Now I’m really impressed with WINE. Thats the windows emulator for Linux, not the stuff in bottles.<\/p>\n
It’s been a long time since I tried it (many, many years), tonight I tried the latest version for FC10.<\/p>\n
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.
\nSo 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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
The sound was a bit quiet but I could live with that. The graphics were rendered perfectly.
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.
\nNow to try a couple of old AOW games, if they are ok under wine as well then I probably don’t need windows anymore.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading