Cedega 6.0

[Rob Williams]

The anticipated 6.0 version of Cedega is now upon us, and we are taking a look at what's new and notable. Updates include Shader Model 2.0 support, file optimizations and a larger games database with the additions of Oblivion and Need For Speed: Carbon. Is this the version Linux gamers everywhere have been waiting for?

You can read the full article here and discuss it here.

 

[Unregistered]

Nice article, except for the grammar issues (it's instead of its)
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/its.html

 

[misconfiguration]

Great Article

Rob,

I really enjoyed reading this article; it's quite hard to find Cedega reviews, especially with an un-biased opinion, I have ported games before, albeit this wasn't since the day's of Starcraft. I have been thinking a lot about getting a 'testing environment' I play WoW and everyone knows just how hard it is to get away from the game. With running Linux; I'm afraid of a few minor things.

1.) I Cedega normally runs from OSS as opposed to ALSA, I think I read that 6.0 is capable of converting OSS > ALSA so I can 'sound mix' a bit. I'm the type of gamer that likes to hear the sound of the game, listen to music in the backround and have my headset on for TS.

2.) I just don't want to lose any performance when it comes to frame rates/resolution; how well does Cedega handle High-Res gaming? I'm an avid Linux fan; I've used it for years I'm just afraid of losing functionality I game to get away from my real-world problems not create more .

Thanks again for the article!

 

[Rob Williams]

Unregistered,

misconfiguration, I am not aware of any converting that goes on, but I've included a screenshot of the profile editor, where it allows you to choose either or. During testing, I used ALSA and had no problems at all. I listened to music pretty much throughout all of the testing, without any issue that I recall.

As for high-res gaming, it seems to be great to me. Granted, I've only used a couple games, and plan to use more in the near future. In the case of both games that ran well (NFS: Carbon and Guild Wars), I maxed out their graphic settings and both ran just fine. NFS ran the best though, without any noticable lag. Guild Wars did lag a bit, but still ran relatively smooth. It could also have lagged due to other processes running in the background (main PC is only single core still).

I was actually impressed quite a bit by the performance, because I expected a massive performance hit as well. In the future I'd like to do some light performance comparisons, but as far as I know, there is no easy way to benchmark those two games, or WoW, under Linux.

I don't think you'll be too disappointed, especially with WoW. There are -many- WoW players who use Cedega and I've never heard much bad about it. This is where I think Cedega should offer a free trial to their program. I think it's ridiculous that they don't. They used to, but I am not sure what happened to it.

Regardless, if you are interested a lot with WoW performance specifically, you could peruse the forum and read up other experiences.

 

[misconfiguration]

Rob,

I have now registered with the forums; I appreciate your speedy response, they're always full of insight. I think you've pretty much persuaded me to go ahead with my original plans and go with the Linux setup. I've been meaning to do it for some time but I was having issues with driver support and my amd64 install of Gentoo. I'm going with x86 this time around, just to be on the safe side.

 

[Rob Williams]

Welcome to the forums

It's nice to see someone else from Indy as well (DarkSynergy and Taterworks are both from Indiana).

Do you use Windows primarily right now? If so, I'd still keep a dual-boot prospect in mind in case you find a game doesn't work that well under Linux. I have the benefit of having two PCs, and I admit I never game through Cedega/Wine since I have a Windows rig for that purpose.

I shy away from 64-Bit versions of Linux as well, although I'd like to move over in the future when Flash is actually supported natively. Right now, that's the main reason I am still on 32-Bit. The web is crippled without that support.

Some people have had problems using Cedega under Gentoo, so you might want to bookmark their forums incase you run into any problems. I didn't look into them, because I had a pretty seamless experience under my install.

 

[misconfiguration]

Ubuntu

Well; I went home yesterday and removed my u320 SCSI drive from my machine and proceeded to slap in a 250GB sATA drive that I haven't used since I bought it a year ago. After installing my new HDD I proceeded with my fresh install of, you guessed it.. UBUNTU!

