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Cedega 5.1 Released 122

Posted by Zonk from the penguins-have-hobbies-too dept.
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."
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Cedega 5.1 Released More

Cedega 5.1 Released

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  • In related news (Score:4, Informative)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Wednesday February 15, 2006 @09:42PM (#14729247) Journal
    Wine 0.9.8 [winehq.com] was released today.
  • 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
    • 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 ad
      • They focus on making the most popular games work and screw the rest. I have no trouble admitting that my 3 month subscription of $5/month was a waste of money. I signed up so I could participate in the voting, only to discover how truely shallow people are. So I gave $15 to a quasi-open-source company, better than giving it to Microsoft I guess.
        • >>They focus on making the most popular games work and screw the rest.

          No, they work on making you think that the most popular games will work. When you actually try to install, patch, and play these games, you find out otherwise.

          >>better than giving it to Microsoft I guess.

          If you have a problem with MS, then why buy a game based on that system? A game sale for a MS game is the same as an OS sale for MS. The devs license DirectX, programming tools, and logos. They feed the coffers of the mons
        • I'm not sure about all of you guys. But it plays what I want with no problems.
          I just bought the Command and Conquer: The First Decade pack. Wine it errors on the installer, Cedega, it installs and runs perfectly. No gameplay problems, no lag, any of that crap.
          Guild Wars, works.
          World of Warcraft, works.
          Steam and All the apps, they work too.
          Civ 4, yep.

          What more can you want?
          Alot of games work with Cedega.. I don't see why all of you have these problems.
          My box isn't top of the line, in fact it's almost 3 years
          • What I'd like to know is, does it run Dungeons & Dragons Online? I've been playing in the beta for DDO for months and I really enjoy the game.

            The only reason I keep Windows is for games. I'd love it if I could finally get away from Windows once and for all.
      • Most of the less popular games require a little bit of tweaking before they work properly. I've never had any of the games that they list as working not work, some just require time spent tweaking Cedega and in-game settings.
        • Most of the less popular games require a little bit of tweaking before they work properly.

          Yeah...'tweaking' called "Aw, fuck this", [CTRL]-[ALT]-[DEL], [DOWN], [ENTER]

          I never figured out what I ever got for my $5/month. If it actually runs in Cedega, generally it also runs in wine. Point2Play is a pain in my ass, and probably everyone else's too. I'd rather they work on getting the games to actually run out-of-the-box than to write a braindead app launcher.
      • 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.

        What exactly gives you that impression? If you're worrie, check my comments and see that I'm a longtime poster, no Transgaming employee/shill. While a lot of my games didn't work wonderfully back in the WineX days, I generally had luck with the popular ones (Warcraft III was big at the time). Nowadays, I tend
    • <blockquote><i>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?</i></blockquote>

      Cedega is still basically WINE with maybe some optimizations for gaming, right? If so, games shouldn't be anymore taxing on Linux than on Windows since you're working with a translation layer to the Windows API rather than an emulation of Windows on Linux. In theory though, performance could take a
    • I also have a question about playing games on Linux. Is it possible to use gamepads at all? I have a playstation type with 2 analog sticks, L1, L2, R1 and R2 buttons, 4 standards buttons the D-pad and a start and select button. I can use it in MSWindows XP without any driver (just plug it and it is recognized).

      I like to play with gamepads as I got used to it from console gaming. I tried to connect this joystick 3 years ago to a Mandrake box but I could not use it, I believe the system "saw" it but there was
    • I'm a relatively new subscriber to Cedega -- I actually bought a HP workstation and installed Ubuntu for the sole purpose of running WoW under Cedega (my 400MHz Mac ain't gonna cut it) -- and I've been not unimpressed by it. I'm not going to say "wow, it's great!", but in my experience it's worked okay.

