OT - general game performance on Cedega/wine

[Ed Kolis]

Figured this would be a good place to ask, what with the concentration of technical knowledge - I'm considering replacing my laptop with a much faster desktop system, and I'd like to run Linux on the desktop... but one of the reasons I want a faster system is to play games on! So, does anyone have a general idea of how games tend to perform when run under Cedega or wine as compared to under Windows natively? The computer I'm looking at comes with Windows preloaded, but I've really been moving in the direction of open-source lately (you should see my cygwin folder, it's growing like santa the night before christmas on that rudolph special ) and I'd like to avoid dual-booting if possible, so I'd prefer to run the games emulated, even if they are slightly slower that way, just so I don't have to mess with 2 OS's on my machine, one for games and one for everything else. BTW, the games I'm talking about here are fairly recent, and most of them run at least marginally on my laptop. (X2: The Threat pretty much stresses my system out to the max, while WarCraft 3 runs just fine and UT 2004 is choppy on the larger levels, even at low resolution.) I don't have a LOT of money to throw away on an UBER LEET gaming system (hey, I'm in college ), nor would I want to (I can upgrade down the road, unlike with a laptop) but I can get significant discounts from Dell (see previous comment) and I am serious about this, so I'm looking at so I'm looking at around $1100+tax for a 3GHZ P4/ 160GB HD / 512MB RAM (though I might go with 1GB) / 128MB ATI video / whatever other specs you want to know system (including 17" LCD monitor ). I know I could probably save money by building my own system but that means I'd have to dig up all the parts compatibility lists and I'm not a hardware geek!
And of course the biggie is, Space Empires 5! David, now that the beta is nearing and the game should presumably be almost up and running, could you shed a little light on how well it runs on Cedega and/or wine? Could never hurt to have another tidbit of information
Thanks for the advice!
(If all else fails, I'll just leave Windows a LITTLE NTFS partition to run off of, store my games on a FAT32 partition, and put everything else under a set of Linux partitions... and if you're wondering where I'm gonna get $1100+tax from, I do have a brother who's interested in buying my laptop, which helps out in the money department If you're wondering WHY I want to do this, well, I want to escape from Microsoft and start using more open source software, yet still be able to play computer games! )

[Suicide Junkie]

If you sell your laptop, you'll need to get the SE4 board game, just in case the power goes out

[Fyron]

ATI is bad for Linux. Their Linux drivers are not very good. You need Nvidia for decent Linux support. This is a typical problem with ATI, poor driver support... :-\

Are you getting some sort of massive discount from Dell? If not, you can generally get better hardware for half the cost if you buy the parts at a computer fair or online and build the system yourself... I've compared systems in Dell magazines to stuff for sale at computer fairs and consistently see such results. You also save money by not having to get an OS, which isn't a problem since you plan to install Linux anyways...

all the parts compatibility lists and I'm not a hardware geek!

Those are still published? Putting a computer together is rather painless these days what with rampant standardization and all. As long as you stay away from no-name, super cheap parts, all of the stuff you buy will work together. Well, other than motherboard and CPU, but all motherboards explicitly state whether they are designed for AMD or Intel CPUs... Find a friend that is a geek and get him to put your parts together if you are uncomfortable with it. Surely you can find some friendly geeks at college?

[Raging Deadstar]

Imperator Fyron said:
Surely you can find some friendly geeks at college?

I have this sudden mental image of Ed dressed in 19th Century Safari Gear and an Elephant Gun stalking the Corridors of his College...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

'By george! There's another of them! A rare Star Wars prequil fan, too! Quick, bag it!'

[Ed Kolis]

Well, I looked into buying computer parts at Micro Center, starting with one of their barebones systems, and I really couldn't get a much better deal than with Dell, at least not if you take into account Dell's service agreements... any other stores you guys might suggest that might have lower prices? I'd prefer not to go to something like Pricewatch because there you're dealing directly with a variety of manufacturers and I don't want to be waiting an extra week on that one last crucial part to ship!

[Arkcon]

I didn't like the way SE4 ran under WinE, it was slow, in a choppy sort of way, and would hang on combat replay I'm back running Windows again, so I can play graphical games like Diablo and MM's Starfury. I didn't spend lots of time tweaking WinE, and didn't try Cedga, so you may have better luck.

[Edit spielling]

[Sivran]

SE4 ran fine for me under Wine, except for a few glitches--
* Sometimes, ship minis would not appear. You only knew a ship was there because of the flag.
* Combat replay rarely worked at all.
* It did NOT under ANY circumstance like being minimized/alt-tabbed out of. It consistently barfed when I did this. When I returned to it, it would draw only the top left quarter of the screen then die.

Other than that it worked. There may have been errors in my wine config that might have caused some of that, too. Ah well.