Wine is a rather heated topic at the best of times, but I think we can all agree what the Wine developers have been able to achieve is nothing short of extraordinary. Wine enabled me to re-live an experience I had with a game as a child, and I felt the need to share it.
I'm never one to advocate the use of Wine really, in fact, in the past I have been rather against it. My tune changed and cooled down a lot during the years I've been running GOL, as it really is such an awesome bit of software I don't think anyone should turn their nose up at it.
I should state for the record that I don't particularly think it's a great idea to use it for new games, since there's always a chance they could come to Linux natively, but when it comes down to either using Windows, or using Wine on Linux. The answer should be obvious really, Wine it is. Not everyone is willing to give up certain Windows games they love, and I don't think we should speak out against anyone who does. It brings them a step closer to being a fully-native Linux gamer, so that's awesome really isn't it? A Windows user coming to Linux, using Wine and possibly buying future native Linux games further growing us as a platform can only be a great thing.
Anyway, When I was younger, I got absolutely hooked on a game called "Dark Reign: The Future of War" [GOG]. From what I remember, my dad purchased it for me after I discovered it while I was scanning the shelves in a local PC World store, and I was instantly hooked. It was the type of game where it could easily turn from morning to night without me noticing. It's not the best of games by today's standards, back then it wasn't exactly a well known title either or groundbreaking in the strategy genre, but it enthralled the younger me.
I ended up thinking about it last night for some strange reason, went looking and picked up a copy on GOG and it works near-perfectly in Wine's latest version (tested in 1.9.22). The GOG installer threw up some random errors at the end of the install, but they can be ignored. Only one issue in-game that I could see was that water had some weird flicker on it, but I could easily ignore it for a beautiful bit of nostalgia on Linux.
Dark Reign was one of my first-loves when it came to strategy games, it helped me through some rather difficult times in my childhood. Two hours had vanished before I knew what happened last night, and it's such a pleasure to be able to re-live memories of it on Linux without needing Windows at all.
One issue I would like to figure out, is why some fullscreen games break when I alt+tab. They become completely unresponsive after this is done forcing them to be stopped.
Kudos to the Wine development team for their amazing effort.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I was actually thinking along those lines, a lot of people are claiming Vulkan and DX12 are closer, so with them already working on Vulkan, DX12 might not be so difficult to sort out.I bet what he meant is that the D3D 12 API has a very similar, in large parts almost identical design to Vulkan. D3D 11 and OpenGL are quite different. Thus it is reasonable to assume that translating D3D 12 to Vulkan might be much more straightforward than emulating the previous versions of DX with OpenGL.Well the thing is, with DX12, aren't things supposed to be simpler? So it won't take something like Wine as long?
Simpler?
Sorry if that's not what you meant, Liam.
Wine is an amazing piece of software which should be loved by everyone
Partially it's thanks to it that I'm now a full time Linux user as there are some games (Guild Wars 2 being one of them) which I wouldn't do without.
I only reserve Wine for old Windows games of which are most likely never going to get ported over (and occasionally Free2Play MMOs), It's nice be able to re-play a favorite old game of mine without needing Windows for it.
That said I don't intend to buy any new Windows games regardless of how good they run in Wine, I believe there are enough cross platform tools to make a Linux release happen these days.
I have found some games listed on Wine-AppDB to be outdated and do not reflect how the game runs in Wine today.
For example BloodRayne has a Silver/Garbage rating, however after a full playthrough last week I'd easily give it a Gold/Platinum rating.
Thanks to wine devs, now is possible play on linux many old titles
In my case most windows game played works in linux using wine (in my case more play old games and emulators than newer games)
Respect wine appdb in various entries stay oudated but is very simple* add your results for help wine
*need register in wine appdb and send your results, most part of this process are simple
only need add: type of game license aka: steam, gog, gamergate, retail or other, what works, what dont works, what dont tested, which wine are used in test, select distribution used, if game is correctly installed
However wine devs dont support playonlinux or any wine patched version but staged is supported
In my case sometimes put some results
Another important step if want help is report problems bugs** in your used apps
**for send bugs is needed stay register in wine bugzilla
wine appdb register is different to wine bugzilla register
^_^
Crystal Dagger Nov 7, 2016
Wine + PlayOnLinux rules!
