A Look At WineX

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

Gaming is still an area where Windows is, so to speak, way ahead of the game. Since Loki Entertainment Software went under, Linux gamers have had little hope of seeing a wide selection of popular games for Linux. However, the folks at TransGaming are trying to bridge the gap with WineX. TransGaming recently released version 3.0 of WineX, a product that's designed to allow Linux users to run Windows games on Linux. I took it for a spin recently to see just how well the product worked, and whether WineX is the answer to gaming on Linux. The answer, as it turns out, is "maybe."

WineX is not compatible with all Windows games on the market. In fact, TransGaming supports only a small subset of Widnows games. You can find a full list of supported games on TransGaming's site along with ratings for games that have been tested by TransGaming or submitted by their users.

I tested WineX 3.0 on a machine with an Athlon XP 2000+ CPU, one gigabyte of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9000 with 64 MB of RAM running Mandrake Linux 9.1. It's not as brawny as many gaming machines, but it's no slouch in the speed department either. I've been running native Linux versions of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament on it for some time, and I'm happy with the performance of those games.

Setting up WineX 3.0 is pretty easy, I just grabbed the WineX RPM and installed it. I also installed their Point2Play GUI, but I didn't have very good luck with it. At first, it couldn't even find my CD-ROM or DVD drives -- apparently the format of Mandrake's /etc/fstab threw it for a loop. Even after I fixed that, the options for installing a game using Point2Play remained greyed out. That's not really a big deal, installing a game with WineX is easy enough from the command line. All you need to do is mount the CD-ROM and run "winex3 setup.exe" (replacing "setup.exe" with the appropriate name for the setup program) and run through the normal installation procedure you'd go through in Windows.

I tested several games, some on TransGaming's list and some not, and only had real success with two games. To be fair, the games that didn't function were either not on the list or marked as working poorly. Half-Life installed, but threw an error after startup and then hung on a black screen with an hourglass cursor. I suspect that if I spend some time tweaking config file, I could probably get it to work. The installation program for Dungeon Master died midway through the install, as did the installer for MDK 2.

Then I tried installing the Windows version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. This installed flawlessly. Then I began the grueling work of actually testing the game. After several hours of gameplay I didn't notice any glitches or problems with Wolfenstein. I had success switching the resolution, tweaking the brightness, saving and loading games -- in short, it seemed to work perfectly. I then installed Heretic II. I had to tweak the WineX configuration file so that Heretic would realize that the CD-ROM was in the drive, but it also ran perfectly after I made the switch.

WineX 3.0 kind of reminds me of the days when I used to buy a DOS game and cross my fingers hoping that it would run on my computer. Some games would install and run easily, others would take a little wrestling to get them to run, and others never ran due to conflicts with this or that piece of hardware or for some other almost unknowable reason. The difference here is that TransGaming is continuously working on WineX, so it's possible that a game that doesn't run today will run sometime down the road.

While WineX may not be compatible with a fair number of games, the performance of the games that are compatible is very satisfying. If you're thinking that you want to run a Windows game under Linux, my advice would be to check TransGaming's list of compatible games first. If your game is on the list with a working rating of 4 or 5, you can feel pretty confident that you'll be able to play your game on Linux with WineX and be happy with the performance and stability of that game. Otherwise, proceed with caution.

Even though WineX doesn't run everything under the sun, I still think it's worth the price. TransGaming doesn't sell WineX as a boxed product, you have to subscribe to WineX to get the prepackaged files. They offer RPMs and Debian packages of current releases only to subscribers, but you can access their CVS and try to build it yourself from source. I didn't try this, but would be curious to hear what kind of success others have had. The pricing for the subscription is pretty reasonable, just $5 a month with a 3-month minimum. Even if you cancel the subscription after the initial three months, you still have the releases that you download during your subscription. It's not a perfect solution, but WineX does show a lot of promise.