Hackszine.com: Windows Gaming in Linux

Windows Gaming in Linux

For a lot of of Linux devotees, gaming has always been the reason for keeping an extra Windows machine, so it's pretty interesting to see this barrier crumbling. Hackszine reader Michael Becker writes:

I'd love for you guys to talk some about using Linux as an alternative to Vista. Personally I'll be using Linux with Beryl to get all those nice graphical goodies OS X and Vista user have and I'll have DirectX 9c support using
Cedega.

I know several people running this setup. I can't find any game I'd be
interested in playing that won't run under Cedega and it will run
faster to boot.

I haven't used Cedega, but it appears to be a closed-source fork of the WINE project with a more developed DirectX layer. So, like WINE, your games aren't being emulated, but are running natively on the Cedega libraries. This means that DirectX 9 games will play as fast under Linux as they do in Windows. It's peculiar, but according to some benchmarks, they actually appear to run faster than under Vista!

It's a subscription based service ($5/mo), but they are supporting a huge list of games that have been tested to play on the platform. Seems interesting, and worth checking out if you can't get your favorite game running under WINE.

And do try WINE first--it's no slouch. There are a lot of great games like Half Life and Counter Strike that will play nicely. I've included a link below for installation instructions, so give it a shot if you haven't already.

Are you a Linux gamer? Are we finally reaching the point where gaming is as good or better under Linux as it is in Windows? Tell us your experiences in the comments.

More reading:

Posted by Jason Striegel | Apr 17, 2007 08:10 PM
Gaming, Linux, Linux Desktop | Permalink | Comments (2)

Comments

Newest comments listed first.

Posted by: Kr4t05 on April 21, 2007 at 7:31 PM

Cedega 6 is definitely king, right now. It was a great improvement over the 5.x series. I mainly play Guild Wars and GTA: SA on a separate Windows XP partition. But, I was finally able to delete that partition after getting Cedega 6, and free up 20GB! :)

Also, Wine plays Half-Life 2, and plenty other games...

But, I'm neglecting a slew of great FOSS games, like Nexuiz, Warsow, BZFlag, Torcs, Tremulous, gl-117, and Linux-native games, like Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstien.

$5/mo is minimal compared to $299 for Windows Vista. Granted, it's a trade off, as certain "bleeding edge" games don't shine quite as well, but it's all good.

My specs are:

Intel Celeron D 2.26GHz
1GB Patriot DDR400
GeForce 6200 256MB VRAM AGP
WD 160GB IDE/ATA
Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Modest machine, and I get far better performance from Doom 3 and Quake 4 than on Windows XP. (I couldn't even get Quake 4 to install on XP!)

It's far from "ideal," but gaming on Linux has come far, and it's a great way to save some extra bucks on a low-calorie gaming box.

With that said, I'm off to save Ascalon. ;)

Posted by: tms10000 on April 22, 2007 at 8:46 PM

Closed source forked from opensource Wine?
Subscription based?
ICK!