Being uterly bored today, I decided to try WineX to run a few games on my home Fedora Linux Core 2 workstation. WineX is a commercial version ($5 USD) of Wine project produced by Transgaming Technologies. WineX is mostly Wine, plus a few goodies, like better support for DirectX.
It seems that Transgaming Technologies website is partially closed for renovation. Including the part of the store where you can buy WineX. So, I searched the web and found a stripped down version of WineX which works on Fedora Linux and a couple of other distributions. It comes in RPM format, so all the installation and configuration thingy is pretty much minimized.
When I tried to run this and that executable I started to get all sorts of debug and error messages. Brief search on Google also provided me with an answer, which, pretty often, was to go to DLL-Files.com website and download this or that file.
Most of the games I tried ran the installation just fine. Everything was installing pretty nice, but I didn’t succeed in actually playing any game except for Sierra’s Half Life. It was getting stuck every other time after accessing main menu, but when it was working – it was perfect. Age of Empires II, Sims, Singles, Colin McRae, Midtown Madness, and a couple of others – all refused to work, reporting problems about unhandled exceptions.
It seems that some people do succeed in playing some of the games I failed, but I am certainly not alone. Overall, I think that the progress is very noticable. Last time I tried Wine/WineX I could only install Counter Strike at best. I have no idea if the commercial versino of WineX is any better, but judging from the impressive list of supported games it must be.
I will try it again later and probably will pay my $5 USD. These guys are doing a great job and they need all the support they can get. Meanwhile, I am back to Quake III Arena and a whole bunch of Linux games.
I tried WineX as well and I managed to sun Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Sims on it. The only thing that kills is that you have to browse the whole Internet in order to find out how to solve this or that problem with playing one game :(
So I also decide to come back to WineX some later on, while hoping that more and more people will move on Linux and defenetly will try playing games on it :)
[1] When solving problems like this, try to make notes along the way and post them in the blog. It will be helpful for others and they will not have to browse through all the web anymore.
[2] The time I was doing it I didn’t have my blog running (unfortunately)