Cedega versus regular Wine

[Dapper Dan]

I've been trying to get Steam going on Crux 2.3 for days now with no success. Every time I try to run it, it hangs at "Connecting Steam Account (username)." I've tried just about every single fix I found on the net and nothing helps.

I just had the idea tonight to try regular Wine and see what happens. I got all the way throught the install and updating process and now Steam is happily downloading Team Fortress! It was a snap to get through the Steam install with regular Wine when Cedega wouldn't do the job.

I have two observations based on this experience:

(1) Wine has vastly improved over the years and seems to just get better all the time by leaps and bounds.

(2) Since regular Wine is obviously now running so many games so well, does Cedega now have any real advantages over regular Wine like it once did a few short years ago?

[Themer]

I use Cedega and have found it superior (when gaming is in quesiton) in every way possible -it runs Battlefield 1942 at full speed and graphics with no snags, and even games like RalliSport Challenge (from microsoft) work just fine!!

Strangely enough, when it comes to photoshop and Flash, Wine still runs these while Cedega does not. But if your a gamer and that's your question here there's no competition, Cedega does games!!

[techieMoe]

(2) Since regular Wine is obviously now running so many games so well, does Cedega now have any real advantages over regular Wine like it once did a few short years ago?

Yes, Cedega still has officially-licensed decryption, which means you can run games that use copy protection with it. There may be unofficial workarounds in WINE for this, but since it requires licensing to be "legal," I doubt WINE will ever fully support it.

[Dapper Dan]

Since I last posted here, I've devoted a lot of time trying to get Steam working under regular Wine. Everything works perfectly until I get to the actual TF or HL splash screen. It's there for four seconds and then goes away. I've googled every error and nothing works. No one else has come up with a solution for the same trouble. It has to do with not being able to revert from depth 24 to 16. My other very old standby, "Trespasser" runs fine under regular Wine. Actually perfectly all except the fonts look like Martian. Very distracting.

I finally gave up and re-uped my Cedega account and got the latest version. Steam runs far worse in Cedega than under regular Wine. The login takes forever, and when I try running games, the screen just goes blank necessitating a Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. I've found no solution that works. Trespasser won't even install. I keep getting errors (that I NEVER got with Cedega or Wine before), that there is "not enough memory" to install the game.

All this is very disappointing. In years past, both ran well for me under Cedega. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd now rate Cedega a 0 and regular Wine a 1 on these particular programs.

[oz]

Hey, Dan - I'm just curious having never subscribed to Cedega... do they give you a refund if you should find that it does not perform as you expected?

[Themer]

Since I last posted here, I've devoted a lot of time trying to get Steam working under regular Wine. Everything works perfectly until I get to the actual TF or HL splash screen. It's there for four seconds and then goes away.

My guess, and I've never used steam, but my guess is that it's OK running just steam, but then when it goers to launch the game (3D), it chokes and closes.

Cedega has support for steam and "source games" - I'm running 6.0 and I haven't specifically tried steam but it has support for it, and battlefield 1942 works fine, so I don't see why there would be a problem -how much memory do you have?

[bigtomrodney]

I was a paying subscriber to Cedega, and while there are some aspects that appear easier to deal with than Wine - the UI for instance - I found that ultimately Wine did the job better. The Cedega interface looks good but didn't always do what I expected. I cancelled my subscription and decided I'd rather spend less time getting things working and just playing Tremulous or Enemy Territory natively.

[Dapper Dan]

-how much memory do you have?

Cedega finds it at 1007 MB. Also, Celeron 3.06 with a Gforce 7300 - 512 mb.

[Themer]

That should be fine - the card is not top of the line , and neither are Celerons, but still it shouldn't be a problem -my card (7600 GT) has only 256Mb...)

[i92guboj]

I use Cedega and have found it superior (when gaming is in quesiton) in every way possible -it runs Battlefield 1942 at full speed and graphics with no snags, and even games like RalliSport Challenge (from microsoft) work just fine!!

Strangely enough, when it comes to photoshop and Flash, Wine still runs these while Cedega does not. But if your a gamer and that's your question here there's no competition, Cedega does games!!

I wouldn't go that fast.

Cedega is not superior in any regard to wine nowadays. It is lagging much much behind. Right now, the support of directx in wine is better. That alone, automatically means that it has better support for games.

And this is not really the important thing. The important thing is that this difference is growing with each release. And when I say "release" I mean "wine release", since the transgaming guys don't seem to be capable to keep a good release rythm.

As I always say: cedega is a project that aims to run ok a couple of games, the most voted ones on their web. While wine, actually cares about achieving full compatibility, in which regards user programs API (including games).

There's some interesting info here, but if you google you'll find more stuff (look at the date when searching ):
Wine HQ - WWN Issue #329

Yes, Cedega still has officially-licensed decryption, which means you can run games that use copy protection with it. There may be unofficial workarounds in WINE for this, but since it requires licensing to be "legal," I doubt WINE will ever fully support it.

This really depends on the country you live in. I know also that there's some work ongoing on wine to support this. But I really don't care about this. In my country, to make copies for backup or personal use purposes is legal. As it should be on every country over the world.

I just refuse to buy disks with anticopy, since it harms my right to make private copies and backups. We already pay a royalty for digital media to be able to make those copies. Having anticopy while you pay to make copies for personal use would be a *bit* stupid. With the law over my hands, I have the right to return a disk to the seller, if I find an anticopy protection on it once I start using it.