Gamers like to be able to play all their games and get right to gaming instead of messing with configurations. Even if their games were available for Linux, switching to Linux seemed like a bad choice until recently, as only a very small amount of commercial games have official Linux-support. Even though getting the not officially Linux-supported games to run by other means, it would be far from easy. Sure, for Linux there’s free games like Frozen Bubble, Tux Racer, FreeCiv etc., but the big commercial titles are rarely released for Linux.

The company TransGaming Technologies tries to fill out this need for commercial Windows-games by having created an application called Cedega, which makes it possible to play such games without official Linux-support regardless.

There’s a lot of controversy in the free-software community though. Cedega is based on an old version of Wine (a project aimed at making Windows-applications run on Linux) from when Wine it was still under the MIT License, which meant that anybody could take what they wanted from the project without contributing the changes back to the original authors. Because of this, this (fully legal) ‘theft’, the Wine-project choose to release future versions under the LGPL, which does not permit changing the code without releasing the source-code. Cedega can therefore no longer tailor newer versions of Wine to suit their needs, as the project is mostly closed-source.

Another point against Cedega is the principle that Linux shouldn’t run Windows-games in the first place, the authors should write the games for Linux.

Cedega has added many unique features not found in Wine, like compatibility with most modern copy-protections and a Games Disc Database in which profiles optimized for each of the games in the database are available, as well as a GUI for managing installed games.

Cedega costs only $5 month, but you have to sign up for at least 3 months, yet trying it out is not a budget-killer - you can always cancel your subscription.

Expectations
I expect my Windows-only games to run just as well as they would do in Windows. I expect both Cedega and the games to be easy to install.

The website
Registering is a three-step procedure, which went flawlessly. Included with the product is access to future updates and you get to vote each month in surveys on what the Cedega-developers time should be spent on.

The website (www.transgaming.com) is a little special, it looks undone. You see, when you just browse around the pages, you see a design with a white background, but if you try hit the “Login”-button (regardless if you have a login or not), you’ll get redirected to a page with a totally different design, but basically the same content and basically the same structure. Take a look at the screenshots just above to see what I mean.

Anyway, both versions of the site are easy to navigate through, so no problem, it just doesn’t seem very professional.

Requirements
I had to note that it is recommended to have a nVidia Geforce class video card. The FAQ states that it’s because the nVidia-graphics drivers are simply superior to ATI’s drivers and that even though most games will work with both cards, the ATI-cards can result in instability.

The word is that nVidia employs a lot more programmers for their Linux-driver than ATI and has done so for a longer time, which has resulted in better drivers.
Besides that, the requirements are as could be expected, like Linux Kernel 2.4 and sufficient available space for the games.

Downloading and installing
When hitting the download-link, you get to a very long license, basically just giving credit to all t he parties they ’stole’, used or purchased from and then a print of all the various licenses involved in Cedega (as Cedega contains parts from both open and closed-source projects, a multitude of licenses are involved).

I humbly accept the licenses, although I haven’t read all of them. Some parts are probably not valid in my country anyway, but I’m no lawyer, so I’ll let the legal parts rest for now.

Getting to the download-page, the first download is a “Quick Start Guide”, which more precisely states what hardware should work and extremely short guides (as in two lines per type of package-system) for how to install Cedega, is included. These guides doesn’t say how to download or give a tip about whereto, they don’t say to fire up a terminal and they don’t say how to navigate to the right directory through the terminal - they simply assume you know how to get this far on your own. Sure, some would argue, similar instructions for a for Windows-download wouldn’t have such precise instructions, but the thing is that in Windows, logging in as administrator, opening a console, cd’ing to the right directory and running a command is not necessary - you just double-click whatever you downloaded. New beginners in Linux might not know and might not even want to know how to do this. In this case, they just want to get to gaming, but now they’re forced to search the web for something like “how to install a deb”.

