Best Emulator for Windows based Games

[jeffreyvergara.NET]

Which do you think will be the best emulator for windows based games in Ubuntu Linux? WINE, Cedega/Point2Play, or Crossover Office?

[jyank]

cedega by far

[Unit #134679]

cedega by far

Cedega is by far the best. I havent tried Loki, it looks like its good though

[cfa]

cedega most compatible as i know

[krak]

windows is the best emulator for windows based games](*,) :-({|=

[Artificial Intelligence]

Not to be picky but none of the above options are Emulators. W.I.N.E. = Wine Is Not an Emulator

Some people mean by that that Wine must emulate each processor instruction of the Windows application. This is plain wrong. As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator": Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor. It will thus not be as slow as Wabi which, since it is not running on a x86 Intel processor, also has to emulate the processor. Windows applications that do not make system calls will run just as fast as on Windows (no more no less).

Both goes to Cedega xover office.

But other than that little detail ;) I choose Cedega

[Unit #134679]

Not to be picky but none of the above options are Emulators. W.I.N.E. = Wine Is Not an Emulator



Both goes to Cedega xover office.

But other than that little detail ;) I choose Cedega

Haha, good pick. By the way, how exactly did customize your desktop like in your screenshots? They are very nice

[nicomazi]

hi...i got some educational cd-roms. would any of these emulators will be able to playback them? or it's puurly for games?
thnx

[Unit #134679]

hi...i got some educational cd-roms. would any of these emulators will be able to playback them? or it's puurly for games?
thnx

It might work...I have no idea though

[Ensnared]

Cedega, hands down. I didn't even think Crossover was very suited for games at all.

And if you look up the definition for an emulator, you'll see that WINE most definitely is one ;) it's just emulates in a different way than what emulators traditionally do (it's a software emulator, not a hardware emulator), which is probably the reason why it got that name (that, and recursive acronyms being sort of cool :mrgreen:).

[Daniel Rehm]

The only game I have any real urge to play these days is World of Warcraft so I don't know that my opinion really counts for much, but Cedega handles WoW very well so they get my vote.

[ams]

I am new to linux. I went to the Cedega site and it looks like they want me to pay for the service. Is Cedega open source, if so where can I download it?

[peterbrowne]

QEMU

sudo aptitude install qemu

then install windows on it

[jyank]

I am new to linux. I went to the Cedega site and it looks like they want me to pay for the service. Is Cedega open source, if so where can I download it?

You will either have to pay to get the download, or use the cvs version which you would have to compile from source.

Or, if you really don't want to spend the $15 (? not sure of the price) you can find it elsewhere i'm sure, considering it's just a single .deb file, but you can figure that out if you want. :rolleyes:

[Unit #134679]

You will either have to pay to get the download, or use the cvs version which you would have to compile from source.

Or, if you really don't want to spend the $15 (? not sure of the price) you can find it elsewhere i'm sure, considering it's just a single .deb file, but you can figure that out if you want. :rolleyes:

Google

[stoffe]

You may or may not like their business practices and especially their attitude towards the project that made them possible (Wine), but that is absolutely no reason to advocate piracy. Pay for the product or use something else.

[Artificial Intelligence]

I can't believe that people will considering piracy for a lousy $5 at month. Think of all the good stuff these guys at Transgaming are doing. With the money they can improve the current games which Cedega are supporting plus supporting further game release. In the end it hurt the users as well.


.:=The AI Dude=:.

[Arktis]

I can't believe that people will considering piracy for a lousy $5 at month. Think of all the good stuff these guys at Transgaming are doing. With the money they can improve the current games which Cedega are supporting plus supporting further game release. In the end it hurt the users as well.


.:=The AI Dude=:.

The more money Transgaming gets, the more ability they have to support windows games, and the less incentive developers will have to create linux ports of their software. This is the most common complaint I come accross. Solution: just use cvscedega. :smile:

[Unit #134679]

I apologize

[zootm]

Not to be picky but none of the above options are Emulators. W.I.N.E. = Wine Is Not an Emulator
It's an API (Windows) emulator, just not a processor emulator. It's still emulating, despite what they say, and it's valid to call it an emulator.

This post brought to you by Anal Retention Inc. :D

[MuRRe]

I have never compiled frm CVS. Is it like compiling when u program Java?