I've always been an avid Slackware/BSD and Gentoo user, I have heard a lot about Ubuntu's quick installation and ease of use so I say why not; let's forget the other distro's for now and give it a try.

The installation was by far simple as it can get, boot into a live CD > click on an icon that say's install, I know the server version has an instant LAMP server icon as well. After the install I finally booted into my brand new Ubuntu box.

I ran into a lot of issues, the device manager had found ALL of my drivers, I was pretty astonished, but I was having a hell of a time getting the Nvidia drivers install for my 7900 GTO, I couldn't exit the X server no matter which init I tried or even crashing the X server would bring it right back up again.

I decided to install from the repositories and use apt to update my xorg.conf file as well, I got my ALSA working fine, with surround sound support, drivers install with my widescreen res going. I have not installed Cedega, I didn't get started on my Ubuntu install until a little later last night.

I have subscribed with Transgaming; I'm running into some issues; I've already paid for the service albeit I'm not able to set a passwd, nor did I get an email stating I had a generic one for a first-time login. I requested a new password still no luck =/. I submitted a help ticket with them; I'm sure they'll get to me promptly.

I got Teamspeak working as well, albeit my USB headset it's setup correctly yet, so I've got to figure that one out, then it's onto the Cedega install tonight! (hopefully).

 

[Rob Williams]

Alright, -1 point for you, since you moved from a great distro to a sub par one.

"I couldn't exit the X server no matter which init I tried or even crashing the X server would bring it right back up again."

Did you kill all the processes related to it? I find it odd that you couldn't simply close X through GDM/KDM/WhateverDM Ubuntu uses.

I am a few days late replying to this, but hopefully you have Cedega set up now. I am not sure how their customer service is, but it shouldn't be too bad. Let me know how you make out.

 

[misconfiguration]

Rob,

You shouldn't take points from me :'(. I read a lot of things with Cedega and Gentoo, don't get me wrong Gentoo is one of my fav distro's second to only Slackware. I wanted to try something new, + most of the issues with Gentoo are decently simple to solve but like I said, something new . I have posted a blog of my journey with Cedega; if you're interested see it here;
http://misconfig.blogspot.com/2007/04/cedega-mini-review.html

I'm not a journalist so unregistered please don't be a grammar nazi, I hope you enjoy it everyone.

 

[Rob Williams]

Hah, I was kidding about taking points away. I completely understand why people move away from Gentoo. I've run into a few problems that have almost made me take that direction, but I enjoy Portage too much.

Good to hear your experience with WoW was good (despite the tweaks you had to perform). I do believe a few games require you to push the engine back to 5.2, though I never thought to give it a try during my own testing. I still look forward to a day when it's more reliable, but at least you can play WoW without much issue ;-)

 

[Darragh]

wine references

You have a couple of references to wine in your article that might cause readers to think that cedega is based on wine.

"If it uses Wine to perform the emulation, then why not just use it instead?"

"Wine has the capability to install MSI files (wine msiexec.exe /i SteamInstaller.exe) so I am not sure why Cedega doesn't have that built-in support."

I think that it would be better if you pointed out that back in 2002 transgaming forked from wine a project called winex, which later turned into cedega. Since then they have continued independently with development focusing on different areas. So users should not assume that just because something works in one it should work in the other. I think it also highlights that in reality that while both projects seek to implement a win api layer for linux, they are quite different projects after 5 years of separate development with little to no sharing of code.


In this case with cedega you need to install instmsi.exe with the os set to windows 98, and then you can install the msi. Most games however don't need you to do this, so I don't think that transgaming have worried about needing to write a native implementation to handle msi installs.

With wine the developers worked on a native implementation because windows installer is integrated by default with Windows XP, and is also used by so many application installers, they didn't want user's to need to install this software in so many cases.

 

[Rob Williams]

You make good points. I know at one time Cedega did rely heavily on the Wine fork, but I didn't know anything changed. It's hard to find reliable information on this. I'll add an addendum with your comments, since you explain it well.