Here is the product page:
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/

And here is the announcement:

http://crossover.codeweavers.com/pipermail...rch/000040.html

It's especially interesting since they now are in direct competition with Transgaming's Cedega.

It's always good to see things like this, and it will only get better, but a look at the Supported Games list is a little disheartening. There is only 45 listed, and of those, the ones that are supposed to work the best are Silver, this is what it says about Silver.



I am not knocking them, and do applaud them for their efforts, however the above comments about the Silver games do not inspire a great deal of joy in me. The latter part however, stating that they will respond to and address, all bugs reported for these silver applications, does bring hope. But unfortunately, another problem is the small number of games to choose from, and I don't think that this will be overcome any time soon. As I see it, the only real hope for Linux and games, is when more and more Game companies start to support Linux natively. Then we may see things start to happen, and have things as they should be, but will that happen . . .?

Congrats and thanks to CodeWeavers on their efforts, and I do hope they can take things up a couple of notches above Cedega and Wine.

They list only a couple, but probably many more will work. They just cannot give any guarantees on those "many more"... CX Games is based on the latest version of wine, so the games you could get to work with that have a pretty good chance of also working with CX Games.

The difference is, the installation is easier, and it is optimized for performance, which I take it means for example that it will not slow down performance because of debugging code ('error messages') like in regular Wine. Also by having this seperate product they can update it more regularly in order to profit from recent DirectX (and other) improvements in Wine.

These are some games that I personally have got to run with 'regular' Wine over the past year(s):

- Dreamfall
- Secret Files Tunguska
- The Witcher (runs, but not really playable being too slow)
- Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic (very slow at some points though)
- Oblivion (sometimes slow, lot of regressions)
- Morrowind
- Call of Duty, original version
- Prince of Persia I and II (Pop 3 runs but not really playable due to visual bugs)
- Syberia II (Benoit Sokal adventure game)
- Gabriel Knight II, Gabriel Knight III
- Paradise (Benoit Sokal adventure game)
- Laxius Power I, II, III (RpgMaker games)
- Oni
- Guild Wars (original version)
- Deus Ex
- Lighthouse (Old 'Sierra Online' game)
- Probably I'm still forgetting a couple...

Not too shabby right? It gives me great hope to what they'll be able to do once they are at Wine 1.0
(edit: being able to see -for example- how Dreamfall got working better and better was a real joy... especially the sound, graphic effects and bink videos)

Competition encourages innovation and value for money.

Yes, being able to install and configure easier with things like Cedega and CG are great, especially for those who don't like getting their hands to dirty, and yes, competition is good, and as Reiver_Fluffi said, , which is always a good thing. It will be good to see how this works out and grows.

I am thankful for companies like id Software, Frictional Games, Epic, etc, who make the effort and release Linux native versions, and always hope that more will follow.

Sure, but that still doesn't amount to a huge number of 'top' games.

They do have one advantage over Cedega: Cedega doesn't work on OS X (They have that Cider tech, yeah, but that's for dev's not end users).

This is actually much easier than most people think. If dev studios would just can DirectX and start writing with OpenGL and it's associates, we'd all be living happily.

decided to shell out the cash for the osx version...

Didn't like the CD's, but in the Advanced Installation there's an option for Guild Wars, it downloads gwsetup.exe from the Guild Wars website and installs. Kind of annoying because everytime I visit a new area it has to download a bunch of files, but then I think I prefer it to cd-swapping and having to update later anyways.

Also tried SimCity Societies and SimCity 4 Deluxe, haven't had luck with them. SimCity Societies doesn't seem to recognize the CD, and SimCity 4 Deluxe doesn't seem to want to start the install. I may need to tweak some options.

Well, as far as I understand Max OSX 'success rate' is likely to be lower than Linux, since they started on OSX later and there are still some problems with 'Quartz' driver (graphics subsystem).

I tried it out and it seems that this is what CX Games is (compared to Wine):
- seems to be based on a recent 'stock' version of Wine
- calls wine with specific parameters (probably to increase performance)
- creates a separate 'wine/cxgames' folder called ~/.cxgames/
- uses the Crossover Installer, which means folders get created automatically in KDE/Gnome menu and icons on Desktop

If you do not mind the fiddling with the command line, there does not seem to be a lot of reasons to get this, unless for easier installation and in order to support Wine financially (or if you want to play one or more games on the 'supported' list).

For those interested, this should be useful too:

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgame.../the_real_dirt/