Newer than Crossover Office 5 and capable of running significantly more games, version 6 is better, but not completely perfect. While most of the lower end games seemed to work, some still failed. However, big steps have been taken to improve DirectX compatability despite the sparse entries in the Changelog.

Body

First, I'll go into the games I've tried. Old games all of them, because I KNOW F.E.A.R and Quake 4 will almost certainly not work with it. I say almost certainly as in; I'm 99.9% certain those games won't work with Crossover Office 6.

Secondly, a point to the wine teams. What are you guys doing, wine has been operational for how long now? Civilizations 2 still doesn't work, you should be ashamed. Really.

So, what works?

• Sim City 3000 No

• Zeus – Poseidon Perfectly (only full screen)

• Magic Workstation No

• Painkiller Almost Perfect, not quite playable

• Doomsday Yes

• Civilization 2 No

• Dominions 3 Yes

So, they're better, but it still needs work. Additionally, even the games that work tend to work more slowly in some ways than they do on the slower, but purely windows machine. The main culprit is Dominions 3, yes it has a linux version, however upon testing the windows version, it works almost perfectly but not quite.

Conversely, Sim City 3000 used to work in Wine but doesn't currently. It appears crossover has inherited those characteristics. Every time the wine project updates something, they break stuff that used to work. Maybe they should just keep the broken implementations and hammer out the bugs. It might not be an elegant solution but they'd get much farther.

On the other hand, just how DO you make a turn based strategy with the minimal of 3D graphics that still manages to get only 30FPS on High on a Geforce 7600? Simple, by not optimizing at all and adding in huge and unnecessary backgrounds to the battle screen with MASSIVE and totally unnoticeable detail. Seriously, you can barely tell the difference between lowest and high but apparently it takes all your graphics power to render. Or to put it another way, a Intel 950 can run Halo and Half Life 2 but has trouble with Dominions 3.

The main distinction, Painkiller didn't work on version 5. A big difference, neither did Doomsday, a DirectX Doom 1,2, Heretic and Hexen engine. So, they're going forward.

Beyond the Games

There have been a few major changes to the way that Crossover Office itself works. Firstly, it's faster. Instead of taking ages to get anywhere, the application itself handles stuff nearly instantly. This is a big improvement over the old version which could take minutes to handle routine menu actions. Conversely, if you don't use the virtual desktop function to limit screen size, it still tends to resize your resolution fairly consistantly. If you DO use the virtual desktop function, not all applications work correctly inside it, so it's a trade off.

Verdict

It's an improvement. The steady march of progress that drives humanity forward. However it's not so much of an improvement that most people will notice a difference unless it happens to run a game you have been wanting to run on linux but didn't bother dual booting for. Is it worth upgrading? It depends how much the menu speed annoys you, it's probably better to use the money and bid on a game you want to see working. At least that will steer development pressure. In fact these guys could use more people placing bids for getting windows software working, there aren't that many Linux users but the bids seem depressingly low even for our ranks.