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Wine is a rather heated topic at the best of times, but I think we can all agree what the Wine developers have been able to achieve is nothing short of extraordinary. Wine enabled me to re-live an experience I had with a game as a child, and I felt the need to share it.

I'm never one to advocate the use of Wine really, in fact, in the past I have been rather against it. My tune changed and cooled down a lot during the years I've been running GOL, as it really is such an awesome bit of software I don't think anyone should turn their nose up at it.

I should state for the record that I don't particularly think it's a great idea to use it for new games, since there's always a chance they could come to Linux natively, but when it comes down to either using Windows, or using Wine on Linux. The answer should be obvious really, Wine it is. Not everyone is willing to give up certain Windows games they love, and I don't think we should speak out against anyone who does. It brings them a step closer to being a fully-native Linux gamer, so that's awesome really isn't it? A Windows user coming to Linux, using Wine and possibly buying future native Linux games further growing us as a platform can only be a great thing.

Anyway, When I was younger, I got absolutely hooked on a game called "Dark Reign: The Future of War" [GOG]. From what I remember, my dad purchased it for me after I discovered it while I was scanning the shelves in a local PC World store, and I was instantly hooked. It was the type of game where it could easily turn from morning to night without me noticing. It's not the best of games by today's standards, back then it wasn't exactly a well known title either or groundbreaking in the strategy genre, but it enthralled the younger me.

I ended up thinking about it last night for some strange reason, went looking and picked up a copy on GOG and it works near-perfectly in Wine's latest version (tested in 1.9.22). The GOG installer threw up some random errors at the end of the install, but they can be ignored. Only one issue in-game that I could see was that water had some weird flicker on it, but I could easily ignore it for a beautiful bit of nostalgia on Linux.

Dark Reign was one of my first-loves when it came to strategy games, it helped me through some rather difficult times in my childhood. Two hours had vanished before I knew what happened last night, and it's such a pleasure to be able to re-live memories of it on Linux without needing Windows at all.

One issue I would like to figure out, is why some fullscreen games break when I alt+tab. They become completely unresponsive after this is done forcing them to be stopped.

Kudos to the Wine development team for their amazing effort.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: GOG, Retro, RTS, Wine
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Liam Dawe Nov 7, 2016
Quoting: cxphergmailcomWine is often used as an excuse. That's the only problem and it's not wine's fault. It has it's place. But eventually, it's going to be used for really old games just like this article and some software.

It will take too long to catch up as the renderers become more complex on the Windows side. Starting with DX11.
Well the thing is, with DX12, aren't things supposed to be simpler? So it won't take something like Wine as long?
dubigrasu Nov 7, 2016
Quoting: KimyrielleI do agree that WINE is an awesome piece of software and I have nothing but respect for the developers who put so many hours in it. However, I also do not see as as a viable means to get recent games to run in Linux. Honestly, as great as WINE is, but there is barely ANY newer game that just runs in WINE, like that. Either the game will require some serious tinkering to get to run, or it will have more or less serious issues, or both. Let's just say the "Platinum" list on WINE-HQ is rather short for a reason. I rather dual-boot than try running newer games in WINE. It doesn't matter anyway - in both instances I am playing a Windows copy counting as a Windows sale. But one works reliable, the other does not.

For older games - completely agree. These games won't otherwise be ported and usually DO run in WINE with minimal hassle.
Provided you have a powerful enough machine to compensate for the overhead, most of the newer games are working very well and without much fuss especially with the newer versions of Wine (1.9+).
There's rarely a game that I tried recently that didn't worked with Wine. Now, depends also on what "newer games" means, but at this point anything with a DX9/GL renderer has a very good chance to work with Wine.
What gives Wine its "it doesn't work" label are of course the exceptions, and when you bump into one of these game that you desperately want to play (and the damn game doesn't work) is hard to have a good impression about Wine. With enough bad luck, repeat this experience few times and that's it, probably you'll never try Wine again and the bad impression about it is definitive. It resembles what you often hear in various places about Linux itself; "I've tried Linux and it doesn't work".
[email protected] Nov 7, 2016
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: cxphergmailcomWine is often used as an excuse. That's the only problem and it's not wine's fault. It has it's place. But eventually, it's going to be used for really old games just like this article and some software.

It will take too long to catch up as the renderers become more complex on the Windows side. Starting with DX11.
Well the thing is, with DX12, aren't things supposed to be simpler? So it won't take something like Wine as long?

Simpler?

The pipeline behavior is actually more or less the same with some operations having more emphasis and multiple concurrent operations. DX11 is a one way pipeline even Lo Wang and Hoji can't get through without fucking Kyokogami literally.

