Running windows games in linux

MonsieurEvilMonsieurEvil Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 4Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
in Off-Topic
I know people around here call me a Windows biggot (and well, they're right. It's what I do for a living, after all), so I figured I'd drop the other hammer:

<a href="http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/02q2/020531/index.html" target="_blank">How to run Windows games in DirectX on Linux workstations</a>

This is another excellent article from the awesome Toms's Hardware website (the be-all, end-all site for someone wanting to learn PC hardware). I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I can sum it up with:

1. It's possible.
2. They charge you $5 a month.
3. It's about 1/2 as fast as running the game natively in Windows.
4. That's still probably fast enough for a lot of people.
5. You have to have a pretty good PC, and nVidia hardware.

A very interesting read. Get up in that, penguin heads!
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Comments

  • DruBoDruBo Back In Beige Join Date: 2002-02-06 Member: 172Members, NS1 Playtester
    I posted this, like, 5 months ago.

    NS on my linux box? w00t.
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  • MonsieurEvilMonsieurEvil Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 4Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
    You did? I did a quick search to make sure I was not duplicating someone's post and never saw anything like that before I started this thread...

    Prove it! <!--emo&:p--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':p'><!--endemo-->
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  • Hand_Me_The_Gun_And_Ask_Me_AgainHand_Me_The_Gun_And_Ask_Me_Again Join Date: 2002-02-07 Member: 178Members
    I haven't tried WineX, but I did have a play with the free <a href="http://www.winehq.com/" target="_blank">Wine</a>.

    Half-Life worked surprisingly well, in both software rendering and OpenGL. I've only got a humble Matrox G400, but I still got framerates of 40-50fps at 1024x768, which isn't far off what I get in Windows 98. There were occasional glitches with OpenGL, and the switching-to-fullscreen didn't work, but everything else worked fine, including the sound.

    Unfortunately, trying to run NSTR2 resulted in some impressively scary error messages. I've no idea if it was anything serious, or if it's been fixed in a more recent Wine release (I was using the one distributed with Red Hat 7.3), but anyone considering switching entirely to Linux should keep that Windows partition handy. <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->

    Other stuff I tried? Wally works almost flawlessly, and has proved really useful, but Hammer broke in a similar manner to NSTR2, with a Big Scary Debugging Console Of Death.

    So, overall it was promising, but I'll still be keeping Windows for the forseeable future, if only for a couple of things.
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  • DOOManiacDOOManiac Worst. Critic. Ever. Join Date: 2002-04-17 Member: 462Members, NS1 Playtester
    if wine ever gets perfect (and i mean PERFECT) i'll move over to linux. till that day, /me pets warcraft 3

    still interesting read though :)
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  • DruBoDruBo Back In Beige Join Date: 2002-02-06 Member: 172Members, NS1 Playtester
    <!--QuoteBegin--MonsieurEvil+July 22 2002,16:40--></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td><b>Quote</b> (MonsieurEvil @ July 22 2002,16:40)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE"><!--QuoteEBegin-->You did? I did a quick search to make sure I was not duplicating someone's post and never saw anything like that before I started this thread...

    Prove it! <!--emo&:p--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':p'><!--endemo--><!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span id='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
    It was in someone else's thread, about how linux was better than windows, no, windows was better than linux, no, linux was better than windows, et cetera. I think it eventually got locked. It's probably expired by now.

    But when I posted it, I remember a certain rat-eating former marine basically going "pshaw, not worth it" at my post.
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  • MonsieurEvilMonsieurEvil Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 4Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
    /me searches again, and finds something from May.

    Yep, you were in the middle of a <a href="http://www.natural-selection.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=10;t=2249;st=10" target="_blank">3-page thread</a>. No wonder I missed it. I do not appear to be saying pshaw or anything though.

    Oh well, I will just delete this thread then and let people dig it up themselves.

    <!--emo&;)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=';)'><!--endemo-->



    <!--EDIT|MonsieurEvil|July 23 2002,15:56-->
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  • Sgt_XSgt_X Join Date: 2002-03-01 Member: 261Members
    U know the funny thing is i've read that thread and it was before I checked the boards often, oh yea i found looking for threads MonsE started. U can find some realy interesting stuff doing that.
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  • LegionnairedLegionnaired Join Date: 2002-04-30 Member: 552Members, Constellation
    Thanks for posting this MonsE, i've been looking for ways to flee from satan..er...um... Microsoft.

    I just need something to be able to play any game on, and not sac performace...
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