wine/cedega

Otacon · 30 Apr 2006 at 20:02

Having never used Linux as a Desktop OS, the need to play games has never come up, and I've never really investigated it. However, I'm now running Gentoo on my main rig at home, and would like to do some *occasional* gaming, so I best put my finger in the pie

Looking at win32 emulation, the obvious (it appears anyway) choice would be to go with cedega (lots of success stories with Steam et al). My question is though, by going with cedega over 'vanilla' Wine - am I losing any functionality?

Cheers guys

cb_linus · 30 Apr 2006 at 20:18

I would go with Wine first - it's free and there's a decent guide for getting Steam working (can't verify it works as I haven't tried it for a few months).

Cedega is more focused on gaming so I guess you are less likely to get non-game Windows apps working (or at least officialy supported).

My experience with using a 64bit Gentoo machine is that the pre-compiled 32bit Cedega binary works a lot better than compiling Wine from source and trying to get a 32bit Windows app. working in Wine. Personally, I would run Wine first and see how much mileage you get and maybe consider running both and get the best from each if necessary, especially as Cedega officially supports some games

Otacon · 30 Apr 2006 at 20:19

As a 64bit Gentoo user, I appreciate your opinion

cb_linus · 30 Apr 2006 at 20:34

Actually, I did have Half-Life 2 installed a few months back on Cedega (more or less at release date). Performance was almost identical to when I was running it in Windows (on the same machine) with the draw back that on Linux the water didn't seem as shiney as on Windows - I don't think DX9 emulation was as advanced as it is now, I guess.

Some issues that seem to be 64bit related where that after installing the game I was able to play for as long as I wanted but, after a Steam update, it tended not to want to start again (back-up your save games). I took some screenshots at the time, here's a Half-Life 2 on 64bit Gentoo with Cedega gallery on my unfinshed website

You can see there's the odd graphical glitch (featurless faces on some characters) but those seemed limited solely to the first level and didn't seem to get reported on Transgaming's forum (so quite rare?).

riven · 30 Apr 2006 at 20:51

I've played a few of my older games in cedega. It's pretty nice, but I will still always use windows for newer titles because I think I am right in saying that cedega doesn't have AA support.