Now I’m really impressed with WINE. Thats the windows emulator for Linux, not the stuff in bottles.
It’s been a long time since I tried it (many, many years), tonight I tried the latest version for FC10.
Basically on my Windows-XP desktop server in my workroom, that I generally keep around mainly for playing games, I wanted to install/try some software that might trash it.
So I installed the software (without running it, needed to install it as it was from giveawayoftheday.com so was a time limited install), and started a full partition backup before I risked running it. Well that was going to take 4hrs and I wanted to play Heroes4 again.
So on the FC10 system in the living room I did a ‘yum install wine’, and tried to install heroes4 under wine. It installed perfectly, although I had to reboot before I could actually run the game (the install did something funny to the screen resolution).
The sound was a bit quiet but I could live with that. The graphics were rendered perfectly.
The only issue I had, which I thought was more to do with my hardware I think (the living room machine runs FC10 on a single core processor with only 512Mb memory, and X-windows wants most of that) was that it was a bit slow as far as displaying movement in troop movement and combat scenes. Having said that it was also slow enough for me to appreciate the graphics, I didn’t know a thrown rock casts a shadow on the ground it passes over until now as it’s just over too quickly on my workroom Windows-XP machine.
I’m really impressed that wine handled this game, as the last time I tried to run this game under Linux was in a Win98 VM and both VMWare and QEMU failed to run it as it detected a ‘debugger’ which of course the VMs need (note: haven’t tried the latest VMWare solutions, never will, am sticking with qemu and virtualbox now); wine handles everything just fine.
And an update. Installed it on the workroom machine that had 1Gb of memory. An improvement with the sound which is flawless there, graphics are still a bit slow and jerky though. I’m running the game at 1024×768, it will probably run a lot better if I set the game to a lower resolution. It’s certainly playable though.
Now to try a couple of old AOW games, if they are ok under wine as well then I probably don’t need windows anymore.
Although… I wonder if I can get Delphi running under WINE. Probably not and I still have some apps to support, but will be fun to try one day.
