Source Games and Wine

Many a day on the Ubuntu Forums, I stumble upon posts like: “Program X doesn’t work under ubuntu, I’m leaving”. As it turns out, some of these posts are for the Source games, mainly the multiplayer ones (Counter Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Half Life 2: Deathmatch, Team Fortress 2). For that purpose I’m gonna make a short guide, just to show how I had luck getting the Source games to work.

First, get WINE (obviously). For best results, add the WINE PPAs. This allows you to use the latest WINE release:

1. Go to System>Administration>Software Sources. You will be prompted for a password.
2. Click on the “Third Party Software” tab
3. Add the appropriate PPA to this list by clicking on “Add”. The PPAs are according to your Ubuntu Version. If you are not sure which version you are using, go to System>About Ubuntu, and look at the second paragraph. It should say something like “Thank you for your interest in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron”. Anyway, here are the PPAs:

• ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa (for 9.10)
• deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt jaunty main #WineHQ – Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” (for 9.04)
• deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt intrepid main #WineHQ – Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” (for 8.10)
• deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt hardy main #WineHQ – Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” (for 8.04)

1. After Adding this you will need to vailidate it. Please download Scott Ritchie’s Key and save it to your desktop. In Software Sources, click on the “Authentcation” tab, and click “Import Key File”. Then click on “Desktop” and double-click “Scott Ritchie.gpg”.
2. Finally, you can close Software Sources. A box will pop up asking if you want to reload sources. Click this, and the window will close after a minute or so.
3. Moving on to installing WINE, go to Applications>Software Center (or Add/Remove) and type “wine” into the search box. If in software center, click on “wine windows emulator” and then “install”. If using add/remove, click the checkbox next to “wine windows emulator”, and then hit apply. Enter your password as prompted, and then close the box when completed.
4. Now to install Steam. Download this file, and double-click on it. It should open through WINE, and then follow the instructions in the installer. Enter your account info, or create a new one.
5. Once Steam is up and running go to Settings, and click on the “In-game” tab. Uncheck the box next to “Enable Steam Community in-game (Sorry, In-game does not work on WINE). Now it’s time to install your games. If you bought them through Steam (or have already activated them), simply right click on each game you want to install and click “Install Game”. If you bought them through retail (On CD/DVD), you need to activate your game. Click on “Activate a Product on Steam”. Click “next” and then you will see a License Agreement. Go ahead and click “I Agree” if you agree with the terms (or just don’t care). You will have to enter a CD key (located on the small card inside of the game’s box. It is toward the bottom of the card). You may be prompted to insert the game CD/DVD. Go ahead and place the CD/DVD into the drive and Steam will ask you what games you want to install. Check all that apply, let it run, and if you need to insert addtional CD/DVDs, please do so.
6. Now, go to Applications>Wine>Configure Wine. Under the applications tab, click “Add Application”. Go to Program Files>Steam>steamapps>username>game, replacing “username” with your username, and “game” with the multiplayer source game of your choosing. Double-click hl2.exe and select under the menu “Windows Version” to “Windows 98″. Save and exit. (you do not need to do this for each Source game. This will configure all multiplayer Source games you have, no matter which game’s hl2.exe you configure)
7. Open up Steam and right click on each of your Source games (yes, for each one). Click on “Properties” and then “Set launch options”. Type “-dxlevel 81 -novid” exactly like that (but without quotes). click OK and exit.
8. Double Click on the game and Launch. Technically you’re done!

This was my method. It works perfectly for me, but your experiences may differ.

Review Crossover Games Linux 8.1.3

To start off, here's some info on Crossover Games

Now gamers can play the games they want, on whatever platform they want! With CrossOver Games, you can run many popular Windows games on your Intel, OSX Mac or Linux PC. Whatever your tastes, be they first-person shooters, fantasy, strategy, MMORPGs, or more, CrossOver Games provides the capability to run many popular games titles. CrossOver comes with an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing your games simple and fast. Once installed, your game integrates seamlessly into your Desktop. Just click and run! Best of all, you do it all easily and affordably, without needing a Microsoft operating system license.

Some notable features already in previous versions are Multi user support, Bottles (It is essentially different wineprefix for each application to ensure compatibility) and a list of supported games for quick installs.

The Latest release from them is Crossover 8.1.3

ChangeLog

8.1.3 CrossOver Games - November 24, 2009

• Fix yet more Left 4 Dead 2 issues
• Worked around a driver bug on ATI cards on Snow Leopard. Should improve behavior in Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and many others.

8.1.2 CrossOver Games - November 20, 2009

• Fix installation of Left 4 Dead 2 via Steam on the Mac.

8.1.1 CrossOver Games - November 19, 2009

• Prevent 'error 53' during installation of Left4Dead 2 with the latest Steam client.

8.1.0 CrossOver Games (aka Zombie Mallard) - November 18, 2009

• Add support for Left 4 Dead 2
• Fix a problem with directory permissions in World of Warcraft in Ubuntu 9.10
• Fix a number of problems with Guild Wars
• Fix a number of Mac audio issues which should fix Steam voice chat
• A few minor adjustments for Snow Leopard
• Fix a bug registering CrossOver under Snow Leopard

8.0.0 CrossOver Games - September 2, 2009

• Improved behavior of the Steam game store
• Fixed several problems with memory management -- this should fix TF2 crashes, among others.
• Enabled Shader Model 2.0 and 3.0 by default
• New supported games:
  
  
  
  • Dragon Sky
  • Last Chaos
  • Jade Dynasty
  • Ether Saga
  • Perfect World
  • Left 4 Dead
  • Tales of Monkey Island
  • Shaiya (Though only in non-English versions, for DRM reasons)
• Fixed various regressions in:
  
  
  
  • Half-Life 2
  • Team Fortress 2
  • Spore
  • Guild Wars
  • Civilization IV
  • LOTRO (unsupported)
  • EVE (unsupported)
  • Pharaoh (unsupported)
  • City of Heroes (unsupported)
  • Lego Star Wars (unsupported)
  • Bejeweled

This release, Crossover Games 8.1.3, has fixed various issues with L4D 2 and created workarounds for the ATI driver issue with SnowLeopard.

Crossover Games 8.1.3 utilizes Wine 1.1.25

And in this Review (like every other I have written, I will again attempt to find the reasons why Crossover 8.1.3 is worth our money.

In this review Crossover Games 8.1.3 will be pitted and benchmarked against Wine 1.1.33 using Everest Ultimate Edition benchmarking utilities (don't ask me why I use it. I just happen to have it conveniently on hand.)

I didn't go through all the benchmarks though, as 5 were sufficient.

PS: For those of you wondering about the memory latency, both Wine and Cxgames achieved 65ms.

My test rig (also my daily usage rig):
C2d 2.4ghz
4gig ram
Nvidia 8400 gs

For me, I generally use Crossover Games to run Steam and other Half-life 2 mod games like Counterstrike source, TeamFortress 2, Insurgency and Left4dead.

Well, the bench marks aren't everything, so I decided to give it a road test. This time Crossover Games 8.1.3 with wine 1.1.25 (Counterstrike source has a minor bug with wine 1.1.33 )

Running Counterstrike Source with DirectX level 8 and a resolution of 1150 by 900 in a sever of 77 tick and 20 people.

The results aren't really glamorous, but Crossover games did indeed perform better than Wine on the road test.

Running Team Fortress 2 with DirectX level 8 and a resolution of 1150 by 900 in a sever of 100 tick and 26 people

Well, this review wouldn't be complete if I didn't insert a few screenshots. I love screenshots As you can see from the screenshots Steam integrates rather well with Compiz thanks to Crossover Games 8.1.3.

Forgive me, I was playing mouse hunt on Faceboook while writing this review.

Yup, Some Screenshots when I am playing Counterstrike Source.

In conclusion, the results, graphs, and statistics have shown Crossover Games 8.1.3 is better than Wine. IMHO, yes it is worth our money. Plus Codeweavers (the company behind Crossover) are one of the main contributors to Wine.

The state of Mac gaming part 3 of 4

Last week, we asked developers to reconsider the idea of creating games for simultaneous release on both PC and Mac platforms. However, we cannot control what others do; we can only ask. So let's concede for the moment that things will continue as they are now -- very few games coming out on both systems at the same time, and Mac getting ports of popular PC games much later than their original release. What's an avid Mac gamer to do?