      They definitely move from one "most popular" title to the next, and I've never been clear on exactly how many people they have working on it at any one time (it could be one guy, it could be 50 people, you'd

  • From the blurb:

    Gamasutra reports that Cedega 1.5 has been released for Linux gamers looking for a Civ IV fix

    A bit of editorial nostalgia, perhaps?

  • WoW, Amd 64, Via Chipset, ATI Radeon 9200 (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Last time I tried Cedega it didn't work. Textures were missing.

    This was playing WoW on an AMD64 in 32bit mode, on a motherboard with a Via chipset and an AGP ATI Radeon 9200 (Gigabyte)

    I upgraded my bios and tried so many things and eventually gave up. I have a windows machine now. So have they fixed this?
    • I have been happy with WoW on Cedega for awhile now, 8 months perhaps. Sadly, it has required quite a bit of playing around with settings to get things working nicely.

      Recently I installed Ubuntu and it was extremely easy to get NVidia, Cedega, and Warcraft to work... I only needed the memory workaround (0x010000000)

    • many people, including myself (GeForce FX 5900, non-ultra) have been playing WoW nearly bug-free for a long time. in fact, i heard most of the texture problems have been resolved, but most of those that remain are due to the ATi drivers. there are numerous known (and acknowledged [transgaming.com]) issues with ATi cards and drivers in particular, and the forums are rife with people complaining about their Ati stuff not working as expected.

      that said, support improves every month with every new release, and with your subscr

  • I was just evaluating Cedega 5.x the last 2 or 3 days with Battlefield 1942 and it worked pretty good but there's still plenty of issues with Punkbuster unfortunately. After a day or two of messing with manually updating Punkbuster (I think) I may have actually successfully updated it and was able to get on a few Punkbuster servers without getting the annoying O/S privileges messages. A good tip is to change your profile to WinME or Win98 if you have it as WinXP or Win2K. I'm still debating if I want to act

  • I have had good luck. (Score:3, Informative)

    by cosmotron ( 900510 ) on Wednesday February 15, 2006 @10:54PM (#14729610) Journal
    I have Cedega 4.1 and got Steam working in it (before they changed the skin) and Anarchy Online. I didn't even need to do anything; just fired up cedega and ran the executable.
    • This is slightly offtopic, but did you need to do anything special to get Anarchy Online running at more than a snail's pace? Indoors areas were fine, but I ended up with a framerate under 1FPS in city/outdoor areas. I should note that I'm using the CVS version of Cedega.

  • wake me up... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Truekaiser ( 724672 )
    when they stop charging you like a mmorpg.

    • Re:wake me up... (Score:4, Informative)

      by damiam ( 409504 ) on Thursday February 16, 2006 @12:00AM (#14729889)
      Unless I'm much mistaken, they don't charge you like an MMORPG. Your subscription buys you voting rights and access to updates. If you cancel, you still have the right to use the software that you've already downloaded.
      • indeed. and further, Cedega's cost is roughly $60/yr., which is about the same cost as a new off-the-shelf game or two. well worth the price over Windows itself, IMHO.

        just need to stop looking at it like a monthly fee... more like a new license every year... for the price of a new game. :)
        • Windows costs what, 100 bucks? And each version stays around for ~5 years.

          Thats $20 a year to your $60 with Cedega....

          You pay less by using a legit dual boot windows.
          • You can pay $5 and keep your copy of Cedega for eternity if you want. No one's forcing you to subscribe.
          • Windows XP Home Upgrade is USD100. Full XP Home is 200. IIRC, Pro Upgrade is 200, and full is 300. Prices may vary within a few tens of dollars depending on sales, but those are retail costs.

            Now, I fully realize that you can probably find XP OEM for much less, but it comes with bigger restrictions (particularly that it's locked to whatever machine you install it on (even more, I think it's technically locked to whatever hardware you bought with it)). IIRC, Cedega can be transferred between PCs at will

            • You can get the OEM version of Windows XP Professional [newegg.com] for $137 from NewEgg. It is NOT tied to hardware. Now if you use this you can't call Microsoft for technical support - but who ever does that?
              The best reason to run Cedega is that you don't want to run Microsoft software at all and you consider this important enough that you don't mind messing to get a game working on Linux. And of course realizing that some games won't ever run under Linux.
              Another similar option would be gaming on a Mac. You reduce the

              • You can get the OEM version of Windows XP Professional for $137 from NewEgg. It is NOT tied to hardware.