[zootm]

Similar. Most large projects should have something to automate the process, so long as you have the things it needs (typically a bunch of packages with "dev" in the name) to compile.

[valnar]

Does anyone know how Win4Lin works in comparison to these emulators? Surely a "real" version of Windows running under Linux is better? Or is it?

Robert

[Artificial Intelligence]

The more money Transgaming gets, the more ability they have to support windows games, and the less incentive developers will have to create linux ports of their software. This is the most common complaint I come accross. Solution: just use cvscedega. :smile:


That's only hold half of the truth. Alot of Linux users want to play games or their favorite games. Alot of newbies want to play their favorite game which only are availble on windows and still buy Window games, either the dual boot or use Cedega. This still counts as a Win buy games.
Another group wants to move to Linux...but they don't because they can't play their favorite games. Either their games aren't supported by Cedega/wine etc. or they won't dual boot(yes I know alot who wouldn't bother with dual booting), This still counts as a Win buy games.
These are the commen gamers.
So if the gamers stays away from Linux because they can't play their games, how would it motivates developers to make games for linux? Cvscedega is only a half solution or half the problem as it is. Cvscedega is the free version Cedega, so if transgaming are loosing money because everyone want to use cvsCedega, Transgaming have to fire people which again means that there are less developes of Cedega which again means slow developing time for Cedega and cvsCedega which also means less new games will be supported. And gamers wants to play the newest or almost new games. Therefore they won't switch to linux because they can't play their games. Which means there are no potiental for game-developers to make Linux port, because the market share is to little and those who play alot of games don't use linux.

It's a tricky one, I know...It's like an evil circle.

[Arktis]

All things aside, the real problem here is actually DirectX. It is the single worst thing that could ever happen to PC gaming, because it is massively popular due to being bundled with windows, and it is TOTALLY NOT cross platform... like, "dude".

Everyone, do the mantra! "DirectX must die, DirectX must die, DirectX must die..."

If that happens, cross platform gaming won't really be that big of a problem anymore.

[chaok]

will any of these work on amd64?

[Jonathan2007]

I am going to try CVSCedega soon. It looks interesting. Currently I am dual booting Linux and Windows but would love to get rid of Windows. Only thing holding me back is gaming. Anyone got Call of Duty 2 or FEAR running on Linux and if so which emulator?

[Circus-Killer]

I can't believe that people will considering piracy for a lousy $5 at month. Think of all the good stuff these guys at Transgaming are doing. With the money they can improve the current games which Cedega are supporting plus supporting further game release. In the end it hurt the users as well.


.:=The AI Dude=:.

please try remember this is a world-wide community, and thus, everyone is exposed to different exchange rates.

$5 (or +- R50) a month is a lot to ask from a south african, especially if a product only half works.

why would i wanna pay that much for something that will run most games, just not the games i wanna play. no no no. and also i dont like cedega tactics.

and more over, i think game developers need to start using opengl over directx. directx will be the death of gaming.

[curvedinfinity]

please try remember this is a world-wide community, and thus, everyone is exposed to different exchange rates.

$5 (or +- R50) a month is a lot to ask from a south african, especially if a product only half works.

why would i wanna pay that much for something that will run most games, just not the games i wanna play. no no no. and also i dont like cedega tactics.

and more over, i think game developers need to start using opengl over directx. directx will be the death of gaming.
Correction: DirectX will be the death of Linux gaming. Most people don't use Linux, so most people don't care. If most people knew that they didn't have to pay the semi-annual Microsoft tax of approximately $400 (Windows+Office), most people wouldn't. If most didn't, most people would use Linux, so most games would be written with OpenGL.

[Circus-Killer]

the reason why i said directx would be the death of gaming, rather than the death of linux gaming, is that AFAIK directx 10 will only be available in vista. so that leaves xp users out of luck for the newest games.

this is why i think gaming will die, even in windows. i dont see people buying vista just so they can run their new games. i honestly think that people are gonna start turning away from windows once vista is released.

basically, moral of the story, directx bad, opengl good. its just a matter of game developers catching a wake up and realising whats really going on.

[sesliu]

Cedega, ofcourse!

