SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a compatibility layer that allows some application programs written for Microsoft Windows to run under other operating systems.
Phoronix reports
Following [the March 30] debut of Wine 3.5, a new Wine-Staging release is now available that continues to carry close to one thousand patches on top of the upstream Wine code.
Wine-Staging 3.5 was able to drop some of the patches now that the BCrypt patches have been upstreamed, but they still are dealing with around 950 experimental/testing patches for code not yet in Wine trunk.
There are new patches to Wine-Staging 3.5 to support Implicit MTA, stubbing out some more functions that are needed for the BattlEye game anti-cheat software, adding in a function needed to make Rise of the Tomb Raider happy, fixed 1D texture support, and other fixes and code additions.
Wine-Staging 3.5 binaries for popular Linux distributions are available here.
Phoronix earlier noted
Wine 3.5 continues the recent theme of enabling Vulkan support. Wine 3.5 most notably on this front introduces their new basic Vulkan loader. This means Wine users no longer need to manually install the LunarG SDK for Windows in order to have Vulkan support but rather this custom-developed loader library is shipped by default. This implementation though doesn't support multiple drivers and notably doesn't include support for Vulkan layers, so those needing such features will still want to manually install LunarG's SDK.
The Vulkan library in its current form paired with the recent of Wine's ongoing Vulkan support is good enough for handling Wolfenstein, Doom, and the various Windows VK demos, etc.
Wine 3.5 also includes support for RSA and ECDSA crypto keys, improves its manifest file parser, and supports the Places toolbar within file dialogs.
In its announcement, WINE Headquarters has a list of fixes.
Bugs fixed in 3.5 (total 58)
Some keywords: Empire Earth; Age of Mythology; Mega Man Unlimited; Need for Speed; Rush for Berlin Gold; Battlefield 3 (Origin); Galactic Civilizations III; Starcraft 2; Doom (2016); Grand Theft Auto V; Titanfall2; Wolfenstein 2: The new Colossus; The Witcher 3; Divinity: Original Sin 2.
The list also includes some productivity apps.
See anything in their list that makes you say "That's worth a try"?
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday April 02 2018, @12:10PM (9 children)
I fire up Starcraft 2 a handful of times a year, and I've got a few older Windows games like Heroes of Might and Magic 3. The last time I tried the latter on Wine, it would crash unpredictably and I gave up. I might try again.
I'm trying to move away from using proprietary software, period. That said, I wonder if Wine is our best weapon to eventually make serious headway into Linux on the desktop. They just keep improving, so maybe Wine 5 will be a better Windows 7 than Windows 7 was.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Monday April 02 2018, @01:12PM (4 children)
I've been pretty impressed. I still have an XBox, and have been trying to move to PC for gaming, using Linux of course. One of the things I regularly do is play RockSmith, which uses a real guitar. I actually got the damn thing working under Wine. Most of the rest of the stuff I play is available for Linux, but it's nice to have Wine there as a fallback.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Monday April 02 2018, @01:25PM (2 children)
Total Annihilation, now Supreme Commander 2, Axis and Allies, Starfleet Command all work well.
Gotta try some others when there is time.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Pav on Tuesday April 03 2018, @12:53AM (1 child)
I'm no hardcore gamer... it's more to relax between other computer related activities. Still, I haven't found the need to go beyond native Linux offerings in some time.
Spring is a clone of the Total Annihilation engine for Linux and can be used to play the original game if you have the data files. There are also many other Spring based games which are quite worthwhile... I'm into Spring::1944 at the moment. There's also a Warcraft 3 workalike engine, though I don't know if it can deal with Warcraft 3 data files - their engine is up to snuff, but the artwork isn't quite as pretty as WC3 and the game doesn't have the magnificent balance of the original. Still, it's a gamespace that kept me entertained for a good while.
Gunroar is pretty decent if you are also into the "bullet hell" genre, and like the weird aesthetic and electronica/rock/action soundtrack (which I do).
There are also some other REALLY GOOD nostalgia faves from other genres eg. The Ur-Quan Masters, which is really "Starcontrol II" released as open source. It's a strange arcade and adventure game amalgam, complete with all adventure game text as voice-actor rendered audio which was only part of the rare CD 3DO release - IMHO this game is worth playing through for the first time today, though use a playthrough guide because the difficulty is stupendous. FreeDroid is a clone of the C64 classic Paradroid, with many famous growling SID chip tunes pilfered from other titles to play in the background, and either faithful or upgraded graphics as options.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 03 2018, @01:30AM
Ur-Quanmasters is on my laptop right now (yeah, it seems to play faster than I remember, and I gotta get used to each ships strengths and quirks again)
Tried spring a few years ago...will try again (last time ran very slow only old machine)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:35AM
I just got hold of Harpoon, an old DOS/win game: used to spend DAYS moving my carrier fleet from Boston to Iceland, lol.
Gonna try it out the next few days.
All the old games are new again ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @04:59PM
it would be nice if wine or alt was made into a transparent layer (no config necessary) that could allow the running of all the lame ass "business software" (specialty slaveware) companies are stuck on. this alone would allow many companies to run gnu+linox until replacements could be developed. all these companies switching to linux would speed up replacement dev too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @07:19PM
Try using staging with the direct3d patches, or the wine-nine variant if your distro includes it (OpenSUSE does.)
Recently I've been testing and half of my tested games work with wine+opengl d3d emulation and the other half work with wine+libd3d emulation. There are still a variety of issues (like a z-buffer issue with the water effects in Test Drive Unlimited) that affect both variants, but for most of the rest it is a simple application crash with one or the other, and enabling/disable the wine-nine code, either via winecfg checkbox or reinstalling the 'vanilla' staging version resolves it.
Having said this, performance has gotten quite good under many circumstances and while Linux is sometimes slower on raw FPS, it tends to have a lot less microstuttering than the same apps on Windows with slower processor speeds. The pre-GCN ATI/AMD drivers seem particularly bad about this, while the mesa drivers appear to be getting quite good on both pre-GCN hardware and Kepler hardware under nouveau. If they can just get OCL 1.2 support going for r600g and start improving compute support in nouveau, we will finally have something to challenge the proprietary software ecosystem we are currently bound by.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2018, @01:38AM (1 child)
In case you are unaware, there is a mostly complete FOSS engine clone of HoMM3 that runs under Linux (GNU and Android varieties).
https://vcmi.eu/ [vcmi.eu]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday April 03 2018, @08:45PM
My hero (or heroine, whatever)! Awesome, thanks. I'll look into that. I wasn't aware of it. I have a legally purchased copy of HoMM3 from gog.com, so I should be able to use vcmi.eu