                Incorrect. Quoth the Microsoft Get the Bare Facts about Acquiring PCs Without Preinstalled Operating Systems [microsoft.com] (8th hit I got on googel for "oem license site:microsoft.com"):

                OEM licenses for Microsoft operating system software are not transferable from one machine to another, even if the PC on which it was originally installed is no longer in use. The OEM license is tied to the original PC on which

                • What I mean is that the CD install is not tied to specific hardware. You can install the OEM version on any system, it isn't checking the key to something in the hardware as to whether it will install or not.
                  As for reinstalling on a new machine, you aren't supposed to, but of course there are ways around that if you don't care about breaking the terms of the license. Otherwise you are looking at buying a copy every time you get a new computer, which may be once a year or once every 10 years depending on how

                  • As for reinstalling on a new machine, you aren't supposed to, but of course there are ways around that if you don't care about breaking the terms of the license.

                    Breaking the terms of the license is what gets people in trouble with the BSA and may result in heavy fines. While they've not sued any home users TMK (or at least not enough to get attention anyway), license issues get businesses in trouble pretty regularly. And Microsoft (and others) can audit you at any time!

                    Additionally, product activation

                    • OK - so you really think MS is going to bust a home user for running an OEM copy of Windows on two machines? Really???? The worst I could imagine them doing is making it so you can't run windows update or something.
                      I'm not advocating breaking the license. Certainly not for businesses. Honestly though in terms of the case we were dicussing, home user dual booting to play games, I can't possibly imagine MS busting someone for that.
                      But lets say you change out your computer once every five years. That's a whole

                    • OK - so you really think MS is going to bust a home user for running an OEM copy of Windows on two machines?

                      It's really only a matter of time.

                      The worst I could imagine them doing is making it so you can't run windows update or something.

                      There are any number of things they could do, the least of which is cutting off your Windows Update. Have a fingerprint scanner? A camera? They can do anything, since they control the OS and have little to no oversight. I'm not saying they're doing any of these th

  • Link Mislabeled (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sean0michael ( 923458 ) on Wednesday February 15, 2006 @10:57PM (#14729623)
    The link is labeled "Cedega 1.5" while the title and summary clearly state it as "Cedega 5.1". Can we fix this please? Thanks.

  • The ass-backwards solution (Score:4, Interesting)

    by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Wednesday February 15, 2006 @11:13PM (#14729686) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:The ass-backwards solution (Score:5, Informative)

      by paeanblack ( 191171 ) on Wednesday February 15, 2006 @11:32PM (#14729766)
      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 ?

      1) Games that have massive memory requirements often run better in wine than on XP. In Simcity 4, I've got some cities that will no longer load in XP, but can chug along in wine.

      2) Laptop drives aren't big enough that I'm willing to have a windows partition, but I still want my gaming fix when I'm on the road.

      In general, though, you are right. A dedicated gaming box often gives the best results.
    • What exactly qualifies as "patchy crap?" While I haven't always had Cedega work with my games, it tends to install under a fairly predictable folder structure, and it's never screwed up any of my other applications. As I'm a debian (testing/unstable) user, it installed easily and properly from the .deb file as well.

      If you want to talk about patches, try getting the same system to work stably and without constant patching on windows.
    • That's exactly what I used to do, back when my "UNIX Desktop" was a Sun machine. But as I progressively got fed up with Sun's lack of decent 2D graphics hardware, I found the machine was probably better used as a server. (Already had a Sun server running a bunch of Sun Ray thin clients, but that desktop was a faster machine.)

