Cedega, Wine or Crossover for Gaming?

[Majorix]

Which software is best for running Windows games?

PS: Please don't see the prices. Only consider the performance and compatibility.

[Iarwain ben-adar]

Wine,
defenatly.

If it doesn't work, chances are that it works in half a month/a month.
Great support aswell ;)


Iarwain

[M$LOL]

Wine 4TW. IMO the other two suck (although Crossover is good, just not for gaming).

[frodon]

I played counter strike source on both cedega and wine.

With cedega no pixel bug at all and good performances on all maps but always some random crash and you need to restart the game. Also sometimes there some bug with the steam interface and you also need to restart.
With wine no crash at all and no steam interface bug but there's some pixel bug in the sky sometimes (only in the sky) and performanaces are good on standard maps but a little bit low on high texture maps.

Wine just miss few little improvements to be perfect whereas cedega remain always a bit buggy so my vote goes to wine because it's far more confortable to use and more supported than cedega.

[justin whitaker]

I play Steam titles (CS:S, HL2) and World of Warcraft: TBC via Crossover: same Wine goodness, without all the hassle. It works perfectly with these two titles...

[M$LOL]

Is this the new Crossover I haven't tried?

[justin whitaker]

Is this the new Crossover I haven't tried?

I'm using the latest version, whatever it is: 6.0 something. Pretty impressive: I ran the Steam installer, it updated fine, and downloaded CS:S and HL2 from Valve. Both worked fine for me, but my system is fairly unexotic.

World of Warcraft installed just like on Windows. I had to run the installer twice, once for WoW, once for TBC, but it updated fine, and did not have the issue with sound that I had with Cedega and Wine.

I cancelled my Cedega account as a result. Codeweavers is doing a great job!

[M$LOL]

Any other games it can run? You've got me interested now...

[justin whitaker]

Any other games it can run? You've got me interested now...

I really have not experimented all that much. I'm loading CS:S maps and HL mods now....:) Supposedly, it runs a bunch of stuff other than Steam and WoW, but I have not tried it yet.'

I'll post something in Game Arena when I have a better sense of what it can do.

[maxamillion]

Cedega is best for gaming, sorry for all those who back wine in this respect (don't get me wrong, i love the wine project) but Transgaming takes a wine snapshot and then pays developers to further make sure it can support popular microsoft centric games, I just honestly don't understand how someone can claim that the project Cedega uses as a starting point for development is better then their final product.

CrossOver is best for all around applications, if you need something to run your photoshop and CS:S then this is the software suite for you. CrossOver also uses wine as a starting point and (to the best of my knowledge) throws money at the community wine project and might even host the servers for the collaboration of the project (somewhat like what Sun does for OpenOffice). CrossOver also adds many features that companies would be able to benefit from is attempting to migrate away from a windows based environment without "Bob from accounting" freaking out that all his software just disappeared.

wine for all around application API for windows applications for those who would prefer a more actively updated software package, something that is entirely open source and "free" in all senses of the word .... I would be willing to agree that "if it doesn't work, it will soon" because of how active the community is working on the project and how often they release updates when compared to wine's corporately backed counter parts but to answer the thread topic at hand, I truly believe Cedega will give you better performance in respect to games since that is their target market.


.... that is my opinion, take it for what it is (and I whole heartedly would be curious to see benchmarks done on this topic)

p.s.- I would actually like to be proved wrong and see wine come out on top, but I just don't think that's the case

[frodon]

I guess you never really compared both cedega and wine for the same game (i was thinking like you before), i play counter strike and have both wine and cedega and wine just works better, i know the theory of cedega but the fact is that wine works better without any crash whereas i get only system crash with cedega for the general same performances.
I guess it depends of the game but the latest version of wine have really good performances and i see things changing especially for cedega because wine will be soon at least as better than cedega on the performance level, the user friendlyness is another thing however.

[maxamillion]

I guess you never really compared both cedega and wine for the same game (i was thinking like you before), i play counter strike and have both wine and cedega and wine just works better, i know the theory of cedega but the fact is that wine works better without any crash whereas i get only system crash with cedega for the general same performances.
I guess it depends of the game but the latest version of wine have really good performances and i see things changing especially for cedega because wine will be soon better than cedega IMO.