[Artificial Intelligence]

please try remember this is a world-wide community, and thus, everyone is exposed to different exchange rates.

$5 (or +- R50) a month is a lot to ask from a south african, especially if a product only half works.

why would i wanna pay that much for something that will run most games, just not the games i wanna play. no no no. and also i dont like cedega tactics.

and more over, i think game developers need to start using opengl over directx. directx will be the death of gaming.

If people can afford to buy games they can afford paying Cedega, period.

[BlueMystic]

what do I think? i think of the old 2-liner, "you have the border-line middle class people running pcees, you have the elite mac os x users, and you have the ****-poor *nix users."

that little quote proves to me to be the best quote and one that i've heard in the few countries i've been in.

as far as business practices? i understand you want to send money to linux people. what i don't understand is the fact that people aren't putting up any "improve WINE" that would solve all the problems. the folks at Cedega wouldn't be making a penny if people would realize that WINE runs the games at the same FPS as Cedega. With WoW on my Ubuntu 6 box I have 60-68fps in a valley (outside a city) with WINE and when I used CVScedega I got around the same, usually however in the 50's. I had an athlon64 board with 2x 1gig sticks.

[BlueMystic]

i say "HAD" because now i run a new Mac Tower. so 'tis all good. ;-)

however, i still use my ubuntu as a web-surfing computer when i'm not gaming on the mac or doing some military drafting on it.

[haxer]

Fight for our right to play games? I love truecombat elite without that game i would thing gaming in linux sucks totally. I think more and more people inside the gaming industry in maybe 10 years will do games for linux .. look at the different between this year "2006" and last year "2005" havent things inproved? :-k

[curvedinfinity]

If people can afford to buy games they can afford paying Cedega, period.
Saying that is like saying if people can afford to buy a computer they can afford to buy Windows. A computer costs $700 or more and Windows is only $100.

-- My personal feeling is that it is morally wrong to charge for a reproduction that didn't take any time, money, or physical resources to make, no matter the cost. I chose Linux for that reason, among many.

[Artificial Intelligence]

what do I think? i think of the old 2-liner, "you have the border-line middle class people running pcees, you have the elite mac os x users, and you have the ****-poor *nix users."

that little quote proves to me to be the best quote and one that i've heard in the few countries i've been in.

as far as business practices? i understand you want to send money to linux people. what i don't understand is the fact that people aren't putting up any "improve WINE" that would solve all the problems. the folks at Cedega wouldn't be making a penny if people would realize that WINE runs the games at the same FPS as Cedega. With WoW on my Ubuntu 6 box I have 60-68fps in a valley (outside a city) with WINE and when I used CVScedega I got around the same, usually however in the 50's. I had an athlon64 board with 2x 1gig sticks.

Now there's a world to diffrent between cedega and cedegaCVS (also which game it supports etc.) and that goes to wine also (both pro and cons on both sides).
The problem I see in wine is that one thing works in one version but breaks in the next continuesly. Secondly for a newbie wine is equal with alot of hassle with files command lines compared to cedega. I don't think that the avarage Joe would do that.


By the way when I ran WOW on cedega I had around 70-80 on a 2.4 gz and 1 g stick ;)

[Artificial Intelligence]

Saying that is like saying if people can afford to buy a computer they can afford to buy Windows. A computer costs $700 or more and Windows is only $100.

-- My personal feeling is that it is morally wrong to charge for a reproduction that didn't take any time, money, or physical resources to make, no matter the cost. I chose Linux for that reason, among many.

I can respect an ideology wiev people have on the case. But I loose respect for people who can afford paying for WOW monthly plus some othe MMORPG and then whine about the $5 charge of Cedega. That's hypocrisy.

[HAARP]

Even if I did use Cedega, I wouldn't pay for it.
They stole Wine, I'd steal Cedega. It's that simple.


Oh I'm so gonna get flamed now :[

[Artificial Intelligence]

FUD, HAARP. You know that. Cedega had an agreement with the wine people that to add their work back to wine. Sure the Cedega broke the promise but it's still not a steal if you read the GPL license. You can charge for GPL stuff but you have to make the source code available and the do, but they can't provide all the non-GPL in the source codes as they don't "own" them. It's here where some of the money are paying for. The rights to use some of the copy-protection etc. etc.
Not many realize that.

