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Wine Software

Wine Gets Direct3D Support 156

Posted by timothy from the daddy-what-was-'windows'? dept.
chromatic writes: "Looks like a company called TransGaming Technologies has been improving DirectX support in Wine. They plan to use a modified Street Performer Protocol to make money, and will eventually relicense their patches under the Wine license. Maybe I'll finally be able to run Thief!" And maybe one day Xbill will run on Windows.
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Wine Gets Direct3D Support More

Wine Gets Direct3D Support

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  • I don't think this would make more gaming companies want to port to Linux. Why? Because they would have to recompile the game with WINE and Linux to get a native binary. Unfortunately, with these 600Meg-1Gig games you see, that would mean adding another CD (or two) to the box, which would cost money, as well as add weight for shipping costs. Why not just go ahead and create a Linux version seperately, if it's going to cost so much more?

    The other option would be to compile a Windows only version, test it using WINE on Linux, and if it works, ship it with that version of WINE on the CD. Unfortunately, using WINE as an emulator will see significant loses in speed and framerate (or at least in my experience).

    --
  • OS/2 2.1 was sold and advertised at retail, true. But I think this was once again after it was clear that OS/2 hadn't gained much widespread corporate traction.

    Now whether OS/2 2.1 was really designed as a consumer OS ... I think the default desktop setup and the lack of out-of-box support for anything but SCSI CD-ROMs tells that tale.

    IBM was taking advantage of the incredible frustration out there with Win 3.1, but it sure looked like short term cash scam instead of a real strategy, at least until Warp 4 (The Tombstone Edition) came out.
  • It's unlikely that IBM was paying that full $90 price for Windows, because they owned full rights to Windows 3.0 and below according the MS divorce terms.

    During the anti-trust trial, it came out that IBM was paying $11/copy for Windows 3.11 as an OEM. It's possible they had to pay 'full retail' for the OS/2 component, but extremely unlikely.

    "OS/2 For Windows" was cheaper, but my guess is that the big reason was because it was marketed towards home users and it wouldn't undercut corporate folks paying $300-$500 for the full version. Plus it was an 'upgrade'.
  • The Transgaming DirectX path is distributed as a diff to Wine 20001222. The WINE site seems extremely poorly designed, with a series of sites [oddly labelled `mirrors' despite the fact none of them contaisn the same software]. I'm still hunting down the list for packages, or even source tarballs, but they're damned difficult to find and most of the sites mentioned are a little stale.

    Sould someone please post a link to Wine 20001222? RPMs and DEBs would be great, but source will do.
  • OS/2 1.x was not a consumer OS and was jointly developed between MS and IBM. Mostly MS. IBM took the OS away from MS after 1.2 and rolled a completely new GUI for it. 2.0 was marketed to the consumer and was when I got into the OS. 1.2 woud also only run on IBM or certain Compaq machines. 2.0 ran quite nicely on my brand-X laptop and just about every other machine I ever tried to install it on. IIRC (It's been a while now) 2.1 was when they started stamping CDs and they had some big problems with the Non-ATAPI Mitsumi CD ROM drives.

    2.1 was the release of OS/2 that had the most chance of making it in the consumer market. It was stable, allowed you to preemptively multitask Windows programs, and you could do things Windows users could only dream of, like format a disk and do anything else at the same time. And we had users -- the highest estimate I heard was that OS/2 had 10 million users at the height of its popularity. Many of those were home users who were curious and wanted to try it out, ham or BBS operators who wanted real Multitasking, and programmers like me who wanted an OS where you could crash the DOS shell and not have to reboot.

    Of course I probably don't know my OS/2 history either. After all, I started working IBM's OS/2 support line around the time that 2.1 was introduced and left around the time they announced that the Boca Raton plant was going to be closed.

  • You've got it backwards, silly (Score:3)

    by The Pim ( 140414 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @09:17AM (#1424565)
    Wine doesn't let you run xbill in Windows. It lets you run WinLinus in X.
  • > Wine users are confronted with C:, D:, etc,
    > drives that don't exist. which is also cool, /scraft isn't the location of my cdrom, but wine thinks it is. Now I can play starcraft without the CD so I can listen to music at the same time (yeah, that's it, listen to music. of course, I *have* the CD. It's not like it's at a friend's house or anything *nervous glance*)

    "huhuhuhh, go away. we're like closed or something"

  • Re:Wishes... (Score:3)

    by jguthrie ( 57467 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @09:18AM (#1424567)
    AC Wrote:
    If you know a thing or two, you will not make such absurd remarks. cross-platform engine for game development? Are you on crack? Do you know what it takes to write a game? What developer in his mind wants a dumb mediocre engine just cuz it is portable?

    Perhaps one that had a game with good gameplay but not so flashy graphics who wanted to sell to as wide a market as possible? Many people believe that this thing that you also wrote:

    Game programming is about pushing the hardware to the very limit.

    Is so wrong that it's not even funny. Game programming is about producing an enjoyable game, not about throwing megapixels on the screen. The whole "pushing the hardware to the very limit" BS is a fairly recent phenomenon, and may be the reason that PC games (not just the Linux ones as reported on /., but PC games in general) typically are money-losers.

    In fact, I believe that the emphasis on programming is misplaced because a game's design is far more important than how pretty the graphics are, and the game's graphics depend more on the work of visual artists than on some coder who's always trying to bum a few cycles. To be sure, the best programmers can combine with the best game designers and aound and visual artists to produce a game that is enjoyable to play and visually stunning as well as a programmatic masterpiece, but simply being a programmatic masterpiece is not sufficient.

    The point is that different developers are trying to accomplish different things. Not every developer will share your vision of the way things ought to be. Those that can produce a commercially viable product will get to do it again.

  • Try the iBiblio archive [ibiblio.org] for the latest Wine source releases. If you really want binary builds, check out WineHQ [winehq.com]. They have a page with a list of different packages linked off the main page.
    _____
  • I ran warp 2.11/3.0/4.0 fine on all my IDE boxes and even on a 386 with an ESDI drive.
  • .net is about getting every msft customer to send them monthly subscription payments. NOTHING more nothing less...
  • The whole "pushing the hardware to the very limit" BS is a fairly recent phenomenon, and may be the reason that PC games (not just the Linux ones as reported on /., but PC games in general) typically are money-losers.
    Now that's one heap of BS.
    Let's go back to when computer gaming became mainstream. The 1980's and the C64. What were the most successful games doing then? Pushing the hardware to it's limits. Same thing with it's successor, the Amiga. The same thing also happened with console games.
    What about the PC then? Well, in the end of the 80's the PC got some decent graphics hardware. Soon after that some games like Wing Commander came out and pushed the hardware to it's limits. It sold like crazy.
    What about the coming of FPS games then? When ID software released Wolfenstein 3D they did things not thought possible with the hardware. Turned in a lot of money. DOOM got them heaps of it after that since they had ditched their distributor and were good at it themselves. Same thing here. Quake a bit later made people drool at the realistic, fast 3d. After this the ID programmers were driving Ferraris...

    Oh yes, using the hardware to the max really makes a money loser...

