DethLeaf

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Yah, sux that WineX is $99/year.
I understand the cost, but I dont understand the cost on linux.
o.O

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Heh, it's been argued to death by people other than me. Personally, I don't mind paying for software, or for some software to be proprietary. I just don't really want to give Transgaming my money because they took the freely available work done by 100s of people, made it proprietary by changing the license, and didn't contribute anything back to the original authors. Of course maybe this has changed; I don't keep up with the news very well. I doubt it though, otherwise the directx9 code from Cedega would have been folded back into the main Wine tree by now.

Hmm, should I really post this? Kinda off topic. Oh well, delete this if it's too far off track from the original intent. :P

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also i've only been able to get it to run with nvidia cards.
if anyone has gotten it to work with ati cards could you please post here?
that would be greatly appriciated.

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AFAIK some of Cedega's directx emulation will only work on nVidia hardware. I read somewhere that CoH supports OpenGL. Is this true? If so it ought to run under plain ol' still-free Wine, as long as dx6 calls are not used for input.

I know I tried running it under normal Wine, but it didn't work. Maybe there's some trick you have to use to get it to use OpenGL (if indeed the above rumor is true)?

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will Cedega run under OS X? i just returned a Dell laptop and am considering either a Sager 3790, or possibly a iBook. if Cedega can run CoH under OS X, i'm liable to go for the iBook

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Nope, it won't run on PPC (I wish! My real computer is a Mac running Linux, heh). Wine/Cedega isn't really an emulator, but more of a runtime library that redirects Win32 api calls through libc (and whatever else, xlib and a bunch of other stuff probably). So it requires an x86 compatible CPU, as the code is still more or less executed natively rather than interpreted.

At least that's how I understand it. You may be able to use a real emulator such as Bochs or vmware or something to run a copy of windows and CoH on os10, but I have a feeling it would be godawful slow, and I don't think any of those emulators provide access to the 3d hardware.

I'm running Debian unstable on an Athlon 900 with a geforce3, 320 megs of ram, an old 4 gig disk and /home over nfs, and a 2.4.26 kernel out of package management.

I use blackbox or ratpoison as my window manager, depending on my mood, which are both very lightweight, so I don't run it in a bare xsession or anything like that. Cedega _does_ eat 100% cpu all the time though, and I imagine most all my lag issues are due to my crappy CPU, so if you're running Gnome or KDE it might be a good idea to switch to another WM while playing, maybe. Honestly though I don't think most desktop environments will use enough CPU to make any difference; I never saw much if any performance increase running stuff on a bare xserver when I used to use KDE. Turning the graphics settings down all the way while in a big group helps a little bit, but not quite enough. In small groups I can run at 100% detail with high quality textures with no problems though.

My biggest issue atm is that my home directory, which is the only place I had enough space available for the installation, is mounted via nfs on a 100mbit link, so load times are beyond abysmal.

I've been playing City of Heroes in Linux and it seems to run quite well. So here's how I got it working, in case there are any others out there who don't use Windows but want to play the game.

There's an emulator (well not really an emulator, more like a runtime library maybe?) called Wine that allows Linux to execute _some_ Win32 code. In order to run City of Heroes, you must use a version of Wine called Cedega (formerly WineX). Cedega was forked from the main emulator some time ago by the people at Transgaming (which caused no end of grief in the free software community, but that's a discussion for another time) and is now a commercial program. You can either buy WineX from Transgaming.com (which you may not want to do if you are a GPL purist, as Transgaming kinda "stole" the original BSD licensed code in the first place), or if you are feeling adventurous, you can compile it from CVS without paying, using the instructions here: http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/...p?articleid=45

After installing Cedega (at the time of this writing, version 4.0.1), you should be able to mount the CoH CDs and install them via "cedega /cdrom/setup.exe" or whatever your CD mount point is. Just remember not to cd into the cdrom mount point, or you won't be able to unmount CD1 when you need to insert CD2.

After installation, you can just cd into your installation directory (mine is ~/COH/), and run the game via "cedega CohUpdater.exe".

There are some issues, however, which I will enumerate below:

1). (May only apply to nVidia cards) Run your X server in 24 bits. 16 bit color causes the game to run _very_ slowly.

2). (May only apply to nVidia cards) If the cursor appears as a black rectangle, maybe with some junk underneath, set the following options in the "Device" section of your XFree86 configuration file:
Option "SWCursor" "true"
Option "HWCursor" "false"
After doing this, the cursor will only be visible when you move the mouse, will flicker, and will sometimes produce artifacts. A minor annoyance.

3). Make sure you set the VideoRam and AGPVertexRam options in the [x11drv] section of ~/.transgaming/config to the proper values. Otherwise, not all of the RAM on your video card will be used properly. And also make sure you actually have OpenGL turned on from within XFree86 configuration and that it is working, using the glxinfo program (I think there are instructions in the Cedega documentation).

4). Make sure that cedega reports itself as being Windows 2000, either with a commandline option or a section for CoH in the ~/.transgaming/config file.

5). The license agreement is not displayed in the updater, nor are the release notes, because it tries to use an embedded IE window. The URL is, however, printed to stdout, so you can still get the documents by pasting the URL into mozilla. Which I highly recommend doing, because you have to read the license agreement to legally play the game, afaik, at least if you live in the US.

The game runs passably on my computer this way, even though everything but my video card is at or below the minimum spec printed on the box. The two biggest issues are lag when there's too much stuff on the screen (usually only happens in large groups) and that I have to relog after playing for 5 hours or so because the rendering gradually slows down to a noticable chop.

I hope this helps someone. Let's cross our fingers and hope the game still runs in Linux after the next update. :P