Other than that wine and Cedega are now two completly diffrent applications now.

[Esben Kramer]

DirectX is a way of forcing players to buy Vista. Despite thier security-measures, it will be cracked eventually, and since most gamers I know are ****-poor anyway, that's probably the way they'll go. Unless they have to get a new computer of course...

I just hope the PS3 is a success, since it uses openGL, which would make porting games a lot simpler.

[curvedinfinity]

I can respect an ideology wiev people have on the case. But I loose respect for people who can afford paying for WOW monthly plus some othe MMORPG and then whine about the $5 charge of Cedega. That's hypocrisy.
Though I believe the $15/mo is probably much more than the cost it takes to keep the WOW servers up, it does technically pay for a service, not a product, which is different from Cedega.

Cedega does not provide a product which requires more resources as the number of its users increases (that would be a service).

That being, I will never use Cedega until they drop the monthly charge, make the software free to download, and allow the option to order a CD at a small profit (which I would order).

[Artificial Intelligence]

Well the prize you pay for cedega also include services (and it's here where the diffinition on what service is and what it include) plus as I posted in the previous post above, cedega have to pay for all the non-gpl codes they have included in cedega.

I know we might not get to an agreement, but I really hope that wine gets good and I hope that people just can choose what the like to use pay or not.

[HAARP]

FUD, HAARP. You know that. Cedega had an agreement with the wine people that to add their work back to wine. Sure the Cedega broke the promise but it's still not a steal if you read the GPL license. You can charge for GPL stuff but you have to make the source code available and the do, but they can't provide all the non-GPL in the source codes as they don't "own" them. It's here where some of the money are paying for. The rights to use some of the copy-protection etc. etc.
Not many realize that.

Other than that wine and Cedega are now two completly diffrent applications now.

That's not quite true. WineX was created when Wine was still under the MIT License. It may not be exactly theft, but it wasn't a nice thing to do either. I can't stand them...

[justin whitaker]

I do not get the vitriol that is reserved for Transgaming. Seriously. They have not done anything that the licenses have not allowed them to do.

Actually, if you download Cedega, you get presented with a host of licenses: MIT, LGPL, GPL, proprietary...it's amazing that they can navigate through all that crap and release something at all.

We had a better solution, in Loki, and as I said in another thread, they could not make a go of it because people pirated the games instead of paying Loki for their work.

So rail at Transgaming all you want: they do allow you to play some Windows titles on Linux. Not every linux box, but enough to make it worthwhile. They do a good job keeping Guild Wars, EVE, World of Warcraft, and Steam up and running. Five $ per month is nothing to get away from being shackled to Windows XP to run those titles.

Just make sure you point a finger at the Linux community for letting Loki go under while you are at it.

[Drezliok]

WindowsXP is what right now? 189.99 "full copy" [thankyou amazon.com]
Warcraft is 19.99 right now with 15 bucks a month.

15*12=180 Warcraft is 180 a year, plus the 20 bucks to start. 200

400 for the first year of gaming goodness.


Ubuntu with Cedega installed with Warcraft
12months*$5 for Cedega+200 for year of WoW

260 for the first year of gaming goodness.


Ubuntu with WINE installed with Warcraft
200 for year of WoW

200 for the first year of gamming goodness.


My Winner is WINE, at this time. My computer is old, my windows is old, and WINE runs the games I want.


I will change my tune and happily pay for Cedega to play my windows games when XP is no longer supported and what ever games I want to play needs Vista.

But for now there is no point. And cvsCedega is still worth using.

Note: Second year for windows would be cheapest and you make up some of what you lost while Cedega will still charge. But sooner or later you'd still pay M$ again for a new OS.

[_simon_]

Cedega for ease of use. (I've also tried WINE and Crossover)

It's great at installing games but I've never had much luck when it comes to playing. I am seriously considering dual booting again so that I can play my games :(

[Eddie Wilson]

I've owned Cedega and Crossover. Cedega is junk and they give nothing back to linux. Crossover has run many more games than Cedega could ever think of running and Crossover does give back to linux through the wine project. Just my opinion.