    [A] game's graphics depend more on the work of visual artists than on some coder who's always trying to bum a few cycles.
    Oh sure, you're right about that. But what do most 3d artists want, to be able to produce better visuals? More polygons, more and higher resolution textures, better effects... And still at a good framerate.
    How do you achieve this? You could require the user to buy hardware that's hardly on the market yet. Either that or you could make the user run it on a system that can throughput a decent amount of data, and get a good coder that can really make good use of it...
    It's not a big challenge to code under crossplatform newbie APIs like OpenGL... Unless you want to make it run at a decent speed.
    Now there is an API that is fairly usable without being Windows-only and complex. Glide. Oh, what do you say? Glide doesn't work on your card? Tough luck, that WAS the standard for years.
    DirectX is the best API available, it really makes a difference in what quality of content can be provided. Have a guess of why Linux OpenGL versions of games are usually pretty late compared to DirectX? It's so that top-notch computers can run them fast enough that they can't be called slideshows...

    Now as for enjoyable gameplay, that is something you've got to experience first hand. If you watch a review that has screenshots with crappy graphics most people won't buy it, and won't experience the enjoyable gamplay. If it on the other hand is beautiful and slow like hell, then it isn't enjoyable.

    If you were Joe Windows User, would you buy the game noone of your friends is playing, that has bad graphics and is slow, or would you buy the Windows-only beautiful, fast and fun game that all your friends are playing?

  • See 'Linux Games Not Selling [slashdot.org]', which appeared on Slashdot on August 13. Contrary to popular slashdot belief, I don't think many folks are willing to pay to run a game on a knockoff platform where it may or may not work correctly. And vendors are unlikely to support it because of lackluster demand and a rat's nest of support issues.

    Maybe I'm crazy, but it's not even an interesting question until there's demand.

  • From the license [transgaming.com] page:
    Please note that "TransGaming WineX" is a derivative of the Wine project, consisting of new code for several Wine components, including but not limited to:
    libddraw.so, libdsound.so, and libdinput.so. More information about Wine can be found at http://www.winehq.com.
    There you have it. DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput ((R)/tms where necessary)
  • Not true. Microsoft needs third-party developers. That means they're symbiotes, not parasites.
  • Thanks. To make myself clear, I was talking about WineHQ specifically when I was commenting how badly the downloads are arranged and managed.

    Mirrors should have the same content. Release info for a particular stable build should have a link to download it in different formats.

  • I've been unable to compile or run any programs written with allegro over the last 6 months (since I first started trying) ... DOSisms ...

    Subscribe to the Allegro mailing list [sourceforge.net]; there may be someone willing to help you get Allegro working. It worked without a hitch on my Red Hat 6 and Slackware 7 boxen.


    Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo [pineight.com].
  • Sigh..I wish that myth propogated by the Caldera spin machine would just die. The DR-DOS error to which you refer was disabled in the shipping version of Windows 3.1. The real explanation (quoting Urowsky):

    Microsoft considered having Windows test for the presence of MS-DOS, because Windows 3.1 had only been tested with MS-DOS. The notion was that Microsoft could warn consumers that they were using an untested configuration and that Microsoft could not guarantee the proper functioning of their machine. To preserve the option of including such a message in the final product, Microsoft included in the third beta release of Windows 3.1 certain code that looked for MS-DOS. If MS-DOS was not found, that code displayed a benign message asking beta users to call Microsoft support personnel. The goal of the message to beta testers was to determine whether the code that tested for the presence of MS-DOS was working properly. Importantly, Caldera fails to mention that the message to beta testers did not mention DR DOS or DRI by name or suggest that the reason why the message was being displayed had anything to do with the beta tester's operating system. In fact, the message provided beta testers with no indication of what was causing the message to appear. Caldera also fails to mention that no such message was ever displayed in any commercial release of Windows.

  • It's not a big challenge to code under crossplatform newbie APIs like OpenGL... Unless you want to make it run at a decent speed. Now there is an API that is fairly usable without being Windows-only and complex. Glide. Oh, what do you say? Glide doesn't work on your card? Tough luck, that WAS the standard for years. DirectX is the best API available, it really makes a difference in what quality of content can be provided. Have a guess of why Linux OpenGL versions of games are usually pretty late compared to DirectX? It's so that top-notch computers can run them fast enough that they can't be called slideshows...
    Hate to break this to you, but OpenGL is not a newbie API nor is it any slower (or faster) than DirectX. You forget that in many of the early ages of DirectX, the Direct3D component sucked so bad that almost no one WANTED to use it. Today things are somewhat better since the APIs have evolved to the point where they're usable, and since Microsoft promotes DirectX, part of the 'logo'ed driver qualifications is passing the conformance tests for Direct3D, etc. However, OpenGL has been available on Windows for nearly as long as DirectX has -- Windows NT 4.0 shipped with an OpenGL DLL, although few vendors shipped a corresponding ICD with their driver sets.

    OpenGL has a lot going for it. One is that it's a mature API and was designed by a company that is responsible for a great deal of the graphics technology that we've seen on TV and now are happening on our computers -- SGI. DirectX, or rather Direct3D in particular, was a late comer to the party and has had to play the catch-up game for the past couple years. Another advantage is the cross-platform capabilities, which also means you may be able to do portions of the development work on platforms a little more stable than the regular Windows 9x systems the game will likely be run on. Also don't forget that there have been large numbers of games using OpenGL... Quake II is a good early example, some later ones include Unreal and Half-Life also used OpenGL engines, and there wasn't any slowdown. I believe Quake 3 Arena also uses OpenGL, but I don't really play it.

    But most of this is all beside the point. It's fairly simple to abstract the game and engine logic from the graphics back-end. For the most part these days, OpenGL and Direct3D are more alike than they are different, and most of the reason we have unportable games is developer laziness and development schedules that run far beyond what they should be forcing the developers to do a half-assed job and deliver an unfinished product.

    Linux has other problems regarding games, aside from this silly Direct3D/OpenGL nonsense, the least of which is the rather poor driver support (we've got what? nvidia (through binary-only X servers/drivers), ATI, Matrox, and maybe one or two other manufacturers?), XFree86 4 just finally getting usable for regular use, and still rather poor support for advanced features of current sound cards (Yes, my SoundBlaster Live works in Linux, but still no EAX or 3D audio).

    I can think of only one reason why a developer would want to always choose DirectX over OpenGL -- driver support for DirectX is almost always better than driver support for OpenGL on Microsoft Windows.

  • Great! (Score:4)

    by Looke ( 260398 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @05:29AM (#1424579)

    Very good! The reason many still have Windows on their computer isn't MS Office and friends, but games.

  • will certainly help the users who are reluctant to switch to linux. better DX support will of course help windows games run under linux, especially as more and more games are DX based.

    course, my site linux tribes [tribalwar.com] (shameless plug) would love to see better DX support in wine so Tribes will run better. :)

    ________

  • That would be the one with the calc.exe which would display "0.0" when you calculated 3.11-3.1.
    --
  • Great! Now I can play some more of those M$ Games that I like! (Age of Empires!)
  • .deb files can be found at http://www.winehq.com/~ovek/ [winehq.com] The libwine-dev is older because that hasn't been changed in a little bit.