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/GPU-Pipelines.jpg

So no, it's not simpler. It's just more efficient.
Avehicle7887 Nov 7, 2016
Wine is an amazing piece of software which should be loved by everyone, partially it's thanks to it that I'm now a full time Linux user as there are some games (Guild Wars 2 being one of them) which I wouldn't do without.

I only reserve Wine for old Windows games of which are most likely never going to get ported over (and occasionally Free2Play MMOs), It's nice be able to re-play a favorite old game of mine without needing Windows for it. That said I don't intend to buy any new Windows games regardless of how good they run in Wine, I believe there are enough cross platform tools to make a Linux release happen these days.

I have found some games listed on Wine-AppDB to be outdated and do not reflect how the game runs in Wine today. For example BloodRayne has a Silver/Garbage rating, however after a full playthrough last week I'd easily give it a Gold/Platinum rating.
JudasIscariot Nov 7, 2016
Quoting: Avehicle7887Wine is an amazing piece of software which should be loved by everyone, partially it's thanks to it that I'm now a full time Linux user as there are some games (Guild Wars 2 being one of them) which I wouldn't do without.

I only reserve Wine for old Windows games of which are most likely never going to get ported over (and occasionally Free2Play MMOs), It's nice be able to re-play a favorite old game of mine without needing Windows for it. That said I don't intend to buy any new Windows games regardless of how good they run in Wine, I believe there are enough cross platform tools to make a Linux release happen these days.

I have found some games listed on Wine-AppDB to be outdated and do not reflect how the game runs in Wine today. For example BloodRayne has a Silver/Garbage rating, however after a full playthrough last week I'd easily give it a Gold/Platinum rating.

You should check the GOG Wine thread as that has more up-to-date info :) GOG Wine thread
ziabice Nov 7, 2016
QuoteOne issue I would like to figure out, is why some fullscreen games break when I alt+tab. They become completely unresponsive after this is done forcing them to be stopped.

Sometimes this is due to the window manager you are using. I found that latest KWin (from KDE 5.8) has lots of problems with games: not bringing the window on screen, disabling video playback or showing a blank/corrupt window. Games that suffer from this are, for example, "The Last Remnant" or "Skyrim". KWin is also "broken" with native Linux games, like "Tomb Raider (2013)": you have to run the game in windowed mode then go to fullscreen.
I don't know if this could be related to my Mesa version, I have to investigate.
mcphail Nov 7, 2016
For me, WINE is no different from having something like the Steam Runtime. I'd be happy if games officially supported "Windows + WINE" as targets rather than "Windows, Mac and SteamOS".
neowiz73 Nov 7, 2016
I dual booted windows for a long time, it was mainly because of certain games that didn't work well under wine I would have to use windows for. mainly the early MMOs like Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Guild Wars/2 and the like. although they all work fine on Wine now. I don't play them anymore, so it's not an issue. it did take awhile before wine was able to run those games well. but since Steam came to Linux all this has changed for me.
these days there's only some older titles I might want to play for nostalgia and then there are the other Blizzard games I can't live without which are D3 and Hearthstone.
Wine allows me to use Linux all the time without a need for dual booting or even a windows partition. it would be nice if the big companies would port their games to Linux, but I highly doubt it will happen until the Linux market share is at least the same or better than OSX/MacOS.
MaCroX95 Nov 7, 2016
Quoting: neowiz73I dual booted windows for a long time, it was mainly because of certain games that didn't work well under wine I would have to use windows for. mainly the early MMOs like Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Guild Wars/2 and the like. although they all work fine on Wine now. I don't play them anymore, so it's not an issue. it did take awhile before wine was able to run those games well. but since Steam came to Linux all this has changed for me.
these days there's only some older titles I might want to play for nostalgia and then there are the other Blizzard games I can't live without which are D3 and Hearthstone.
Wine allows me to use Linux all the time without a need for dual booting or even a windows partition. it would be nice if the big companies would port their games to Linux, but I highly doubt it will happen until the Linux market share is at least the same or better than OSX/MacOS.

Soooooo, never? :D

It's up to them, to port those games, I would never dual-boot for just certain games, I play what I have availible here and if it works through Wine it's great and games like D3 and HS will always be supported, as of new games I only buy ones that have native Linux support and it's looking quite good lately, the amount of titles :)

I also prefer not to use Wine if I don't need to just so I don't build up virtual Windows marketshare that they don't have :)
tuubi Nov 7, 2016
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Quoting: cxphergmailcom
Quoting: liamdaweWell the thing is, with DX12, aren't things supposed to be simpler? So it won't take something like Wine as long?

Simpler?
I bet what he meant is that the D3D 12 API has a very similar, in large parts almost identical design to Vulkan. D3D 11 and OpenGL are quite different. Thus it is reasonable to assume that translating D3D 12 to Vulkan might be much more straightforward than emulating the previous versions of DX with OpenGL.

Sorry if that's not what you meant, Liam.
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