[BLTicklemonster]

Fight for our right to play games? I love truecombat elite without that game i would thing gaming in linux sucks totally. I think more and more people inside the gaming industry in maybe 10 years will do games for linux .. look at the different between this year "2006" and last year "2005" havent things inproved? :-k

Hey, "ZWF0IG15IHNob3J0cw==" to you too!

[notasquirrel]

My two cents about this whole Cedega thing...

MS charges Cedega licensing fees to allow them to use DirectX libraries, unless I'm really confused about this. They should spend four hours a day developing good code, so that people don't have to buy windows, and they should do it at a personal loss? That should be their cost to eat?

Personally, I have that $5 going into a sandwich, or a nice latte (but not both, that would be $8!) and can't afford to spend it on a month of being able to play games.
[/sarcasm]

Windows costs... what, $200-ish depending what version you get? (don't feel like searching.) Assuming you were going to pay for windows, that equates to 40 months of Cedega, or 3 years and 4 months.

And, continuously working on updates for a piece of software is a service, especially given the rate that modern online games get patched. It would be a product if you got a "snapshot" with no updates, and had to pay again to get the new stuff. And both products and services cost time and money to make so it really doesn't make a difference anyway.

I used to wonder where the money came from to develop open source software... I know given a choice what to do with my Saturday, I probably wouldn't do it. Then I worked for an ISP for a year and they used the Nagios project as an integral part of their infrastructure. I realized the Nagios project is supported partly by companies who want to use it, and hire people to work on it. (At least this was the impression I got from reading through their mailing lists. Consider this unverified, but that's the impression I got.)

My point is, I can see a company wanting OpenOffice to be better, and hiring someone to put features they want into it. Or Nagios, or a lot of open source software. But, I can't see any corporate support -ever- for hiring someone to develop a linux platform for playing windows games without using windows. The only people who benefit from that development are the gamers. I also can't see the typical gamer pushing the "Donate" button, so they have to charge for their service or drop the project. I think it would be sad if they dropped the project, because I landed in this thread because I want to try installing Morrowind in Edgy tomorrow. ;) Incidentally thanks for the suggestions everyone, esp. since I was unaware Wine could play directX games.

BTW, even though the $5 is probably Cedega's only way to offset MS's fees, they have still set it up so you can get it legitimately without paying the $5, through CVS, which I think is pretty nice of them.


No intention to offend anyone, I respect all the people here. I'm really happy that so much software has found a way to be distributed for free, but there is still an economy of sorts behind free software development.


I also hope MS finds a way to backport DX10 to XP, but since Vista functions under different core parameters than XP, I can see a difficulty there. (Since Vista needs to run DirectX on top of an already 3D environment. I dunno... I could see that being tricky.) One thing I do know, is if MS does NOT backport DX10 to XP, I don't think non-DX10 users have to worry. The game industry won't adopt a platform like that until a good chunk of the market has it. Legacy Win98 support didn't start to decline until well into 2003. If DX10 is Vista only, look on the bright side - for two or three years, there will be more installed user base of linux OpenGL gamers than installed user base of DX10 gamers. And, games written in OpenGL would be more easily ported between XP, Linux, AND Vista.

Therefore MS has real market incentive to backport DX10, and if they don't it makes linux-friendly platforms more appealing than DX10, and at worst the most likely outcome is continued use of DX9. :D

[davethewave83]

Wine by far, it is free. Anyone who would pay a service fee for cedega is confused, they might as well buy a windows machine for gaming or setup a dual boot, I personally dislike dual boots as I have had issues in the past and negative experiences. it would be cheaper in the long run to just go with windows rather than a life service of cedega. I just wish Wine was more compatible with my windows drivers, I set my wine up to use windows native drivers off my copy of XP and it only caused crashes and instability.

[dfreer]

Wine by far, it is free. Anyone who would pay a service fee for cedega is confused, they might as well buy a windows machine for gaming or setup a dual boot, I personally dislike dual boots as I have had issues in the past and negative experiences. it would be cheaper in the long run to just go with windows rather than a life service of cedega. I just wish Wine was more compatible with my windows drivers, I set my wine up to use windows native drivers off my copy of XP and it only caused crashes and instability.

This thread is over two years old :(

[cristo-father]

digging is awesome :)

[Artificial Intelligence]

digging is awesome :)

So is mod power to close down necromancing :guitar: