CrossOver Games for FreeBSD

An anonymous reader writes "Jeremy White from CodeWeavers has made the announcement that an experimental build of CrossOver Games is now available for PC-BSD users. However, this unsupported edition should also work on FreeBSD or DesktopBSD, allowing users to play Windows games on their desktop. The FreeBSD version of CrossOver Games can be downloaded here (registration required)." From the attached notes: "Remember this is an experimental build! If you are on FreeBSD 6.x, you will need to apply a system patch from http://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine to enable wine to function properly. Users of FreeBSD 7.0 and higher do not need this patch."

The REAL announcement

[QuantumG]

Further, we feel strongly that most of our customers are best served
by the stable, shipping version of CrossOver.

That's right folks, CrossOver claims to have customers. That's the scoop! :)

Re:The REAL announcement

[RiotingPacifist]

They only plan on porting zombie games, as we all no BSD is dead!

p.s before you mod me down, remember this is slashdot not youtube, you do get sarcasm here!

Re:

[overkill1024]

Don't worry, if you're modded down it's just the moderatoers being sarcastic. Certainly that's why all of my youtube comments score at least a negative eight.

Re:The REAL announcement

[Bronster]

I've been paying for it for years - it's the only piece of software I am paying for on Linux in fact.

I find wine very much worthwhile as a "gateway drug" - in fact I was running Win32 perl driving a Windows OCR package under wine on one project - under linux.

So yeah, they have customers. I don't have a clue how many, but I'm planning to renew again next year.

What OCR package?

[emj]

May I ask what OCR package, having an OCR that can be handled with Perl would be very nice.

Re:

[Bronster]

It was an embedded copy of ABBYY that came with a scanner pen. It probably wasn't strictly within the terms of the licence, but it was only a proof of concept anyway unfortunately, the project died for unrelated reasons and I never had to scale it up.

It was receiving faxed images via email, detaching them, splitting them into individual pages, OCRing the pages and identifying them into separate "buckets" based on the form that was on the page, then using the OCRed text of some IDs to classify them further

Re:

[Bronster]

Oh - btw. I signed a non-disclosure at the time which I think was for something insane like 5 years. It's probably expired by now. For that I got given the API names of a couple of functions that didn't advertise themselves via COM - not particularly complex to guess though.

And that was for READIRIS, which we didn't end up using anyway. ABBYY was more accurate and easier to drive.

What?

[CSMatt]

There's a CrossOver Games? How did I not know about this?

Re:

[hedwards]

It's a new product. I think that it's only been around for a few weeks.

I do have to say that I'm a bit surprised that crossover games is being made available first, I can only assume that it was easier to get running, or is likely to require less work to maintain. Otherwise I really don't get it.

I'm definitely going to have to give this one a shot, even if it doesn't work in the near future, I can always just use the Linux version.

Windows User

[KnowledgeEngine]

I think there next business move should be to *sell* a product that lets linux games be played in windows. Take this with some sarcasm as intended, but I'm suprised they are not trying to charge for the "privledge" to do that too.

Re:Windows User

[TheRealMindChild]

Actually, just wait. This is just mindless speculation, but don't you think it is interesting that VMWare [vmware.com] bought [wordpress.com] Thinstall [thinstall.com]?

All of a sudden, you have an application that can emulate a whole machine, merging with something that can take an application an all its dependencies and wrap it into a single executable. Call me crazy, but I think you will start seeing a product where you can wrap your favorite app, along with an underlying supporting OS running on a virtual machine, to target any other OS you want.

Re:

[LingNoi]

If you built an app properly in the first place you wouldn't need that.

The problem is developers saying "lets get it working on X first then we'll port it to Y and Z". The problem with this being that by the time you come to release it only works on the OS you chose and porting it becomes much more expensive then it would have to write portable code all the way through in the first place.

Re:

[raddan]

Tell that to an IT department that wants to stop using Windows. There are some applications that you cannot get rid of, without great pain, e.g., payroll software. Thinstall looks very appealing to them.

Re:

[calebt3]

I am pretty close to being a n00b, but can't the source simply be recompiled for Win32?

Re:

[tepples]

I am pretty close to being a n00b, but can't the source simply be recompiled for Win32?

Win32 and UNIX have different application programming interfaces. Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Business and Ultimate, and Windows Server can run recompiled UNIX apps through SFU (pre-Vista) or SUA (Vista and later), but the software that allows this is not available for Windows XP Home Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic, or even Windows Vista Home Premium. So you have to do it The Hard Way: either implement one set of functions in terms of the other (Wine or Cygwin) or make a generic API implement

Better than regular Crossover for games?

