Wine Traffic #107 For 1 Nov 2001

By Brian Vincent

Table Of Contents

• Printer-Friendly Format
• Text Format
• XML Source
• Introduction
• Mailing List Stats For This Week
• Threads Covered

  1.	25 Oct 2001 - 28 Oct 2001	(4 posts)	Problem With VirtualDub
  2.	29 Oct 2001 - 30 Oct 2001	(4 posts)	Borland OWL
  3.	21 Oct 2001 - 30 Oct 2001	(23 posts)	Poll Implementation of audio.c
  4.	26 Oct 2001	(1 post)	WINE and Haxial programs

Introduction

This is the 107th release of the Wine's kernel cousin publication. It's main goal is to distribute widely what's going on around Wine (the Un*x windows emulator).

There's lots and lots and lots of interesting Wine press this week.

First, everyone should go take a look at the interview with Alexandre Julliard over at OSNews. Alexandre covers a lot of different topics including Wine architecture, working with the Win32 API, and some of the various companies working with Wine. There's a link to some screenshots from CodeWeavers too.

The next bit of interesting news comes out of TransGaming and MandrakeSoft. The two companies have partnered together to bundle a unique Linux distribution. Check out the press release for the details. Of course MandrakeSoft makes the popular Mandrake distribution - definitely one of the easiest distros to set up. TransGaming is developing WineX - Wine + all the goodies (DirectX) needed to run games. TransGaming is providing a port of Electronic Arts' "The Sims". Is there anyone out there that hasn't heard of the game? Didn't think so.

So to whet the appetite a bit, here's a screenshot and here's another. Pre-orders supposedly started October 31st (though I couldn't find them anywhere) and shipping is scheduled for November 9th. The package is being called "Mandrake Gaming Edition" and for $69.99 you get Mandrake Linux 8.1, The Sims, and bunch of mornings wondering why you stayed up all night.

But wait, before you put down your Christmas list there's some other TransGaming info you might want to check out. Although this hasn't been addressed here directly, there have been various discussions about TransGaming's business model. Here's one aspect of it:

• Get a subscription for $5 a month.
• That gives you the right to vote for what you think the developers should work on. You might vote to get a particular game working or a feature added to Wine for example.
• You can check out the current poll for what people want.

Now, for some insight into how The Sims got ported, check out this post on LinuxGames. If you scroll down there's a couple of posts from Don Hopkins who worked on the port. The second post is far more interesting - he describes how he helped design The Sims to be portable and he goes on to say how happy he was doing it with Wine. There are several external applications that can be used with The Sims and doing a native port of each would be nearly impossible.

If you read the post above from LinuxGames you might have noticed Loki got slammed pretty hard. Personally, I hate the whole argument of "native vs. Wine ports". Loki has done more to further gaming on Linux than anyone else. The products they put out have been fantastic. I think there's more than enough room in the roughly $6 billion a year gaming industry for a few companies with different approaches. Naturally some games lend themselves better to a native port than others, but as Don points out above - end users care more about functionality than the details of how it was created.

Finally, we have have an announcement from a new company called Lindows. (See that link for the October 23rd press release.) The details are pretty sketchy. Basically the founder of MP3.com, Michael Robertson, has started a company that is going to create a "reliable, easy-to-use, and compatible OS that can run both Linux and Windows software titles". Preview releases are set to be out before year end and Version 1.0 is slated for Q1, 2002. It's a Linux kernel + Wine. ZDNet has an article with a little more detail in it. And John Dvorak also wrote an editorial about it. Will this product ever be more than vaporware? Do you think we'll see patches getting submitted to wine-patches? Only time will tell.

Mailing List Stats For This Week

We looked at 113 posts in 395K.

There were 33 different contributors. 18 posted more than once. 17 posted last week too.

The top posters of the week were:

• 12 posts in 29K by Simon Britnell <ughbash@yahoo.com>
• 12 posts in 28K by Alexandre Julliard <julliard@winehq.com>
• 11 posts in 22K by Ove Kaaven <ovehk@ping.uio.no>
• 10 posts in 26K by Gerard Patel <gerard.patel@nerim.net>
• 13 posts in 32K by eric pouech <eric.pouech@wanadoo.fr>
• Full Stats

1. Problem With VirtualDub

25 Oct 2001 - 28 Oct 2001 (4 posts) Archive Link: "problem with virtualdub."

People: Roger Fujii, Gerard Patel, 

Roger Fujii was having problems getting a program called VirtualDub to work:

Gerard Patel had some insight:

Nerijus Baliunas suggest checking out http://upx.sourceforge.net to unpack it. He also added that Takeshima Hidenori had just submitted a patch adding a stub for avicap32. Gerard got further after unpacking it, but it still died.

2. Borland OWL

29 Oct 2001 - 30 Oct 2001 (4 posts) Archive Link: "Anyone compiled Borland OWL (Object Windows Library) with winelib ?"

People: Grzegorz Prokopski, Eric Pouech, 

Grzegorz Prokopski wants to port a program to Linux using winelib and had some questions:

Eric Pouech replied to the first question, " well, it might be possible. some folks have been successful with MFC however, it has to be checked which BCC++ specific extensions were used by OWL. since OWL is a C++ lib, the DLL linking is done on decorated names, and since GCC and BCC don't use the same you need to recompile OWL" . Eric thought it was likely it could be converted to winelib. Grzegorz didn't think OWL would use many new Win API features so he didn't think he'd run into a problem on that front. However, Eric reminded him, " my main concern isn't against API support (some native OWL should run in wine). it's more compilation issues that we may face (like use of pragma, specific preprocessor extents..., some 32/16 bit discrepencies). Compiling MFC under wine is not a piece of cake (and furthermore, details have never been released because of copyright issues) "

3. Poll Implementation of audio.c

21 Oct 2001 - 30 Oct 2001 (23 posts) Archive Link: "audio.c converted from WaitForSingleObject to poll"

People: Simon Britnell, Ove Kaaven, , Ove Kåven, Eric Pouech

This topic spanned a lot of threads. It started with Simon Britnell trying to get the audio to work in Homeworld. Eric Pouech had some suggestions for changing audio.c that might cure the buffer underrun problems Simon was seeing. Simon posted the following note with a patch:

"

1. Removes the wodPlayer communication ringbuffer management code as the pipe already has a queue.
2. Removes the need to calculate a sleep interval in the wodPlayer main loop, as it loops only when dsp is ready to be written or a command is ready to be received.

Ove Kåven replied, " Well, it seems like a bad idea to make the player thread enter a busy loop when there isn't enough data to fill the device buffers, don't you think? (Well, though I'd like buffer complete notifications to happen more frequently than they do in Wine's current implementation, making the player thread use 100% CPU isn't the way...)"

Eric Pouech replied it's not a problem if poll was fixed up for it. Ove thought it definitely needed to happen before applying the patch. Then Simon broke in and mentioned he uncovered some race conditions and he needed to fix up the new implementation. Simon and Eric both went to work on working around the problems.

4. WINE and Haxial programs

26 Oct 2001 (1 post) Archive Link: "WINE and Haxial programs"

People: winelist@haxial.com, 

Someone posted a message to the list requesting help getting a some programs to work:

Sharon And Joy