Short of actually buying a PC just to play games -- and it must be said that the cost of a decent PC has dropped dramatically over the past few years -- there are a few options available, and they all contain the crazy voodoo called virtualization. Bear in mind that these are only the applications that I've personally tried myself. Check 'em out after the jump!

Parallels

Parallels Desktop for the Mac is an application that allows a user to run Windows emulated within the Mac environment. It is now up to Version 5, and has been around since 2006, taking advantage of Macs that use Intel processors. Parallels works by providing a completely virtual PC -- all software, yet tied to the Mac's hardware to function. Not specifically meant to allow playing games, it rather offers the complete Windows platform. As such, you can install any Windows application and it should work just fine.

I have Parallels Desktop for Mac Version 4 on my 2.16 Intel Core Duo iMac, and I have to say that my experience has been somewhat uneven. I recently tried to play Torchlight, and was able to run the installer just fine. When it got to the point of actually executing the program, I was able to see the game's splash screen, then was shown an error message before Torchlight shut itself down. I have been unable to get the game to run.

I had also attempted to run Age of Empires 3 and found it fairly slow and unresponsive once too many units popped onscreen. However, I was able to install and play the latest Popcap game Amazing Adventures: The Caribbean Secret just fine. Admittedly, it might be that all these games run well in Parallels 5, so take this personal experience for what it's worth. Your mileage may vary, but at $79.95, you might ask yourself if it's worth the price to find out for sure how it will run your PC games.

CrossOver

The CrossOver suite of applications by CodeWeavers is another virtualization option for Mac users that operates in a slightly different fashion than Parallels does. Instead of the full Windows environment, each Windows application is self-contained -- you could run the PC version of Microsoft Office right in your Mac without having to fire up Windows at all. There are two applications for Mac users: CrossOver Mac, which includes support for Office, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Quicken, and a few other PC apps; and CrossOver Games.

CrossOver Games works the same way as CrossOver Mac, but its focus is to play specific games: Counter-Strike, Prey, Team Fortress 2, and World of Warcraft, among certain others. I was able to install and play Guild Wars with no problems whatsoever. However, if you venture beyond those supported games, you might run into problems. There is a way to attempt to install unsupported games, but it's a trial-and-error process. Some games will install properly but refuse to run, others might not install at all. The tentative nature of this process makes purchasing CrossOver Games an iffy proposition -- it seems unlikely that you'll want to play the PC versions of some of these older games badly enough to buy the program, especially since some of them already have Mac clients.

Boot Camp

Possibly the best experience in playing PC games on my Mac comes from running Boot Camp. Installing Boot Camp is very easy, though it does require you to own a valid copy of whichever flavor of Windows you want to run, which is something the other two virtualization programs mentioned above don't ask of you. However, the benefits of using Boot Camp are immediately obvious: it's an actual copy of Windows, running directly on your Mac. With one exception, everything I installed and ran on the Boot Camp partition worked very well, both applications and games.

 

The one issue with Boot Camp is that you must reboot your machine to access it, which almost seems beside the point to an extent. If I can't use my Mac at the same time as playing these PC games, then why wouldn't I just buy a PC and have done with it?

There have also been mentions of strange video card issues. My iMac holds an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT, which has its PC analog, so I haven't necessarily run into any issues, but some PC games certainly optimize for cards from other vendors, so sometimes that issue rears its head. To be honest, the reboot process is a pain, but it boots into Windows XP (on my machine) fairly quickly, so it's not as onerous a complication as it might be. My personal wish for future Macs is that eventually Boot Camp technology will follow Parallels Desktop, and make Windows available directly within the existing environment without the need for a reboot.

Putty for Mac

$15.00

CodeWeavers Ultimate PC Giveaway Winner Announced

Congratulations to the winner of the CodeWeavers Gaming Rig: Mark Scarton of Park City, UT! Mark will be receiving this sweet machine in time for Christmas (UPS willing).

Mark is the owner of Park City Software, LLC he is also a Computer Software Consultant.
Videos of the Ultimate Linux PC

• Building
• Running Left4Dead
• Picking the Winner

Putty for Mac

$15.00