Is it time for playing games on WINE?

[Jason Edmeades]

Hi Carlos,

Great work, and its good to know we are making progress. I spend most of 
my time working on small tutorials and demos which highlight a specific 
problem, and havent yet had the 'pleasure' of spending much time playing 
the games I have got working!! A list like this is really good (as is 
the fact you have been creating patches!! - I'm not sure about the 
device.c one though, as I think copyrects is hacked to allow back buffer 
updating which would otherwise fail as you are copying to a render 
target). All patches, help and assistance welcome - I spend far too many 
nights up to about 1am trying to get things working.

Anyway a general comment to anyone - I am interested in graphical 
glitches where there are downloadable demos and the problem is easy to 
come across, BUT there are going to be so many I would suggest you drop 
me an email with the details on. I make no promise to do anything about 
any of them, as it all comes down to a lack of time, but please do keep 
this information coming. (The appdb doesnt help since it doesnt 
distinguish wine from winex, and most bug reports are unclear as to 
whether they are d3d7< or d3d8/9). I also dont have the money to buy 
lots of games, so where there is a demo WHICH INSTALLS I can try to take 
a look!

Personally I would love to have someone maintain a list of things which 
work and which fail, and test them periodically, seperated into the d3d 
level. One huge problem I have is regressions - I can code something to 
fix a particular feature but its very easy to break something else, and 
similarly its nice to know that a particular change actually fixes some 
other games!!

Finally some info, I am currently spending my time trying to get some 
features of d3d8 working. I have put on hold render to texture and am 
concentrating on some other areas, although I want to get that one 
working. I then need to make a choice - I can either concentrate on 
performance, on adding hardware vertex shader support or on adding d3d9 
support, and I havent decided which. I think d3d9 would make sense to 
wait until last otherwise any performance work will need doing in one 
place. I have an idea on some ways of speeding things up and have a 
glcore type setup which has been discussed before.

One other thought. At some point in time we will have to address copy 
protection. I dont want to get into legal discussions and I dont intend 
looking into it (yet), BUT would I be correct in saying that if someone 
worked out the first point at which copy protection fails, and codes a 
basic application which emulates this behaviour. Since this simple app 
works on windows, then someone else could then work on getting the basic 
program working under wine without being contaminated by knowledge of 
the internals of the copy protection itself? If this is the case, it 
would be a useful thing to put on the projects page. If the legality of 
this is dodgy, forget it - there are always hacks around, its just 
frustrating.

Anyway, back to my next problem.
Jason