    .rpm files can be found at http://wine.dataparty.no/ [dataparty.no]

    Have fun!

  • Nope, xbill was started before WinG existed :)
  • ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu.
    /pub/linux/ALPHA/wine/development

    Wine source has always been on your standard sunsite (later metalab) linux mirrors.
  • Naw, Counter-strike doesn't run on a Playstation. That's why mine has been sitting in my stereo cabinet unused now for the last year and a half. Playstations can't hold a candle to a computer with a decent graphics card and the cool FPS games out there. If you want to play basketball or football games then a console would be fine.
  • No link to www.xbill.org [xbill.org]. I wonder if I should be offended.
  • "Can you imagine running 3DMark2000 benchmark on an ultra 10 with a 3D-creator card" Yes, and it would blow ass. Ultrasparc II CPUs are designed for databases, not 3D. If you want fast UNIX 3D, go for SGI.

  • XBILL (Score:3)

    by Cmdr. Marille ( 189584 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @05:39AM (#1424589)
    LOOK! There allready is xbill for windows:
    http://www.azzit.de/xbill/ [azzit.de]

  • Re:Great! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's not just games but any sort of multimedia. I switched to Linux originally because I was sick of my computer crashing all the time and the only choices I had for a pre-emptively multitasking OS that was readily available was OS/2 ($$$$) or Linux. Linux was easy to get, came with builtin ethernet networking (OS/2 didn't until later when they came out with the majorly expensive Warp Connect garbage), etc. When I first tried out Win2k though I was very impressed. Not only did it offer the multimedia and game capabilities of Win98 but it also offered the stability of UNIX. I don't need to worry about my 2000 box crashing in the middle of the game locking up my whole system. I've had a game crash but it just ends the program and I can restart it without rebooting ala Linux. Under Linux however I am lacking 3D support for my GeForce 256 card, game selection sucks ass (well, I only play Half-Life which isn't available for Linux), and streaming video support sucks ass compared to Windows. Netscape 4.76 is a terrible joke compared to IE 5.5, etc. I'm afraid Linux has peaked and is on its way downhill much like the tech stock market in 1999. I've got ssh for Windows (putty), IE5.5 for web browsing, and Half-Life. What more could I ask for???

  • A couple of questions. (Score:4)

    by Lover's Arrival, The ( 267435 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @05:40AM (#1424591) Homepage
    Hi all! There are a couple of things that I have wondered about the WINE project, and I was wondering if you could enlighten me:

    1) Is it true that the WINE project could one day run Windows programs faster than Windows does itself? I would have thought that with the open nature of the program code, it would just get faster and faster until it outstrips Windows itself. If this is true, then it would be great for playing games on ;)

    2) Is it likely that Microsoft will deliberately try to scupper the WINE project by introducing new API's that are top secret but required to make MS programs work? Or perhaps try their hand legally? But then, I'd have thought that the WINE project benifits Microsoft in a perverse way, by giving them another market to sell to.

    Brrrr. I just can't get over how cold NE America is. I can't get used to it at all! :o)

  • will their method work though, and more importantly would it be accepted? "As long as our company keeps turning the $$$ over we'll keep giving you code" I guess the issue is, what's to stop others from developing competing code, especially with the core changes TransGaming are making. Or would they try an even eviller tactic, and require that only their patches be included. The idea of good faith sounds nice, but there is an ever growing mistrust of companies, and especially with their tactics on how to make money out of OSS efforts. Cheers, leroy.
  • SCHWEEET!

    Allegro is still alive and kicking.. Damn that brings back memories. I wonder if my mikmod+dos only version of allegro is still on x2ftp? I wonder if x2ftp even exists anymore..

  • Re:A couple of questions. (Score:5)

    by SurfsUp ( 11523 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @06:44AM (#1424594)
    1) Is it true that the WINE project could one day run Windows programs faster than Windows does itself? I would have thought that with the open nature of the program code, it would just get faster and faster until it outstrips Windows itself. If this is true, then it would be great for playing games on ;)

    Oh yes, that's possible and likely. For example, the underlying memory management and disk IO can be faster and better than Windows (it already is), drivers can be better (3D drivers for NVidia and Matrox are already running neck and neck with windows drivers, held back only by 2D blitting support, which is being worked on) system calls can be handled more efficiently, etc. etc.

    2) Is it likely that Microsoft will deliberately try to scupper the WINE project by introducing new API's that are top secret but required to make MS programs work?

    It wouldn't work. There is no way MS can keep any api's secret - we can always run the windows program under emulation to see what it does if we need to. Usually it isn't necessary, and dont forget, secret api's are a pain for windows developers as well, even Microsoft developers. Plus having hidden api's discovered would be a little inconvenient for Microsoft's appeal of the split-up order.

    Or perhaps try their hand legally?

    Yes, for sure they will try to use legal means, it's their only chance to stop us. DMCA and such things show they're already on the march. We have to fight that. Deal: you fight the DCMA, and I'll keep working on the kernel, ok?

    But then, I'd have thought that the WINE project benifits Microsoft in a perverse way, by giving them another market to sell to.

    It lets others compete with Microsoft freely. Microsoft management wouldn't know what to do then, they only know how to play when they get to write the rules. If Microsoft can't control the platform its entire business model goes out the window.
    --

  • Well I already knew divx was supported. Where would I find info about the asf (ms mpeg4 v3?).

    Well most asf files work okay with the latest version of avifile, which is to be found at http://divx.euro.ru/ [divx.euro.ru]

    You need version 0.52 and the latest binaries (windows dlls) works on i386 only of course....

    Sorenson don't even give out an AVI codec or avifile would play sorensen quicktime crap.

  • Games will soon be shipped on DVD.

    And you don't need a special wine version. Wine will be compatible to all Windows. You only need a recent version. Also WINE IS NOT an EMULATOR. There is no necessity for wine to be slow. It is a reimplementation of Windows, not an Emulation.
  • <i>I don't think this would make more gaming companies want to port to Linux. Why? Because they would have to recompile the game with WINE and Linux to get a native binary. Unfortunately, with these 600Meg-1Gig games you see, that would mean adding another CD (or two) to the box, which would cost money, as well as add weight for shipping costs.</I>

    Almost all of those 600Meg-1Gig is game data (movies, sound, levels and art) which are able to be read from any platform (once you get past the byte order issues). Binary executables are relatively small.

  • Is compatibility good? Remember OS/2... (Score:5)

    by Soft ( 266615 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @06:54AM (#1424598)

    WINE is certainly a nice thing to have. However, I'm wondering whether it really is doing more good than harm, as there is a theory that one of the factors which led to the demise of OS/2 was precisely its ability to run Windows (3.1) applications.

    Of course, everybody agrees that IBM's attitude did not help, to say the least. But the lack of native OS/2 applications can also be explained by the fact that software developers could target the DOS and Win16 platforms, and also have some OS/2 market share...