      For the longest time, I did want to maintain the dual-machine setup. As such, I really wanted to build some sort of Opteron super-workstation for *only* UNIX-like OSes (Linux or Free
    • Install Cedega
      Install Starcraft
      Play

      No patches, no extra computers.

    • Re:The ass-backwards solution (Score:4, Informative)

      by ChaosDiscord ( 4913 ) * on Thursday February 16, 2006 @02:00PM (#14734701) Homepage Journal
      "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."

      So with Cedega, for $60 [transgaming.org] per year, I can use my existing Linux PC which is well decked out with lots of RAM, a fast CPU, and a nice video card. As an added bonus I'm supporting WINE development.

      I could convert my box into a dual boot box, but then I'll have to pay for Windows ($268 [newegg.com], respent every few years as new Windows releases come out), I have to put up with the nuisance of rebooting, and any services my PC provides are unavailable while in Windows.

      I could, as you suggest, purchase a dedicated gaming PC. For something roughly equivalent to my Linux PC, I'd be looking at about $700 (respent every few years either in upgrades or replacements), assuming I'll reused the monitor from my Linux PC. And I'll need to find space for the extra machine.

      I could buy an XBox or Playstation (I'd hardly call a piece of commodity electronics an "investment"), but I've been having problems getting World of Warcraft, Civ 4, City of Heroes, and Warcraft III running on either platform.

      For some people Cedega is a very reasonable option. Encouraging people to spend money unnecessarily is stupid. Many people can be perfectly happy with Cedega and end up saving money. Personally it isn't for me (I play too many games, so I suffer with the dual boot option), but I'm not sneering at people who make that choice. You're not yanking people back to reality, you're ignoring reality.

      • I'm obviously not a heavy linux desktop advocate.. servers yes, desktops no. Do you really need a bleeding-edge gaming machine to run Linux ? Yes, it would certainly be nice if the gaming industry could release more native Linux builds of their games, but that doesn't seem to be happening for various reasons, one that comes to mind is that Linux is not "stable", and by stable I don't mean crashing, I mean the codebase. When you design a game for Windows XP, you know everyone's got the same base, and you
        • "Do you really need a bleeding-edge gaming machine to run Linux ?"

          I don't understand what your point is. I don't have a bleeding-edge gaming machine. I have a very powerful desktop workstation that I run Linux on. It just happens that the key difference between "powerful workstion" and "powerful gaming machine" is a good video card. Even a cheap, mainstream video card would turn it into a solid, if unexceptional gaming machine. I've already made up my mind to run Linux on that machine; that I could u

      • You've almost got it right.


        Put your favorite distro on the *cheap* computer ( I have Debian running on a Pentium I, thank you )

        Put Windows on the kick ass computer for games.


        You put the resources where they're needed. The great thing about Linux is that it doesn't need a lot of resources.

  • My experience with Cedega (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jb.hl.com ( 782137 ) <joe@[ ]-baldwin.net ['joe' in gap]> on Wednesday February 15, 2006 @11:44PM (#14729822) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Cedega probably wasn't your problem. I'd bet that you probably didn't have hardware 3D acceleration set up for your video card. The stock installs of most distros use the 2D-only open-source drivers distributed with X, which are useless for gaming. You wouldn't expect games to work under Windows without installing the proper drivers, and the same is true for Linux. With decent drivers (i.e. binaries from nVidia, or the open-source drivers for older Radeons), most games should run at similar framerates under
      • I was running the NVIDIA binary drivers on Debian under a recent kernel. Under WindowMaker, so the DE couldn't have been the problem.

        Nope, it's probably cedega.
        • Well, you can always find out by running glxinfo|grep direct
          is it says no then you have found the culprit. It might also be useful to run glxgears and note the framrate.
          It's also good to run a native fps, say nexuiz,q1-4,ut2004 or something. For comparison.
        • Did you try running a Linux-native game to make sure 3D acceleration was working? I have a hard time believing that anything other than driver problems would cause the kind of slowdown you're talking about.