They also don’t mention that hardware-accelerated drivers most likely are not installed on the users system (as the hardware-accelerated drivers are closed-source for both ATI and nVidia, distributions most often install the free, but non-accelerated drivers per default). The least they could do would be to link to the proper websites with more instructions - it’s one line, maybe two.
The instructions do say though which distributions uses which package-systems, so the new users will know what of the packages to download (they have for RPM and DEB, as well as a TGZ).

That said, it installed flawlessly on my openSUSE 10.2 and it automatically created shortcuts for the application in the K-menu (I recently tried Cedega on a Ubuntu-installation running Gnome and it also flawlessly installed and created icons there).

First impression
Well, I had to accept the license once more at my first run, but ok.

I was greeted by a wizard, which in the first screen told me what the following steps would do and what I should have already done before each step. Nice. I then entered my username and password and it detected what additional components it needed to download and install (I did wonder that 1.8 MB wasn’t much, which is the size of the file I downloaded before).

Accepting the additional components, I had to accept even more licenses (three to be exact), sure.

Note, it did not ask for a root-password, meaning that all this installs in my user-account on my system, thus if I created another account now, this account would have to get all the additional files from the Internet too.

It then detected all the multimedia-hardware and did so correctly and I was then presented with some tests it would like to run, to see if my system was set up optimally. For each step, a “More information”-button provides a short description of what and why the test is relevant. I passed the tests so let the games begin!

Compatible games
Unfortunately not all games are supported yet. There’s a complete list of games known to work available though at this address:

http://transgaming.org/gamesdb/

Not much information about each game and what workarounds might be tried if something fails on this page though, which is why an unofficial wiki has been created with more complete, but user-maintained, lists and general tips have been created. Most pages in the official listing does contain links to the games listings in the unofficial wiki though, so totally unofficial it is not:

http://cedegawiki.sweetleafstudios.com/

This unofficial list has more information, but as the user-base is not very big on the wiki (I have a theory it’s because it’s simply too big a job to get to the editing-part as you have to request a login through a forum), some articles are rather outdated. In other words, if you want to try a less-popular game, using the wiki or the official game database might not be very helpful, maybe even misleading as if there is information, but it is for an older version, things are likely to have changed.

Lastly, there’s also a forum at:

http://transgaming.org/forum

Test 1: Warcraft III
I happen to have Warcraft III and as it is officially supported and has 5 out of 5 playability-stars in the official game database (five stars = “Game runs perfectly”), it would be expected to work exactly like it should and hence a good game to start with.
So, I insert the CD, hit “Install” and hit the “Detect Game Disc”-button and woila - it detects everything correctly and I’m allowed to hit the “Continue”-button. I do so.

What? Everything was going so well, and then this message, “The installer /media/Warcraft\040III/install.exe does not exist.” pops up.

Apparently, the automatic detection is a bit buggy - the \040 is not a part of the title and is some mistranslation of a space I figure, so I try again, but this time I replace \040 with a space, and hit “Continue”. It then installed perfectly.

The shortcuts which would normally be automatically created in the Start menu in Windows, has been created in the Cedega main-window automatically. To start the game, all I had to do was select the “Warcraft III”-button and hit “Play”-button (or just double-click it).

The splash-screen came up and the CD started spinning I could hear. Then the resolution changed. Perfect!
The introduction-video didn’t run very smoothly though. It ran and audio and video was in sync, but video was lagging a bit - it’s a bit sad as these videos are very pretty.

The animations in the menu were perfect though, so right on to the game, which ran just as perfect. Even at maximum resolution in heavy battle scenes was there a performance decrease as far as I can tell.

Now, what about Internet-connectivity? Warcraft III-users can play online using a service called Battle.net, which is built-in in Warcraft III. Clicking the Battle.net-button made it download the latest update, like it’s supposed to. The update too installed without any problems. Connecting to Battle.net also worked and so did playing on it.

This game definitely passed the test - it ran perfectly, except for the videos, which still ran nearly perfect though.