    Now, OS/2 did not have a strong open-source movement behind it. Nevertheless, couldn't a good WINE make Win32 the de facto standard platform for PC software, and eventually make the OS's it runs on targets for the Microsoft change-the-API tactic, as they did with Windows3.1, 3.11, win32s1.1, 1.25 and 1.30?

  • If you want to rip directly to DivX, go to http://www.divx-digest.com [divx-digest.com]. They have a bunch of tutorials about how to add subtitles to a DivX, burn it to a VCD, and a whole bunch of other DivX info.
  • Obviously you are a person who has never programed in COM or DirectX. The whole point of COM is that when you add new features you add a new interface, you do not change anything that already exists.

    If I wanted to use DirectDraw in DirectX8 I would simple create an IDirectDraw7 interface exactly as I had done in DirectX7. You recompile DX7 code in DX8 and it still works, you run DX7 code with the DX8 runtime and it still works.

    I've never heard such misinformed FUD in my life!!
  • Oh and while I'm on a rant, there is no such thing as Direct2D. If you want to access a 2D surface in Direct3D you can use something like IDirect3DDevice8::GetBackBuffer to get you an IDirect3DSurface8 which you can do whatever you like with!!
  • A portable engine can be just as fast as a non-portable one. Its called Quake III. Game engines don't use the OS. They call some initialization routines, and then use whatever APIs are available to shove the OS out of the way. The only thing they interface with is OpenGL, the filesystem APIs, and the networking APIs. In the core code, it doesn't interface with anything except custom game code, and maybe OpenGL. Games like Unreal even do their own memory management.
  • If I recall correctly, Allegro was written for DOS/DJGPP first, then ported to Linux second.

    Cryptnotic

  • Appartently Linux-nazis think X-Bill and Ktetris (or whatever) is funner or more intellectually stimulating than Alpha Centauri or Quake. They need actually start playing some of these games that they mention.
  • One other thing is to submit bug reports for programs that you use. I have heard of several developers who prefer bug reports to patches. If you can identify the section of the code where the bug is then this is a bonus, but by no means is this necessary.

    One of the toughest jobs a programmer does is testing; once a bug has been discovered it is often easier to locate and fix it. The important thing is to read the relevent instructions on what the bug report requires and make sure you give as much of the requested information as possible.

    --
    Steven Murdoch.

  • Wrong. Buy a Playstation instead.

    Does it run Linux?
  • I saw an improvement of 3fps when running UltraHLE under Wine in Linux, compared to Windows 98 optimised by that Norton tool. I can't check it again though, as I got rid of Windows and my Voodoo 2 (which UltraHLE requires).
  • well, I only play Half-Life which isn't available for Linux
    Half-life has been running under wine for quite some time now... http://lhl.linuxgames.com/ [linuxgames.com]

  • Re:Ummm (Score:1)

    by demon ( 1039 )
    A _little_? Uhh. To say the least. Considering (afaik) you wouldn't be calling DirectX APIs via any sort of RPC, and considering the APIs weren't designed with wire communication in mind _at all_, it'd be dog slow.

    Either you're trolling, or you don't understand what RPC (and SOAP is just another way of doing RPC) is all about.
    _____
  • in fact, they're the largest software developer for the Mac, a little recognized fact. (Anyone see Office 2001 Mac? Very slick.)
    That's because Microsoft owns most of Apple! :P Silly Microsoft sees Macs as a viable OS because they almost own it!
  • uh. Do you really think you will ever see .net outside a borg os? Sure, you can access soap objects wherever you are, but can you run them on anything else than windows?

    What's the point if you can remote control Halflife 10 on a windows computer with soap if all the grafics appear on the server?

  • Yes surely they are. But theres a problem. Microsoft is known for developing frequently new API versions.
    That's what they did. DirectX8 has a completely new graphics API. Which makes new Software using it incompatible.
  • It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with,...

    That's why I'd like to see a "Yes, it runs with Wine"-Logo or similar.

    There are some programs which use Wine (like Corel's PhotoPaint). And many developers are bound to Windows (or think they are). Maybe this could get some fresh wind into cross plattform development.

    I don't think many Windows developers would use AmigaOS to achieve this. :-)

  • Is this license DFSG compliant? Will it prevent itself from inclusion in Main?

  • if they are totally dependent on MS to survive, then they are a parasite

    Maybe a better term would be "symbiote"? Symbiosis indicates that two organisms (or whatever) are dependent on each other. The software companies need MS (well, they rely on MS's popularity to provide a large user base for thier product), and the proliferation of software for MS systems helps to make MS Windows, etc., a more popular platform. MS would not disappear if third party developers stopped doing software for it, but it would probably hurt MS. Similarly :) the 3rd party developers could migrate to different platforms when they start getting more of a market share than Windows currently enjoys.

    --8<--

  • Thanks for your most interesting and informative reply, it is great.

    1) That really is great news! I am looking forward to the day when Windows programs run faster on Linux, it will be a watershed when this is realised. Perhaps then businesses will migrate over to Linux and gradually start using Linux apps. WINE could be a sort of Trojan horse for Linux.

    2)This is good too, and I really should have thought of it. Microsoft can't start saying one thing and doing another now, it is under far too much legal scrutiny.

    Deal: you fight the DCMA, and I'll keep working on the kernel, ok?

    I haven't been using Linux for very long, but I am already very enthused. I use the platform to work on Java (I am trying to learn it) and the problem is that now I feel guilty all the time. See, I haven't contributed anything to the Linux community at all (though I have convinced a few friends to give it a whirl;), but I would very much like to. I can't code very well (and Java isn't much used in Linux), but perhaps helping a pressure group as you suggest or doing some Graphics work would help. I also feel guilty when I am using Windows or Macintosh (I have one for Graphics reasons), it feels as though I am betraying Linux. Anyhoo, I do want to help.

    Microsoft management wouldn't know what to do then, they only know how to play when they get to write the rules.

    It would be so great if they were taken down a peg or two. I don't think Microsoft is inherently eveil, it is behaving in the same way that any company would if it were in that position. If Microsoft were just another company then it would be better for everyone. If you ask me, it should be split up into about 4 or 5 smaller companies, that way these companies would be on a par with the rest of the industry, and they would be free to develop for Linux, too, instead of it being taboo.

    Just my stupid opinions, anyway! :o)

  • Here in Germany it's called "Windows" too. So what, his finger must've slipped. At least he can speak English, can you speak German?
  • DirectX 8.0 is completely compatible with versions going back to 3.0 They did not break anything! They added new interfaces, sure, but everything else is still there and even better performing!

  • WINE is certainly a nice thing to have. However, I'm wondering whether it really is doing more good than harm, as there is a theory that one of the factors which led to the demise of OS/2 was precisely its ability to run Windows (3.1) applications.