Do you have the latest version of Cedega with a subscription for updated incremental releases?

[frodon]

Yes, i have the latest version of cedega, i know it's crazy but i think i will just dump cedega now because i only play CS source as windows game and i have better results with wine.

[maxamillion]

Interesting ..... well, like I said ... I wanted to be proven wrong and its possible I have, but I would like to see someone run a 3d benchmark or something similar just to be sure ;)

[justin whitaker]

Cedega is best for gaming, sorry for all those who back wine in this respect (don't get me wrong, i love the wine project) but Transgaming takes a wine snapshot and then pays developers to further make sure it can support popular microsoft centric games, I just honestly don't understand how someone can claim that the project Cedega uses as a starting point for development is better then their final product.

In theory you are right, in practice....well, how can you recommend a product that requires a fairly arcane hack to run on Ubuntu?

Cedega 5.X requires bash, not Dash, and if you do not go to the forums to figure out the fix, updating Cedega hangs the software. Keep in mind that Ubuntu has been #1 on Distrowatch for well over a year...you would think they would put this in their troubleshooting guide at the very least, or better yet, actually include a patch that fixes it for Ubuntu users.

Combine that with the velocity of DirectX changes that the core WINE project is undergoing (which Codeweavers is both assisting with and benefiting from), and I would say that Cedega is now the 3rd option.

[frodon]

I think the best is to test with a game you have, i don't say wine will give you better results for all the games you have but if you are not afraid by wine you should try with some of your games and i'm sure that for few of them you will have some surprises.
You will find all the tutorial for the wine supported games here :
http://appdb.winehq.org/

[compiledkernel]

See our similar poll over on the UGA -- http://gaming.gwos.org/e107_plugins/poll/oldpolls.php?3

[blue_Sphere]

Correct me if I am wrong here.

As I understand it the reason that wine functions better then Cedega is this...


"Free riding" on the free software movement

Many in the community object to Transgaming's business practices by "making a quick buck" off the back of the Wine project, without contributing back. Transgaming obtained the source to the original Wine project when it was under the MIT License (non copyleft) and this license placed no requirements on how TransGaming published their software. TransGaming, unlike other companies with similar models, decided to release their software as proprietary software. Transgaming does release portions of the source code via CVS; however, it attaches legal restrictions which mean that it is not free software. Cedega includes licensed support for several types of CD-based copy protection (notably SecuROM and SafeDisc), the code for which TransGaming say they are under contract not to disclose.

In reaction, the Wine project changed its license to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). This means that anyone who publishes a modified version of Wine must publish the source code under an LGPL-compatible (and therefore free software) license. TransGaming halted using code contributed to Wine when the license was changed, though this has resumed recently with TransGaming integrating certain LGPL portions of Wine into Cedega and placing those portions of the source code on their public servers.

So Codeweavers and Wine are working together while Cedega has to use the last version of wine with the MIT license. Considering the size of the Wine project, it is now far surpassing Cedega in terms of performance.

[frodon]

Yep blue_Sphere, glad to see that someone took the time to explain this story, it's true that Transgaming acted really bad with the wine project not giving back any part of the code they developped while they took the whole wine code at the time, so now i think no one will cry if cedega die because wine is beginning to be just better.

[lakersforce]

...but Transgaming takes a wine snapshot...

How would they be able to do that with GPL'ed software? I dont think Wine runs on a MIT license anymore.

[frodon]

All is explained in blue_Sphere's post, it is GPL now but it wasn't at the time when cedega forked the code, that's a part of the controversy around cedega.

[smurphs]

None of them are much good for older games, from my experience. Dosbox coupled with www.abandonia.com is the way to go (backwards!) UAE is also pretty amazing (e-uae not so) if you used to have an Amiga.

[Artificial Intelligence]

Aye, dosbox (and dosbox game launcher) and e-uae is my favorite! :KS Works 99.99999 % of what you throw at them.