The following is an interview that was conducted over e-mail during the past week or so. Questions come from Tim Mullins & Jason Prince of DesktopOS.com the answers are by Vikas Gupta, TransGaming Co-CEO, President & COO, Gavriel State, Co-CEO & CTO, and Peter Hunnisett, Linux Development Team Manager. MyLinuxNews.Com is reporting that WineX has released version 4.0 of their product and changed their name to Cedega and now include support for DirectX 9 and several new games.
DesktopOS.com Interviews TransGaming Technologies
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I use WineX to play Civ III and Master of Orion II on my Linux desktop. When I stopped using Windows, I knew the one game I needed to have was Civ III, its a show stopper not being able to subjugate the planet about once a month.
Civ III is a bit slow running in WineX 3.3.x and the sound doesn’t always work as it should. Hopefully, some of the minor glitches will be resolved in this new version. I can’t wait to give it a shot.
WineX is a good start for playing games linux. But frankly, implementing a subsystem on top of another isn’t the way to go. It would be better just to port the games to linux. id has already done this.
“But frankly, implementing a subsystem on top of another isn’t the way to go. It would be better just to port the games to linux.”
technically, correct but not every game developer wants to do this considering the market of linux gamers while it leads to more people sticking with windows for games. this chicken and egg problem is resolved more by emulators now. so this is the way to go atleast for now
The interviewer did not ask any tough questions. Such as why don’t you contribute alot more code to the wine project. Or why all the C&D against popular distros (debian, gentoo).
as i understand the issue with gentoo was that it wasnt a C & D.
But a letter where they asked quite politly to stop the winex packages and they stated thier resons why they wanted it stopped. and the gentoo devs agred and stoped the winx-cvs ebuild. without any threats of going to court.
i could have misunderstod
Most likely because gentoo builds from source and as there source code was available gentoo user had no probs in getting the free wineX which they obviously didnt like.
Snake
It’s great that Transgaming has released an update that supports a greater number of games but I really don’t like the name change. Does anyone else have an issue with the new name, Cedega (formally WineX)? To me it almost sounds like the Sega game console. Well I guess if Codeweavers can rename their Wine to CrossOver Office it’s no big deal then for Transgaming to do the same. Though I wish they could of chosen a better name.
> KDE and GNOME menu systems, we’ve found that their location changes so radically between distributions, or even versions of distributions, that it hasn’t been worthwhile to worry about it – something we’ll reconsider if they start following the same standards
They *are* following the same standard, this guy doesn’t know what he talks about.
These guys are leechers. They took years of hard work from wine and now give almost nothing back. Codeweavers, on the other hand, still contributes all relevant code to the wine tree.
If you really need to play games, get a PS2.
As much as i like OSS and GPL, Transgaming is simply following the licenses that were in place at the time. X11/BSD as far as i remember. Its understandable they want to protect their code for now, because if it was GPL’ed, would people pay? I dont honestly think the same amount of people would. I paid for my subscription, and i too, would love their code to be GPL so the original wine project could benefit from it, and i would be able to just “emerge -u winex && emerge -u point2play” whenever they updated it. But for now, i will support a company that is doing an effort to bridge windows games to linux untill the market for linux games grows, and we will se more frequent ports of games to linux like ID games does.
On the other hand we have the chicken and egg problem, developers and publishers dont even know about a linux market if we only have “emulators/compatibility layers” – maybe is Transgaming published the amount of downloads of winex CVS and subscribers each month this would be more visible, and maybe they could change their businessmodel a bit, and go into “consulting”, you know, helping people port the games with their technology – and finally free WineX, this way their technology gets maintained by OSS developers and themselves, which will help them in their new porting business. It might work
.
>The interviewer did not ask any tough questions. Such as why don’t you contribute alot more code to the wine project.
They contribute plenty of code back.
>Or why all the C&D against popular distros (debian, gentoo).
*All* C&D? there haven’t been *any* C&Ds, none. You’re badly missinformed.
>They took years of hard work from wine and now give almost nothing back.
Completely untrue. They contributed tens of thousands of lines of code. to quote:
“major contributions or rearchitectures of: 2D DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput, DCOM, RPC, the WIDL IDL compiler, and wininet code, including SSL support. Additionally, we continue to maintain the X11 licensed ReWind tree, we’ve contributed code for a DIB renderer, and the Shared Memory WineServer.”
Everytime I run into these guys I get a really bad taste in my mouth.
I was at a linux conference where they had a large booth displaying wineX and letting people play games. At the booth they had a big sign advertising Morrowwind, which at the time didn’t run at all in winex. I went over to the booth and asked if it was free to play games, it was, so then I asked what games I could play and they said any that are advertised, so I asked ok lemme play morrowwind, to which my response was not “Sorry we’re falsely advertising that game works when it really doesn’t” but instead some excuse about forgetting to have installed it for this conference.
The gentoo issue irked me personally, selling gpl software and attempting to make it more difficult to access the source and then complaining cause someone helped make it easier for users is just wrong.
Beyond that I also dislike how they manage their website and the lack of response from email I receive from them.
Personally I refuse to touch this software, but perhaps I just had several bad run-ins with them and other people had more positive experiences.
Am I being particularly slow, or is there no source release for this new version? Whilst I’m not someone who religiously tries to only use open source software, there is no way I would pay for WineX without being able to try it first. The last 3.x version I tried turned out to be no use to me at all above normal wine, plus it not only required me to mess around with the linker settings to make it run, but also refused to read any file off a FAT32 partition.
>Am I being particularly slow, or is there no source release for this new version?
They never release the source for the binary releases (except maybe as Slackware packages). The binaries include proprietary commercial software that they simply cannot release as source.
Would anyone be able to comment more verbosely on the technical differences between Wine proper and Cedega?
From looking around for only an hour or so, it seems to me the major differences are Cedega supports DirectX 9 and has better support for Windows Installer programs. Wine seems to have partial DirectX 8 support (minimal DirectX 9).
TransGaming’s site is awfully spartan. With all due respect to the Wine project, I would appreciate a polite, matter-of-fact page explaining the benefits of Cedega over Wine.
Cheers!