I’ve been using Wine since 2004 when I began to use Linux (Ubuntu Warty). I really wanted to keep playing Dungeon Siege, but support was spotty (some graphic and control glitches). Despite this, I was hopeful that it would be playable and Wine kept me running Linux daily supporting other games like Total Annihilation, Oblivion, Guild Wars and productivity software. Through the early years development seemed slow, but once “Staging” and alternative builds became a thing, those improvement really sped up overall development. Having the project supported by Valve and incorporated into Proton combined with DXVK and other compatibility projects has been a huge boon to development as well. I now mostly use Wine in the form of Proton mainly out of convenience.
I think the most fascinating thing was people using Wine on Windows for running older games.
I used it around the same time to play Starcraft online with my friends. In game is was perfect, but batle.net was mostly invisible until you moused over everything.
One thing I remember that was very different back then was that you had to crack almost every game…about no copy protection worked in wine. And that you had to deal more often with the wine config. Divine Divinity worked perfectly once you changed the backbuffer I think…but for finding that out you spend much more time on appdb and reading comments/suggestions ;)
In my feeling wine was actually not bad at all around 0.9, it worked for a surprising large amount of programs back then. It was later when directx 10 and above became available that wine fell back and only caught up for games just recently again. But that can be a very biased view as I already bought the few games I played back then with wine in mind and after checking for compatibility.
I’ve been using Wine since 2004 when I began to use Linux (Ubuntu Warty). I really wanted to keep playing Dungeon Siege, but support was spotty (some graphic and control glitches). Despite this, I was hopeful that it would be playable and Wine kept me running Linux daily supporting other games like Total Annihilation, Oblivion, Guild Wars and productivity software. Through the early years development seemed slow, but once “Staging” and alternative builds became a thing, those improvement really sped up overall development. Having the project supported by Valve and incorporated into Proton combined with DXVK and other compatibility projects has been a huge boon to development as well. I now mostly use Wine in the form of Proton mainly out of convenience.
I think the most fascinating thing was people using Wine on Windows for running older games.
I used it around the same time to play Starcraft online with my friends. In game is was perfect, but batle.net was mostly invisible until you moused over everything.
One thing I remember that was very different back then was that you had to crack almost every game…about no copy protection worked in wine. And that you had to deal more often with the wine config. Divine Divinity worked perfectly once you changed the backbuffer I think…but for finding that out you spend much more time on appdb and reading comments/suggestions ;)
In my feeling wine was actually not bad at all around 0.9, it worked for a surprising large amount of programs back then. It was later when directx 10 and above became available that wine fell back and only caught up for games just recently again. But that can be a very biased view as I already bought the few games I played back then with wine in mind and after checking for compatibility.
For Dungeon Siege, you could mount the ISO and point a wine drive to that. Cracks helped if you did not want to go through that.