Last edited by Crystal Dagger on 7 November 2016 at 10:29 pm UTC
It was very ordinary indeed, but yes I still have fond memories of it.
Dark reign 2 was a whole lot better. :)
It's also rage-enducing having people patronise you with "just patch it yourself!". If I ever meet someone who says that to me in person they're going to get sent to hospital.
It's even more frustrating on the Application side of things where apps like Caligari trueSpace work fully on ReactOS but still have rendering issues in WINE. WINE's great, but it's no replacement for native ports.
I'm glad your game works for you, WINE supports a lot of programs and is a great project. I wish it was better than it is.
Last edited by DMJC on 8 November 2016 at 12:29 am UTC
Thanks for the blast from the past.
TheRiddick Nov 8, 2016
When I do the survey that sometimes pops up when in Steam under Wine it does say the system platform is WINE but I don't know how that data is factored in the statistics at the end of the month, it should be counted as Linux sale/use but we know Valve isn't too kind to Linux when it comes to stats, unfortunately.
Still waiting for DX11 under Wine, and Vulkan support. That would be amazing, we've been stuck at DX9 forever....
boltronics Nov 8, 2016
As of late, I've been playing a game I really wanted to play back in the day but never got to. Dune 2000. I've almost finished the campaign for all three houses under Wine with the High Resolution patch (still doing Harkonnen, just started level 8 of 9). I also just found out about Emperor: Battle for Dune the other day too, so that's something else I've picked up on Ebay (it has a Gold score on the Wine appdb page).
Really stoked I got Dune 2000 brand new too - an amazing find for such an old game. Still in the shrink wrap with the original cardboard box, huge manual, etc. Quite nostalgic.
Last edited by boltronics on 8 November 2016 at 2:17 pm UTC
buenaventura Nov 8, 2016
I am SUPER tempted to buy Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines from GOG now (sale!), I played it way back and it is SUCH AWESOME! I wonder if I have the DVD somewhere... It apparently can work well with WINE. I love WINE. I don't drink though :P
Last edited by buenaventura on 8 November 2016 at 8:59 am UTC
Without Wine I'd have missed the incredible amount of fun playing Dead Island. Slicing zombies into pieces is highly underrated.
Without Wine I'd have been unable to complete BioShock 2 and many other games I've bought before I left the gruesome world of Microsoft Windows.
Last edited by crt0mega on 8 November 2016 at 12:45 pm UTC
boltronics Nov 8, 2016
I bought Dead Island some time ago and its native "port" runs like arse.
Dead Island and Dead Island Riptide are two games I purchased at launch (have the retail boxes on the shelf), and played entirely under Wine. I actually took a chance with Riptide and pre-ordered to get a bonus Turtle Beach headset, and it paid off - worked with Wine on launch without issue. Of course, that was back in the d3d9 days.
Since I had already completed the game, I never looked at the native GNU/Linux port that came out (years?) later. Good to know I didn't miss anything.
Dead Island RiptideYeah, I've bought that one, too. Good to know it also works fine with Wine :)
oldrocker99 Nov 9, 2016
Steam for Windows client, and I play a few games I had bought when I was dual-booting. Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3 run quite well, and I was happily playing Warhammer 40K:Age of War ;) until Feral released it for Linux. Can't afford to buy it twice, but now I'm happily playing it natively.I download from USENET, and many files there are protected by PAR files. There is a Linux PAR program, pypar2, but there are many things it doesn't do, so I have run the Windows QuickPar program with wine for years. (PAR files are kind of magic;
they'll fix broken files and even recreate missing files.)
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me