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.