    • Re:My experience with Cedega (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Sparr0 ( 451780 ) <sparr0@gmail.com> on Thursday February 16, 2006 @12:23AM (#14729973) Homepage Journal
      [i]Hard lock up.[/i]

      Then your system is broken at a level far deeper than Cedega. No misbehaving software can completely lock up the average linux system other than unintentional fork bombs, which I am relatively sure you won't encounter with Cedega.
      • the binary nVidia driver isn't bug-free, either. i've had some major terminal lockups (requiring that i either SSH in and reboot or simply reset or it's just effectively headless) due to that driver. though i do with they'd open-source it so we could get these terminal driver problems fixed. :\
        • If you can SSH in, its not a hard lockup. I have any number of random devices in this room that are always connected to my main machine by ssh, and are used in just such occasions.

          If it's a problem with the nVidia driver then it has nothing to do with Cedega and Linux-native games are going to lock up too.

          • i did say it's a terminal lockup. video freezes, and it's unresponsive to keyboard input. and, as i said, i SSH in to reset.

            however, it only happens rarely, if at all on any of the drivers from the 70- and 80-series. that said, when i take care to not let it happen, it doesn't. switching between TTYs and X sessions rapidly will lock it up fast and hard. it might just be the fact that i use vesafb-tng, but i dunno.

        • Are you running the latest drivers? I had the same issue with some 7xxx drivers, but the latest ones appear to have solved it.

      • Re:My experience with Cedega (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        and by this post, i can clearly see that you do not have ATI drivers, since they freeze even when running the savers from xscreensaver-gl .. bringin the box to a grinding halt.. Good for you sir!
      • If you are in X an are running gaming apps that grab control of the mouse and keyboard, and the application locks solid, you are usually locked right out of X altogether. *Sometimes* you can still CTRL-ALT-F(1-4) to get to a terminal, but more often than not, you need to reboot.

        Sure, in theory you could probably SSH into your PC from somewhere else and kill X and re-start it, but not everyone has another PC in the house to do that with, and even if you do, it is probably far simpler and faster to just reboo
        • Or use the power button. I have acpid installed just for that, when it locks, i can atleast safley shut it down. If you can't use acpid then sshing won't give you much result either I suppose.

          Back on topic,
          I had about 10days uptime, playing WoW with cedega for many hours (seriously, this is getting bad), but it did freeze on me. No keyboard response et al. Normally if the game crashes, i can always change virtual desktop. I do concider my PC to be pretty stable. But closed src ATi drivers, can make life ...
        • And you can always resort to ctrl-alt-backspace before you reboot.
    • So because you gave it one try and couldn't get it to work for whatever reason, that has to mean that everyone else who claims it works fine must be lying? What a ridiculous argument.
      Did you read the release notes for your version of Cedega? Did you search through the nearly 2500 posts dedicated to Source games on the Cedega discussion forums [transgaming.org]? Did you look anywhere else [sweetleafstudios.com] on the web for help?

      Or did you just give up and start badmouthing a program because you couldn't get it to do something that many other
      • These types of posts infuriate me.

        So because you gave it one try and couldn't get it to work for whatever reason, that has to mean that everyone else who claims it works fine must be lying?

        It starts off by fabricating an opinion. Forget what he actually said; let's pretend he said something different because that's what you prefer to argue against.

        Did you read the release notes for your version of Cedega? Did you search through the nearly 2500 posts dedicated to Source games on the Cedega discussion
    • Something ain't right about your post. What distro release / cedega release / video card / accelerated driver / X-win system did you use? Considering you state "This is why I use Windows", I find it hard to believe that you'd have the Linux experience to troubleshoot this problem alone. I could easily say I use Linux because Windows doesn't let me do simple tasks like restart the GUI without rebooting, truth is, although it's just 3 keys under Linux, it's still an involved task at the OS level. Anyhow, to g

  • I just wish... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Thursday February 16, 2006 @12:40AM (#14730036) Homepage Journal
    Microsoft would bother trying to write a full DirectX port for Linux. Who knows? It may actually work for once, and there may be a boost in the software market, if perhaps it's done free. I'd buy software if I had the free tool to run it flawlessly on another OS. *Might have opened my mouth too late*

    • Re:I just wish... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      Microsoft will not do anything to help Linux. It's the closest thing they have to actual competition.