[DurendalMac]

Or is it CrossOver with everything else whittled out? I tried Crossover on OS X and was very disappointed. Sure, Half-life 2 ran...at half the framerate and with DX8 support so everything looked like ass. It was pathetic. Also, if your program isn't on the supported list, don't expect it to run. I'll stick with VMWare and Boot Camp and leave CrossOver out of it.

Re:

[Moridineas]

I tried Crossover on OS X and was very disappointed. Sure, Half-life 2 ran...at half the framerate and with DX8 support so everything looked like ass. It was pathetic. Also, if your program isn't on the supported list, don't expect it to run. I'll stick with VMWare and Boot Camp and leave CrossOver out of it.

I haven't used VMware for running games, but I have tried Parallels desktop and have had minimal success--that is, even very old games like the 7th Guest don't run horribly well. Is VMware that much better?

And Boot Camp is kinda an entirely different boat.

Re:

[nawcom]

i assume you are referring to VMware Fusion? from what i read, directx support is better on that. I haven't tried it out, for i only have a gma950. Don't expect to play games that well that need graphics acceleration, for the intel gpus are pretty damn weak.

I did see someone play portal via vmware fusion, it was on above-average graphics settings, 1280x800, and it wasn't lagging. If he ran it on windows though, he would have the highest settings set. Still, it was pretty impressive, the quality was the sa

Re:

[chrish]

Parallels seems sort of hit-or-miss for gaming, which is to be expected, really. I bought it for my wife's MacBook... she mostly plays the Nancy Drew adventure games from Her Interactive. The Creature of Kapu Cave worked great, but the next one in the series (The White Wolf of Icicle Creek) is having all kinds of issues. The mouse flashes at about 15Hz, audio/video aren't synchronized at all, etc. They "upgraded" the game engine for the first time in years and broke it. Haven't upgraded her to Leopard

Re:Better than regular Crossover for games?

[bain]

It's Crossover with focus on games. you can still install office etc if you want, there is just no support for it.

Maybe the problem is OS X and Apple not Crossover. I run HL2 and a number of other games with more than decent frame rates and everything looks fine.

Re:

[sc7]

I was also very disappointed with Crossover on OS X. I couln't get anything that wasn't on the "supported" list to run, whatsoever, they all seemed to exit with some kind of an error. Unfortunately, IE6 isn't really what I needed on my Mac, so I headed to VMWare Fusion and Unity mode.

Shameless Plug

[Hemogoblin]

Speaking of non-Windows-only games, the guys at S2games [s2games.com] have released a native binary of Savage2 for Linux. I could always use more people to play with, so grab the free 5-hour full demo and come play a great FPS-RTS with me. /end plug

Patch?

[JamesTRexx]

Didn't know there was a patch for FreeBSD 6 stable. Just last night I grabbed a spare disk to install FreeBSD 6 and Wine to see if a few games I like would run. Unreal Tournament did crash a few times, so I'll try this patch.

Re:

[niteice]

The native Linux versions of UT would run much better...

twm support

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried to get wine running under freebsd it freaked out with twm. And as most freebsd users are die-hard twm fanatics, this could be a problem. Have they fixed the twm stuff in wine now?

Re:

[nawcom]

that's strange, wine, from what i know, has no direct link to the window manager you choose to run on X. hell, I have at times set up startx options so it doesn't run a window manager, it simply fills the root background black or whatever wallpaper i want, and it launches the game via wine.

I'm the blackbox/fluxbox/enlightenment user myself, so I don't have any experience with using tab on freebsd; I'm just referring to what i know about the wine source code. If there is an issue with tab window manager, it

Re:twm support

[Solra Bizna]

twm's window behavior is different from what most apps expect, enough so that sometimes they explode.

-:sigma.SB

(twm user who is forced to use sawfish to get good workspace support)

Re:

[makomk]

Wine is very much dependent on a good window manager to work properly. ISTR one of the developers mentioning that using an unsuitable/poor window manager actually caused some of the tests to fail, since it affected window behaviour.

Re:

[jandrese]

"Most FreeBSD users are die-hard twm fanatics"? Where did you get this idea? About the only good thing I can say about TWM is that it doesn't require much in the way of resources, and it's installed by default I guess. Pretty much everybody installs a different window manager though if they can.

Finally there is hope

[nurb432]

For Crossover on BSD. yea!

Now if we could just get VMWare for it..

Re:

[nurb432]

Thats good news too.

While QEMU is available and does work, it could really use some 'datacenter' type management tools.