CodeWeavers Launches CrossOver Games 9.0 for Linux and Mac

Written by Tom Wickline
Thursday, 13 May 2010 02:57

SAINT PAUL, Minn. (May 12, 2010) Despite the massive distraction of this weekend's theatrical release of Iron Man 2, CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that turn Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, today announces it has completed the development of CrossOver Games 9.0 for both Mac and Linux.

CrossOver Games allows Windows games to be used on Mac and Linux PCs without the need for a Windows operating system license.

Available beginning today for download at www.codeweavers.com, CrossOver Games 9.0:

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Bordeaux 2.0.4 A Hands on Review

Written by Tom Wickline
Wednesday, 12 May 2010 05:46

Competition is an important part of all markets. It drives innovation, keeps prices down, and typically tends to ensure a quality product. Don't get me wrong, I think Crossover is fantastic software, but with Cedega pretty much being dead where is the choice in commercial Wine software? Lesser known than the two previously mentioned is Bordeaux.

Bordeaux is a commercial Wine software more similar to Crossover than Cedega in respect to the fact that it directly uses the Wine project. What makes Bordeaux worth taking a look at? Well there are a few things!

Firstly I would like to highlight the fact that Bordeaux updates their software regularly. The version I obtained to use for this review is the soon to be released 2.0.4, which ships with Wine version 1.1.41. The current release, 2.0.0, ships with Wine 1.1.36 (where is Crossover has been shipping with Wine 1.1.24 for sometime now). For those not familiar a newer Wine version typically means support for more applications and better performance for those that already ran in past versions. Worried about buying Bordeaux and then having an new version come out a couple months later? No worries, your purchase comes with free upgrades for six months after purchase.

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Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Linux Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Wednesday, 12 May 2010 03:34

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Linux today. Bordeaux 2.0.4 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have changed the Bordeux UI from a GTKDialog to a GTKWindow, the "OK" button has also been re-named to "Install". We have upgraded our Wine bundle from 1.1.36 to 1.1.41, updated to the latest winetricks release, added support for the new Steam UI, and changed the progress bar back to Zenity.

The Bordeaux UI changes come from our working agreement with StormOS.

With version 2.0.0 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon. With this release we bundle Wine 1.1.41, Cabextract, Mozilla Gecko, Unzip, Wget and other support libraries and tools.

The cost of Bordeaux 2.0.4 is $20.00. Anyone who has purchased Bordeaux in the past six months is entitled to a free upgrade. Bordeaux comes with six months of upgrades and support and of course a 30-day money back guarantee.

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Crossover Games

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 10 May 2010 05:47

I own an Imac so that means my gaming choices are limited. Since Apple has switched to Intel chips, it is possible for most games to be ported via a wrapper program that mimics a Windows environment. Yes, of course if gaming is that important to a computer user they could use the Bootcamp program and then load in Windows. And I've thought about doing that, and I may still become a bootcamper. However right now, I don't want to drop upwards of $200 for the Windows system.

On Massively, a commentator mentioned that he/she played Lord of the Rings Online via a wrapper program called Crossover Games. That idea intrigued me so I looked into the software. The Crossover suite of programs are offered by CodeWeavers. These programs mimic Windows using a wrapper based on the open source Wine project.

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Why there is a Market for Linux Games

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 10 May 2010 05:22

Linux users are starved for quality games - there is no doubting that. Bring up the topic of a Linux port on most gaming forums and you will typically see responses about the market share of the operating system, that Linux users are cheap (thus why they use a free operating system) or there are too many package formats to support (which really is a non-issue). I'm not even going to bother trying to argue the point of market share, we all know Windows is a large majority and Linux is the under dog - lets leave it at that.

Lets stop and think about something for a moment - nowhere near all of those Windows users are gamers. In fact with the world we live in that is so heavily populated with consoles I would be surprised if even half of the people using Windows are the type that go out and purchase the latest and greatest PC games (or even play casually). Linux users on the other hand are typically a more tech savvy bunch and tech savvy people more often than not tend to gravitate towards being gamers.

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Wine 1.1.44 vs Vista Benchmarks

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 10 May 2010 02:52

Dan Kegel has been running some DirectX and OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu + Wine and Windows Vista, Here is the results of Dans recent benchmark test.

Yagmarkdata now has data from five different benchmarks: 3dmark 2000, 2001, 2006 and heaven2_opengl, d3d9, and running on a semi-whimpy e8400 dual core box with an nvidia gt 220 card, on both Vista and Ubuntu+Wine.

First, the good news:

the OpenGL version of the Heaven benchmark achieved 99% of the expected framerate on Wine, not bad, and it looks good, too. The 3dmark* demos look good in general.

And now the bad news:

in general, Wine's D3D version achieves only half to three-quarters the performance of Vista's. The Heaven D3D benchmark doesn't look right in quite a few ways (and one regression is very recent), requires more video ram than on Windows, and hangs at the end. 3dmark2001 has a strange water problem in the nature test at 30 seconds. 3dmark06 lacks shadows in the firefly forest.

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Wine 1.2 Release plans

Written by Tom Wickline
Saturday, 08 May 2010 15:19

Wine 1.2 release plans were sent to the wine-devel mailing list from Alexandre Julliard the Wine project leader. Here is the release plans and Alexandres email to wine-devel.

Folks,

The 64-bit support is now more or less complete, and we have most of the fancy new icons, so it's time to think about the next stable release.

Unless some major problems come up, 1.1.44 will be the last of the 1.1.x series. The next release will be 1.2-rc1, which will mark the beginning of the code freeze. This should result in a 1.2 final sometime in June.

As usual the code freeze will become more and more drastic as we get closer to release, so if you have major changes to make, now is pretty much the last minute.

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Wine 1.1.44 Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Friday, 07 May 2010 14:16

The Wine development release 1.1.44 is now available.

Whats new in this release:

Many more new icons.
Support for 32-bit prefixes with a 64-bit Wine.
Many additional msvcr80/90 functions.
Improvements to Bidi handling.
More complete mmdevapi (Win7 audio) support.
Improved handling of MSI patches.
A number of fixes for desktop menus.
Optimizations in OLE storage.
Various bug fixes.

The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download

Bugs fixed in 1.1.44:

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Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Mac Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Wednesday, 05 May 2010 11:32

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Mac today. Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Mac is a final build and is considered stable. With this final release we can only support Snow Leopard 10.6.x and higher systems. We have changed the progress dialog to a CocoaDialog, (AppleScript Dialog is in the works) Wine bundle updated to 1.1.41, updated to the most current winetricks release, More fixes to the Bordeaux UI, there has also been many small bug fixes in this release.

The Bordeaux UI changes come from our working agreement with StormOS.

With version 2.0.4 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon. With this release we bundle Wine 1.1.41, Cabextract, Mozilla Gecko, Unzip, Wget and other support libraries and tools.

The cost of Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Mac is $20.00.(On 05/17/2010 the price will be increased to $25.00) Anyone who has purchased Bordeaux in the past six months is entitled to a free upgrade. Bordeaux comes with six months of upgrades and support and of course a 30-day money back guarantee.

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Written by Tom Wickline
Tuesday, 04 May 2010 01:06

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.4 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 2.0.4 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have changed the Bordeux UI from a GTKDialog to a GTKWindow, the "OK" button has also been re-named to "Install". We have upgraded our Wine bundle from 1.1.36 to 1.1.41, updated to the latest winetricks release, added support for the new Steam UI, and changed the progress bar back to Zenity.

The Bordeaux UI changes come from our working agreement with StormOS.

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