    I doubt Wine will ever hurt Linux:

    • Linux is free as in beer: why would anyone want to buy Windows if they can run their applications on a gratis OS?
    • One could have said the same thing when Windows 95 came out, I believe that people didn't want to run Win3.1 applications on this Win32 "beast" because the widgets didn't look that advanced. Linux has this same advantage with Gnome and KDE. Think about it, people don't even run KDE apps in Gnome (or Gnome applications in KDE).
    • Linux offers a lot of alternatives for Windows programs, Wine thus only easyers the transition until people are used to the alternatives. Of course this isn't true for games hence this whole article ;-).
  • I think the default desktop setup and the lack of out-of-box support for anything but SCSI CD-ROMs tells that tale.
    I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I've never had a SCSI CD-ROM and have happily installed and used OS/2 since the v2 betas - still am, when I can, although I'm moving on to Linux now.
  • Carrion wrote:
    Now that's one heap of BS.
    Let's go back to when computer gaming became mainstream. The 1980's and the C64. What were the most successful games doing then? Pushing the hardware to it's limits. Same thing with it's successor, the Amiga. The same thing also happened with console games.

    You have selective memory. Some games have always pushed the hardware to its limits, but the reason that PC's had "turbo" buttons for years was because most games, and turbo buttons were all about games, did not push the hardware and you had to slow a faster than standard computer down for them to be even near playable. Most console games even then didn't come anywhere near taxing the hardware they ran on. Some (and here I'm thinking things like Atari chess) did, but it was less about graphical displays than it was about limitations of RAM and ROM. The graphics were intended to be competitive with the often specially-designed arcade equipment and, for the most part, achieved that easily by including similar hardware.

    Carrion also wrote:

    What about the coming of FPS games then? When ID software released Wolfenstein 3D they did things not thought possible with the hardware. Turned in a lot of money. DOOM got them heaps of it after that since they had ditched their distributor and were good at it themselves. Same thing here. Quake a bit later made people drool at the realistic, fast 3d. After this the ID programmers were driving Ferraris...

    And how many other game programmers, all of whom are writing games that require substantial upgrades to the typical Windows computer just to run, are driving Ferraris? Damn few. Isn't it just possible that, given the success that some people have while writing games that push the hardware when others fail utterly, even though they push the hardware every bit as hard, that the success doesn't really have that much to do with how extreme their performance is?

    For what it's worth, I think Id's commercial success has more to do with having a coherent and enjoyable vision and wise business practices than it does with advancing the state of the art in graphical displays. The pushing of the hardware to new performance levels was a side-effect required because the older techniques weren't able to support the vision. But the vision came first.

    There is no doubt in my mind that Id's vision is always going to take the hardware to its limits, but that's the sort of games they design. Other designs are not nearly so hardware intensive. (How many megapixels/sec do you need to do a "Tetris", anyway? I would expect that more people play "Tetris" and "Mahjongg" daily than have ever played "Doom", "Quake", or even "Wolfenstein 3-d".) The fact that other sorts of games can be every bit as enjoyable to play and not tax the hardware proves my point.

    Carrion also wrote:

    Oh yes, using the hardware to the max really makes a money loser...

    Not necessarily, but making a game that uses hardware "to the max" does not necessarily make a game that is a money-maker. It's the emphasis on technically duplicating "Quake" without really understanding what makes "Quake" playable that makes for money-losers. Your counterexamples don't disprove my opinion because they are so rare.

    Carrion also wrote:

    Oh sure, you're right about that. But what do most 3d artists want, to be able to produce better visuals? More polygons, more and higher resolution textures, better effects... And still at a good framerate.

    How do you know? Are you a game artist? I am willing to stipulate that that is what the visual artist might want, but what does the game designer want? I'm not talking about some crap derivative game designer who is trying to duplicate "Quake" or "Half-Life" or "Diablo" because he thinks, as you apparently do, that simply duplicating someone else's success will get you a Ferrari, too. No, I'm talking about someone who has a different idea of what people will play.

    You can't tell me, because you can't imagine such a person.

  • Maybe it's not the hit game of the year, but it is cool -- Codeweaver's WINE runs Stardock's Entrepreneur practically PERFECTLY. I'm happy about that, since I bought the combo OS/2 & Win CD and have been wanting to play it ever since I dumped OS/2 for an all Linux system.

    ONLY problems -- when you install, you have to install the demo from the CD first. If you run the install program and install the game, it will say it succeeded but the files don't seem to be actually copied. After the demo is installed you can run it again and it installs fine.

    It crashed ONCE. Once in several (probably 10+) hours of gameplay. Not too bad I'd say, since you can save often.

    A couple of times, the keyboard quit working in that session. I could still control it w/the mouse, but that's not good enough. In one case, it started working again, and in the other, I killed it and restarted. I think it happened when I switched between various windows and a terminal window overlapped with the Entrepreneur window.

    But game play is flawless -- scrolling and sound are fine.
  • That's what I thought, so I bought Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. I was just starting to get into it when the machine automatically rebooted itself. So it's not perfect. I'll stick to Win98 for games and Linux for everything else.
  • They have to develop for the Mac because they need Apple around as evidence that they're not a monopoly on the desktop. Without the anti-trust trial, Office for the Mac would never have existed. Office for Linux doesn't exist because Linux would almost immediately eat WindowsNT/2000 for breakfast, whereas the Mac is no threat in that department. There's a reason why Compaq, Sun, IBM, Dell, Intel and Oracle have investments in Linux, they can see it's potential to remove the closed monopolistic Windows and replace it with an open OS. I'm always surprised to see people defend a single closed unreliable product, when the PC they use would not exist had the standards not been freely available (thanks to the IBM anti-trust trial folks). Look at how powerful PCs are now, and yet the shipped home OS has barely changed since Windows 95. Look how long it took Microsoft to produce a reliable OS in Windows 2000 and it still crashes occasionally for no obvious reason. Microsoft are a blot on a thriving market and the sooner they are cut down to size the better.
  • The DR-DOS error to which you refer was disabled in the shipping version of Windows 3.1.
    You may think it is a myth, but I SAW the message, both with DR-DOS 5 and DR-DOS 6. It said something to the effect that Windows works better with MS-DOS. You are correct in that it did not mention DR-DOS or DRI by name, but it sure as hell plugged MS-DOS.

    This Urowsky is a Microsoft employee, no? And of course interested parties to litigation NEVER lie during depositions [microsoft.com], do they?

    I guess I need to dig up my old DR-DOS and Windows 3.1 disks and take a screenshot...
    --
    You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
  • I think you're joking, but I'm not sure. Just to get the facts out there: Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple in 1997 as part of an orchestrated effort my Steve Jobs to renew Wall St. confidence. It worked; the stock jumped more than 40 percent on the news. $150 million is nothing to Microsoft, by the way, and they've probably unloaded most of their investment by now. So that's that.
  • What a weird, baseless, self-serving theory. Let's contemplate reality:

    1989: Office for Mac 1.0 released by Microsoft
    1991: Linus Torvald tells comp.os.minix he's doing a free OS
    1994: Justice Dept. begins 1st investigation of MS's (specifically their licensing practices).

    The reality is there's no demand for Office for Linux -- just hype -- which is why boondoggle-prone Corel is looking to sell their Linux Office division.

    Remember when the hypesters were demanding a Java version of Office from Microsoft? And what a fad that turned out to be? The industry is full of hype landmines and this is one. They'll build it when there's demand and no sooner.