      • Re:I just wish... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Octorian ( 14086 ) on Thursday February 16, 2006 @09:28AM (#14731862) Homepage
        Which really annoys me, because if they actually got off their Windows high-horse, they probably could sell application software for Linux.

        If they actually made "MS Office for Linux", and it was actually half-way decent, I wonder how many of us may actually buy it. (as in those of us for whom OpenOffice does *not* cover all the bases)

        Likewise, "Windows Media Player for Linux" would also be useful. I've got some stuff I need to watch that doesn't work in anything but real WMP. (ok, it does work in WMP for MacOSX, but doesn't work in that Flip4Mac thing MS is trying to push as a replacement)

        • ... if they actually got off their Windows high-horse, they probably could sell application software for Linux.

          And so what? The Linux market is tiny, so it's not like they're losing a lot of money. And very few people would buy Microsoft applications because they had Linux version. People buy MS apps because they have to have that particular app, usually because all the people they work with also have that app.

          As things stand, someone who needs a Microsoft app, usually has to buy either Windows or MacO

    • If they port DirectX to anything, they'll port it to OS X, for the following reasons:

      1) It's already been ported to both the CPU types Apple uses (PPC for the Xbox 360 and x86 forever.)

      2) Microsoft already has a rather large Macintosh development team making quality software for that platform. They don't have many employees who know Linux.

      3) Macintosh users are more likely to buy commercial software than Linux users. There are very few Macintosh-using open source zealots as compared to Linux-using open so

  • Why WineX will never be as good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Myria ( 562655 ) on Thursday February 16, 2006 @01:05AM (#14730142)
    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 (Score:1, Interesting)

      by 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.
    • Considering that Transgaming is a Canadian company, based out of Toronto.. I fail to see how the DMCA applies to them. It may apply to persons using such software in the U.S., but the rest of the world should be relatively safe until all politicians can be bought so cheaply (which may or may not happen).

  • DirectX on OS X (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Phantasmo ( 586700 ) on Thursday February 16, 2006 @03:08AM (#14730581)
    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.
  • But Cedega works fine for me. Most of the problems on this thread seem to indicate bad drivers *cough*ati*cough* and there's nothing Transgaming can do to help you. Why Linux drivers aren't always good and why they are sometimes a pain in the arse to configure *cough*fglrxconfig*cough* is a matter we should be discussing next. -Lauri
  • They announce they have full DX 9, Pixel Shader, and Hardware TnL support.

    Until then, I will keep Windows for games so I can actually get the use out of my graphics card that I payed for.
  • I'd much rather run Windows so as to run Win32 API software packages. Considering the fact that _most_ binaries run better on their native OS aswell, along with the fact that only ignorance would bring about one not running windows at all. However, although some prefer Unix based OSes and refuse beyond all measure to run Windows, I think it educates one when you delve between both parties. This is, however my opinion.
  • why go through so much trouble to run a modern game? I've always ran linux/*BSD along side a Windows machine. The Windows machine was for my gaming since it was a no brainer worry free solution.

    When i could only afford 1 machine i'd dual boot. Linux for 1 thing and windows for gaming. Emulators and the likes are just too much a burden for me when the hardware/OS is so readily available. Dont want to give money to MS? Fine risk FBI visitations from pirating. In the end limiting yourself to a single OS is jus
  • Anyone interested in playing Civilisation 4 on x86 GNU/Linux ought to visit http://www.civ4linux.com/ [civ4linux.com].

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