried so far, it really is impossible to tell that it's not a native Linux app. Well worth my $15 I'd say, considering I payed $0 for my whole OS and office suite, and I don't multi-boot. Word to the wise though -- check and see how much luck others have had with specific Windows games before running out and buying them. It may not be compatible (yet).
You can get Cedega (WineX 4.0) from TransGaming.com. You must sign up for a minimum of a 3-month subscription, at $5/mo ($15). During that period, you can download any updates / patches from Transgaming. After 3 months, you can either renue your subscription at $5/mo, or just keep using the version of Cedega you already have.
It does work surprisingly well. Playing Warcraft III, I actually get more FPS than I did in Windows with the same hardware. Could be because Linux is a true multitasking environment, whereas Windows simply distributes CPU clock time by process priority... or it could be Linux' superior memory management (doesn't swap unless it has to). But in any case, I think it's worth $15 if you do much gaming. For me, running Windows binaries in Linux is just the icing on the cake; I'd have converted either way. As a former NT admin, I was just simply tired of the crashing, virii, spyware, and crashing. Once I moved to Linux, I never looked back! But, *nix is not for everyone (yet). -AT
Hey Anti, You've helped me in the past....building a server, choosing a router, etc... I'm a Linux user also. :good: I see that you have Cedega running games and that you are using Kernel 2.6.***. Did you have any problems with the 2 conflicting. I thought that I read somewhere that kernel 2.6.*** wasn't working wel with Cedega. I am multi booting the following linux distros : MEPIS, RH9, SuSe 9.1, Debian Sarge, Slackware 10.0, and Mandrake 10. Some with 2.4 and some with 2.6 kernel. I am trying to convert my brother from WinXP. OH yeah, to keep up with the HARDWARE theme of this forum....which is better a 102 or 104 keyboard ?
Hey glenn, Fellow Linux user! :good: Well, actually Cedega 4.x fully supports kernel 2.6, as well as the ALSA sound system. Haven't had any problems with Cedega at all yet, and supported games are rock solid. By the way, for gaming I wouldn't recommend Red Hat / Fedora, as they are compiled for a 386... :swt: So Slow! What they're thinking I dunno, as RH9/Fedora would never run on a 386 anyway. You'd have to use something in the RH7 family on hardware that old! [/rant] Anyway, just about any modern distribution is going to be compiled for a pentium or better, and you can always recompile your kernel to your specific CPU/hardware to take full advantage of modern optimizations. As for the keyboad, both work fine with Linux, so no sweat!
Cedega 4.1 Released ...And it's a helluva update, too! This version is faster, sleeker, and has a drastically reworked 3D engine. I can attest that games run even faster now than they did before, and Cedega was no slouch to begin with. Also, game compatibility is said to have increased quite a bit. http://www.transgaming.com
Transgaming answers my nagging questions about Cedega, specifically the way in which it's compiled: ******************************** Anti-Trend: I don't understand -- is Cedega actually compiled for an i386 platform, or is it meant to imply general Intelx86 compatibility? It doesn't make sense to compile the binaries without at least i686 optimizations, since Cedega certainly wouldn't run well on anything less than a Pentium3. I might've seen it mentioned that Cedega uses some MMX optimizations, which are i586 functions. So, which is it? Thanks, -AT ******************************** PeteH: Cedega is compiled for a i386 processor so that people can run on a 386 if they wish. Compiling for 586 or 686 doesn't make much of a difference as the major bottlenecks in the code are graphics related not CPU related and compiling for 686 or newer would certainly put a fair number of customers in the dark for little gain. In Cedega 4.1 we introduced some sound mixing code which can take advantage of MMX instructions if they are present. The code does a runtime check to see if the processor that it's running on can support these. If it can, then those instructions get executed if not, the 386 version of the code is run. Hope that clarifies things. It's kind of a having our cake and eating it as well sort of thing. Regards, Peter
Sweet. They have the 3 games I play. That price is awesome-what a heck of a deal! My Linux box was built on scraps I had laying around so it does not have cutting edge hardware. I still have my sentimentally valued 3dfx Voodoo 3 AGP card with 16MB. Yup, it old school. But Linux makes it more than run.
Sure, they are Magic the Gathering, Harpoon 2, and Starfleet Academy. Old but they can still have me for a few hours at a time.
Are you kidding? Old games are where it's at! I haven't played a newer game that's really captured me in ages.
The last game I built a PC for was id software's Quake II. That game had me hooked. I think I played it about 7 times on single player in all difficulties. I still play it online when I have time. Harpoon was a rockin dos (but win capable) game. It was a simulation that also had me playing for hours. Right now, my gaming passion has been Xbox and Halo & Halo2. Beside gaming, I have to learn and self teach/study for my programming and also work. Need sleeeeeep. Tony :gun: :guns: :sniper: :good:
Bugger that, the only games you need are Minesweeper and Clanbomber, and as for the number of hours I've spent playing Emacs version of Tetris, well... Bugger that too, I find that intravenous caffiene helps with late night hacking sessions, who needs sleep when you could be bashing out some C code? :good:
W00t W00t! I love Linux but it's lack of games had me turned off. I will definately return to a dual boot now that this is out. I assume that it will still work on AMD even with all this Intel compatability/optimization talk.
Can something like that trick MSN's website into thinking I'm using Windows? I would really love to be able to get into the chat rooms on that site, but I get an error message in Linux saying I must use Windows.