  • They claim to be doing this under the "Street performer protocol" but aren't. They are not asking to have money put into escrow until they get to a certain level and will then release the code under the WINE license and collect the cash, they want the money now, and we have to trust them to release the code when they get 20,000 subscribers.

    Furthermore, the website is as full of bluster as any go-nowhere $uP3r 31337 project I've seen. Smells like Project Armageddon [simplenet.com] to me, only this time we're supposed to foot the bill.

  • Yes, but swapping 30+ floppy disks (depending on whether you installed the "MMPM" or not) wasn't the most pleasant experience, right?

    I know support for other CD-ROMs was there, just not in the box, so not consumer friendly.
  • Response to Carrions post-

    I have many old friends in the Video game industry, old amiga hackers doing PSX/PSX2/DreamCast/N64 and PC games.

    Are any of them driving Ferraris? Hell no. So they get a royalty check for 250K or so. Thats for 2 years work! I know Oracle DBA's that make more than that in a year.. (And do less work, 20 hour coding days, time line crunchs, etc..)

    The Video Game industry has gone the way of the Record Industry. They pay millions in advertising, so all that gets payed back before the artists sees a penny..

    As a side thought, one of the most popular games out has the shittest gfx ive ever seen. Everquest.

    Don't fool yourself, people pay for the gameplay, not the gfx. EyeCandy gets old.

    Side note- I read (on /.) that the Gaming Industry will be larger than the Movie Industry by 2002.
  • Isn't it really freaky how we're struggling to get things running at "Windows Performance"?
    I mean, in some threads on /. we talk about how slow windows is in relation to anything, but here we are talking about the life-and-death quest to seek parity with Windows Performance..

    just a random thought that occured to me..

    it is kinda scary though, isn't it?

    -ws

  • I would love to see "SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:" on Gaming Boxes to list the version of WINE that is required to run these type of games

    I'd rather see them include the required version of Wine, much like they now include the required version of DirectX

  • If SOAP really replaces DCOM, CORBA, Bonobo, et.al. then who is going to really need an emulator? If you are instantiating a SOAP object then who cares what OS it was written for or runs on?
  • O/S 2 Failed because it only supported SCSI out of the box. An installer had to modify scripts and data files on the install disks to set up an IDE system. So only fairly advanced users could do it and, anyway, SCSI is expensive compared to IDE.

    That and Microchannel killed the IBM OS. It wasn't lack of applications...

  • Direct X and Driver Issues... (Score:3)

    by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @07:24AM (#1424635) Homepage
    I don't know a whole lot about how Wine will be pulling off DirectX support, but I'm making the assumption that it's doing so by reporting some form of generic hardware to DirectX, which when querried claims to support the features that DirectX requests.

    This is all find and dandy, but I think everybody is missing the point of DirectX, which is to allow game developers to make feature-calls from hardware without having to actually access the hardware it's self.

    In Wine, DirectX support or not, games written for DirectX will simply have one more layer of software to trudge through.

    I'm skeptical that performance will be acceptable in any game with anything more than very modest hardware requirements.

    I'm aware this isn't emulation, but an API running in an application hosted on an OS might as well be emulation.

    -=-

  • Linux is free as in beer: why would anyone want to buy Windows if they can run their applications on a gratis OS?

    IIRC, OS/2 used to be cheaper than DOS + Windows3.1. The usual argument was that the price of the latter combination was already included in that of the PC you buy, which is still often true of Windows95/98/ME/etc. Furthermore, are the applications really going to run? How long till Microsoft adds a new API à la win32s?

    One could have said the same thing when Windows 95 came out, I believe that people didn't want to run Win3.1 applications on this Win32 "beast" because the widgets didn't look that advanced.

    What do you mean? Weren't Win16 applications "assimilated" in the sense that they ran under Win32 with the same look&feel as the other 32-bit programs? I thought a lot of early "for Windows95" software was actually Win16/win32s?

    Linux offers a lot of alternatives for Windows programs, Wine thus only easyers the transition until people are used to the alternatives.

    Again, the same was true of OS/2. Some were even free (as in free-beer) or even included with the OS. The only difference with the situation now is the free-speech side. I hope it is big enough.

  • Sigh.. (Score:2)

    by Splat ( 9175 )
    This begs the question from me - why reinvent the wheel?

    Couldn't resources be better spent optimizing or developing any number of open graphics standards instead of pumping dev time into a relatively closed standard such as DirectX?

    IMO, the advances made with DirectX compatibility via WINE will be redundant by the time they are finished. Graphics technologies move at insanely fast rate (I had read moores law CUBED somewhere) and by the time that yesteday's great DirectX functions are working great in WINE, we will already be two generations ahead.

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but DirectX is primarily used by games. I've never seen a killer office app that depends heavily on complex graphic functions via DirectX. Most applications dont need insane graphics acceleration. This move seems to be targeted towards making three-year old games run well in WINE. Why devote such resources to something in which very few people will actually have any benefit from?
  • Oh and by the way: Can you imagine running 3DMark2000 benchmark on an ultra 10 with a 3D-creator card... :)
    Yup, and I shudder at the thought... Sun's 3D hardware isn't exactly impressive, IMO.
  • Why not instantiate DirectX objects using SOAP on a *NIX system to run DirectX Games? Yeah, there would be a little network latency but... Why not?
  • What killed OS/2 was Bill Gates' refusal to license Win32 to IBM.

    Crack smoker. OS/2 was roadkill at IBM long before Windows 95 and any Win32 programs shipped.

    And Microchannel did contribute to OS/2's downfall: IBM marketed a special "Extended" version of OS/2 1.x that supposedly only ran on MCA machines. This contributed to the (mostly accurate) perception that IBM was trying to introduce hardware/software lock-in and monopolize the PC industry. Which made anyone with any sense run as fast as possible from anything IBM, including OS/2.

    Of course, since you only stumbled on this whole thing with "Warp", it's all prehistory to you, and you have absolutely no clue of the bungles and bullshit surrounding OS/2 for first 7 years of it's history. ("Warp" was a pathetic last-ditch attempt to improve OS/2's balance book by taking home user sucker money, BTW. OS/2 was already dead and buried in it's core corporate markets. IBM planned to screw you all along.)
  • Then why don't you do it now? What do you think .Net is about? OS independence.
  • 2. It failed because of windows binary compatability was purposely broken by MS with the release of WIN 3.1.
    I think you mean Windows 3.11 (aka the infamous "fixpack" that M$ released to break OS/2-Windows compatability)...
    --
    You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!

  • Hmm... no. I was referring to individual companies that base their entire product line around a single product (MS-Windows). If that product was withdrawn, then all of their software would cease to function immediately. If an individual company withdrew a product that ran on Windows, then Windows would still survive. If a software apps company used a cross-platform library, or had other products that ran on different platforms, then the company would not be (as) reliant on MS, and would not be a parasite.

    However, if you are speaking in more general terms, then yes, software apps companies and OS companies form a symbiotic relationship, as do software and hardware companies.

