Total Annihilation, Wine, and Other DirectX Games

Total Annihilation, Wine, and Other DirectX Games

Total Annihilation supposedly runs under Wine. I've had only a little luck when forcing my X-server to 640 x 480 and 8-bit color. Even then, it had a few hard hangs , dropping my entire Linux box. Wine isn't really up to running games yet. There are teams working on this, however. You can find some games that do run on it, and limited notes on how to do it, at http://www.linuxgames.com/wine/ . The guys at http://www.transgaming.com/ take gaming under Linux seriously. They're porting DirectX to Wine very quickly, and they're on a subscription basis. If enough people give them money, they'll GPL their work. While I don't really like being extorted like this, it is a viable model for generating revenue. Really, a few dollars is a cheap price to pay when one considers what a stable platform Linux can be for gaming.

Basically, you can run games like these on wine, but you're into serious geek land by the time you get there. I've been playing with Wine on and off for some time now, and I can't reliably get Total Annihilation (or other DirectX) games to run. And when they do run, they're noticeably slower and buggier than in Win9x. This isn't what I look for when I'm gaming. Wine 1.0 will be different. And the subsequent versions will be much, much, much better.