Test 2: Flatout 2
My favorite race-car game is by far Flatout 2. Unfortunately, it’s not officially supported by Cedega and only three people in total has rated the game (which is not many). There’s no entry for the game in the unofficial wiki. There’s a post in the forum though, which states that you post installation need to both run a NOCD-crack and copy a dll-file into the Flatout 2-directory. It should then work. This is the post:

http://transgaming.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6753

Now, I live in a country in which it is legal to bypass copy-protections if it is necessary to do so to make your product functional, so applying a cracked file to make the game run doesn’t give me any trouble sleeping.
It does not work though.

What did I learn from this? If there’s no wiki-page it’s a pretty good sign that the game is not supported yet.

Test 3: Steam
Counter-Strike is still a very popular game, even though it’s aging, as the developers has kept adding new stuff, but to run the new versions of Counter-Strike, you have to first open Steam and Steam has an interesting interface, as it’s not a normally decorated window with borders and stuff and it has built-in webbrowser, using the Internet Explorer-engine, so show all sorts of dynamic information. Steam has been officially supported for many years now and by looking at the release-notes from the older releases of Cedega, it is possible to see that in a lot of them, fixes has been made to improve Steam or the most popular of the games it serves.

Installing Steam went flawlessly. The menus does look a bit awkward and they’re not as responsible as when in Windows, but everything is definitely usable, if you just give it time to load. At first it might feel like you can’t move the windows or resize them, but if you wait a little, then they’ll obey - it’s simply because you can’t do anything at all until the windows are idle.

Anyway, starting Counter-strike: Source - it started like it should. It took a little while longer than it does in Windows, but it still started within about 30 seconds. The menus worked like they’re supposed to.

Connecting to a game also worked like it should, and guess what - the game ran perfectly.

Half-Life 2, classic Half-Life and classic Counter-Strike all worked perfectly as far as I could see, so I figure all the games built on the Half-Life and the Half-Life 2 engine should work. I also tried Darwinia, but it just crashes when I try to open it (but hey, that game has a native Linux-version anyway, so who cares). I didn’t thoroughly try out any of these games, I just stated that the core functionalities worked like they should.

Language-support
Cedega is translated into other languages by its users. The latest version is translated into Finish, French, German, Norwegian Bokmål and Spanish. Not many languages, but on the other hand, people playing games must generally know some English anyway as most games are only available in English anyway, so in this particular case I don’t consider it a problem that it isn’t translated.

Alternatives
Well, there’s the official, free Wine. The list of supported games is not as big and in general it requires a lot of manual work/hacking getting your games to work, like finding dll-files from Windows, cracking CD-protections and so on. A list of compatible applications and games, as well as comments from users, often describing what they had to do to get it working, is available here:

http://appdb.winehq.org/

Then there’s CrossOver Office. Their focus is mainly on office-applications and they have Microsoft Office up to and including 2003 actually running quite smoothly under Linux, as well as Adobe Photoshop up to and including version 7. Some games are also supported. CrossOver is also a commercial pay-only product, but on the contrary when compared to Cedega, the company behind, CodeWeavers, actually have a guy hired whose main job is to post changes in the Wine and its libraries back to the official Wine:

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/

Conclusion
Some games are very well supported, perhaps even to the extend in Windows. It is very important to note that you cannot presume games works in Cedega. If you want to make sure, then I do suggest that you look around in the Game Database, the unofficial wiki and the forum. On the other hand, it’s not that expensive ($15/3 months of access) so it’s not likely gonna ruin your budget trying it out. Officially-supported games though seem to run very well, so if your favorite games are on that list, then you’re in luck.

The engine is impressive, munching a lot of games very impressively, but the finish could be better. The GUI of the Cedega interface is in general well-done, but a bit buggy. The documentation lacks some very simple, but very important guides, aimed at the beginners. It is quite ironic, as all other parts of the application are very intuitive and easy to use (if you look past the bugs), so why not bring the installation to the same level?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.