  • For what it's worth, I think Id's commercial success has more to do with having a coherent and enjoyable vision and wise business practices than it does with advancing the state of the art in graphical displays. The pushing of the hardware to new performance levels was a side-effect required because the older techniques weren't able to support the vision. But the vision came first.
    Once again you show you plain don't know what your talking about. ID Software was started when they figured out how to do smooth scrolling with the EGA graphics hardware. A performance hack. They couldn't sell the trick to their employer nor anyone else, so they started thinking about what they could do about it. They made the Commander Keen game in their spare time and used the funding to start the company.
    The Commander Keen series of games were done in a month or two per game... Not exactly well thought through nor a coherent vision... They sold very well nonetheless. And people were glued to their screens because of the state-of-the-art usage of the hardware really increased the playability.
    How do you know? Are you a game artist?
    Nope. I'm just a coder. But unless you actually meet the artists and talk to them about what they need to do their job, that's one hell of a crappy company you're coding for.
    I'm not talking about some crap derivative game designer who is trying to duplicate "Quake" or "Half-Life" or "Diablo" because he thinks, as you apparently do, that simply duplicating someone else's success will get you a Ferrari, too.
    No... But how do you propose to make original games? By using well established, tested techniques that finally after about 5 years on mature platforms have been implemented on every coder's favorite toy OS? And letting hobby programmers that don't care about performance implement it with an API that was originally specced as an easy 3D API for rapid prototyping? OpenGL wasn't designed for performance, nor to make use of relatively new or non-standard functions of hardware, if you think that you should read up... And if you think DirectX is similar to OpenGL you've probably just looked at the highest level API's. Yes, you'd know Direct3D has more than one way of doing things if you'd have had any real experience with it.
    Now, what am I saying? I say you can't easily make something that people haven't seen before if you're stuck using interfaces like that. No I don't consider NVIDIA's pet extensions to OpenGL to be desirable either, it's nice when some of your customers can actually run the game...
    You can't tell me, because you can't imagine such a person.
    Yes I can. In fact they're a lot of fun to associate with. Most of these people rarely get a chance due to financing issues. It's the people sitting on the piles of $$$ that don't want to fund projects that aren't clones of big moneymakers.
    It's a sad world, really.
    Oh yeah, you're talking about people like Carmack? I'm not. People with that much luck and timing are a lot more rare than those who have the wit and ingenuity.
    One of the biggest problems with the gaming industry is that it's more or less saturated these days. It's harder to get into it for a newcomer now than it used to be.
  • Direct3D in particular, was a late comer to the party and has had to play the catch-up game for the past couple years.
    Yes, of course. But what kind of relevance does it have nowadays when it's more feature complete than anything else, has support for more hardware, and has rock solid support for almost everything while OpenGL implementations tend to be shoddy crap?
    Another advantage is the cross-platform capabilities, which also means you may be able to do portions of the development work on platforms a little more stable than the regular Windows 9x systems the game will likely be run on.
    Don't make me laugh. Windows 2000 Pro and Direct3D is a lot more solid and stable than Linux and accelerated OpenGL...
    I don't know about you, but on my hardware Win2k hasn't crashed at all except for when I've done something really braindead when coding, like blitting from two threads at once. And that's just NVIDIA's drivers fault, that don't check anything just to get another 0.1 fps.
    Now if you're coding on Win9x when there's a really good and compatible poweruser platform available, you're either poor, cheap or stupid.
    Also don't forget that there have been large numbers of games using OpenGL... Quake II is a good early example, some later ones include Unreal and Half-Life also used OpenGL engines, and there wasn't any slowdown.
    • Ever seen how characters are modelled in Quake II? They're basically a couple of cubes with really smart textures on. Looks like crap when you up the resolution. ID Software still had to do really annoying stuff like precalculate how to draw all objects to get the longest chains of polygons, just to get decent speed on it. Roughly half of the geometry data for Q2 are such chains, for example in the player model format.
    • Remember what people were saying about Unreal when it was released? "Oh! What a beautiful slideshow!" May I mention that they migrated to DirectX in newer versions of the engine and that the OpenGL implementation is half as fast on my NVIDIA machine even though NVIDIA's implementation of OpenGL is considered one of the faster ones?
    • As for Quake III, no. The Windows implementation runs on DirectX.
    [D]river support for DirectX is almost always better than driver support for OpenGL on Microsoft Windows.
    Amen.

  • It still is Windows, just emulated.

    Yes, but with more games available to play under Linux, more people will be using Linux to play games. With a significant percentage (e.g. 15%) of people playing under an alternative platform, there will be an incentive to improve the quality of a game under that platform (i.e. make it portable, and provide a native version).

    This moves Linux closer to that 15% (or whatever magic number is needed).

  • I don't think this would make more gaming companies want to port to Linux. Why? Because they would have to recompile the game with WINE and Linux to get a native binary. Unfortunately, with these 600Meg-1Gig games you see, that would mean adding another CD (or two) to the box, which would cost money, as well as add weight for shipping costs.

    How much of this is actually executable code? It is most likely 90 odd percent data.
  • The reality has nothing to do with Corel, the great bandwagon jumper. Why are IBM investing a billion dollars in a 'non-viable' platform? Why are all the other industry heavyweights getting into Linux if there's nothing there. Microsoft will never build Office for Linux while their business depends on their OS monopoly.
    I think you're the one out of touch with reality. You really think that Microsoft would have bailed out Apple without the anti-trust trial. Apple were in serious shit before Microsoft came along, so don't try and pretend that MacOS, no matter how good it is, would have been any less a fringe OS than Linux had Microsoft Legal not needed someone to point to and say 'see - we're not a monopoly'. Linux is already the number 2 choice on Intel servers, and it's not far behind MacOS on the desktop.

  • See, I haven't contributed anything to the Linux community at all

    If you feel guilty, you could


    Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo [pineight.com].
  • ) Is it true that the WINE project could one day run Windows programs faster than Windows does itself?

    It already does! Or at least last time I ran the N64 emulator UltraHLE, WINE ran it a few fps higher than Windows did (according to its internal fps counter).

  • It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with,

    I've had good luck with Allegro [sourceforge.net] 3.9.33. It's a cross-platform 2D gaming library; there's an add-on package [sourceforge.net] to make it interface with Mesa3d or OpenGL. You wouldn't believe how easily it is to recompile a Linux Allegro game for Windows or DOS.


    Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo [pineight.com].
  • The link you give seems to be a native Windows port. But you can also compile and run (IIRC) the original X11/Unix version under Windows using Cygwin. You will need an X server.
  • I should have said Office for Mac would not still exist had it not been for the anti-trust trial. Microsoft face little OS competition at the moment, despite the explosion of Linux interest, because it's hard to compete against an entrenched monopoly. I still don't see how Linux is an unviable platform as you say when most of the industry big-hitters are getting behind it. There must be something there for IBM to throw a billion dollars at.
    The bizarre belief that the Microsoft investment was irrelevant and it was the genius of Steve Jobs that turned Apple around shows how truly out of touch you are.
    SuSE, the only profitable Linux vendor, is very focused on the desktop. RedHat may be the major vendor in the US, but I live in Europe, where SuSE is the major vendor.
    Your banging on about Corel failing, when Corel have tried to latch on to every new fad going (remember WordPerfect Office for Java) fails to demonstrate that Linux is failing any more than Microsoft's recent profit warning indicates that Windows is dying.
  • An investment did help save Apply [sic]. Jobs has done a wonderful job revitalising it, but it still would be in trouble without the financial and applications support of Microsoft.
    Microchannel is a specious argument, that was years ago when IBM were still trying to cling to their monopoly.
    You still haven't answered the question of why the major PC manufacturers offer an 'unviable' OS preinstalled on their desktop PCs, or why so many other major vendors have invested so much time and money helping out the OSS community if it is unviable.
    I don't 'demand' that Microsoft do anything. My argument is against you dismissing Linux as an unviable OS, despite the fact that most of the industry considers it to be important enough to invest in. WordPerfect Office has failed, not because there is no market for it, but because it is no better than StarOffice which is free.
    As for Quake 3, you're selectively quoting what the sales director said. You failed to mention that shops weren't stocking it because it wasn't the Windows version (a problem that Mac software also encounters). That isn't a fault of Linux, as much as a fault of the salespeople not convincing the shops and the shops being overly conservative.
    Linux is no more an 'unviable' platform than the Mac, it has it's strengths and weaknesses, but don't try to pretend that Microsoft has continued Mac Office for any other real reason than as evidence in the anti-trust trial. If Apple had gone bust, that would be all the more Windows Office customers available.

  • Re:Direct X and Driver Issues... (Score:5)

    by gavriels ( 55831 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @08:36AM (#1424696)
    The Direct3D support lives on top of OpenGL. It can actually use information about what the OpenGL/hardware combination supports to report capabilities to DirectX.

    If you're skeptical of performance, check out the 3DMark screenshots. 8-)

    Our major performance bottleneck right now is in sending geometry to the hardware. D3D has an API that lets you store geometry directly in video memory. OpenGL can do this, but only with some NVIDIA specific extensions that aren't 100% up to snuff on Linux yet. Once we get past that hurdle, we should be close to 1:1 with Windows performance.

    -Gav

  • Wishes... (Score:3)

    by JimDabell ( 42870 ) on Saturday December 30, 2000 @06:09AM (#1424701) Homepage

    It would be nice if the game developers would actually use a cross-platform engine to begin with, but I guess we can't have everything. Actually, this could help Linux become more mainstream. If the game companies see that Windows isn't the only OS out there being used to play games with, perhaps they will think more about not being an MS parasite (not a flame, if they are totally dependent on MS to survive, then they are a parasite).

    I hope they can make the Street Performer variant work well - it seems to me that people are putting a gigantic amount of effort into an ultimately doomed attempt at copy-control, and not enough into actually figuring out what to do for money when copyright has completely broken down.

  • On point 2, they did that quite effectively with OS/2 on several occasions. Win32S was the biggest offender. They must have changed that thing 30 times, and there was no way IBM was going to keep up. This generated lots of calls to the support center, which costed IBM lots of money. I'm pretty sure it was someone in IBM who coined the phrase "MS API of the Week Club."

    They also released Windows 3.1 for Workgroups almost immediately after OS/2 for Windows came out, and there was One DLL that broke the OS/2 for Windows installer. We found that replacing that DLL with a Windows 3.1 DLL solved the problem and did not seem to impact Windows operation at all.

  • OS/2 was roadkill at IBM long before Windows 95 and any Win32 programs shipped.
    IBM did not support OS/2 because they did not want to piss off Billy G. Once M$ gave up on OS/2 IBM saw the handwriting on the wall and did all they could not to piss him off so that they could continue to sell/support Windows.
    And Microchannel did contribute to OS/2's downfall (clip) This contributed to the (mostly accurate) perception that IBM was trying to introduce hardware/software lock-in and monopolize the PC industry. Which made anyone with any sense run as fast as possible from anything IBM, including OS/2.
    Actually IBM HAD a monopoly on PCs until Compaq reverse-engineered the BIOS and came out with the first clones. Once the rest of the industry started building clones, there was no reason to buy proprietary hardware.

    Also, you seem to forget that big corporations LOVE IBM. Here at work we have an IBM mainframe with the accompanying DASDs, gateways and tape backups. That plus IBM printers, and quite a few AIX boxes. So your assertion that people stay away from IBM hardware is patently false.
    Of course, since you only stumbled on this whole thing with "Warp", it's all prehistory to you, and you have absolutely no clue of the bungles and bullshit surrounding OS/2 for first 7 years of it's history.
    Hmmm... I was working in IT (at a Mac shop) and I read quite a lot of computer magazines. Contrary to what you think, I was fully aware of what was going on at IBM re: OS/2. As someone who saw the Stac Electronics debacle and actually experienced firsthand the bogus error message when I ran Windows 3.1 on DR-DOS 5 & 6, I was fully aware of what MicroShaft was capable of, and I knowingly CHOSE to support FREEDOM OF CHOICE, which is why I bought OS/2 then and use Linux today.
    ("Warp" was a pathetic last-ditch attempt to improve OS/2's balance book by taking home user sucker money, BTW. OS/2 was already dead and buried in it's core corporate markets. IBM planned to screw you all along.)
    IBM did not screw me, Bill Gates did. If he had licensed Win32 to IBM I would be running Win32 apps on OS/2 version 5 or 6 right now. I happily got by with OS/2 and Win 3.1 until it got to the point where most of the Windows apps were 32 bit, so I eventually had to shell out another $100 to Bill G. for Win 98 (had I not skipped Win 95 I would have had to pay him TWICE for the privilege of running Win32 apps).

    How could you say that I got screwed by IBM if my $90 US got me the best OS and GUI I have ever used bar none? 32-bit multitasking OS/2 was technically head and shoulders above Windows (a 16-bit GUI on top of 8-bit singletasking DOS) that was being sold by Microsoft at that time.

    When I got the red spine OS/2 it came with a TCP/IP stack and internet tools. That was when you had to pay someone for an aftermarket TCP/IP stack (remember Chameleon?) just to get Winblows connected to the net, something that OS/2 did out of the box! Unlike Windows, OS/2 gave me my money's worth...

    P.S Have you ever heard of civil conversation? I guess not with your charges of "crack smoker" and "clueless". Maybe if you pull those Petrophile pulchella Conesticks out of your ass you will stop acting like an dickhead!!!
    --
    You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
  • ...by Windows coders. Libraries like SDL and Crystal Space provide quality cross-platform solutions, but the folks who learned from "Learn Game Programming in 21 Days with DirectX 7" or somesuch don't know or care. Thus, WINE's support for DirectX is important -- while not diminishing the importance of the cross-platform libraries Done Right.

    And btw, WINE's DirectX support already works great with most older games -- it's the newer ones these folks are working on. It sounds like they'll be doing a great job; in any event, don't underestimate the importance of games. Believe it or not, there's a very large number of folks out there who spend more time in them than actual office apps.

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