Over the past years, Linux has seen it's fare share of apps arguably rival many of what is available
in the proprietary OS market. Some albeit met with great success. (e.g. FireFox, Ubuntu) Though, it does
give you a fuzzy feeling of hope for the little penguin, the sore which was Hyperion, Loki Games, and
others still pains many Linux gamers who wish the Linux gaming market will end up on top of all others,
in a movie cliche` fashion. (or at least this editor does) It is should be said that game porting companies,
such as LinuxGamePublishing, and that one from Norway (What was it's name?), are making strides to succeed in
this rather obscure market. They still do not have the top tier titles the Linux gaming community hungers for*.
Cedega 6-- a product of Transgaming-- is an attempt to remedy what damage has been done, and to succeed in
quenching our thirst for Triple A titles, which we cannot grasp.

* Though, I do hear some good things leaking from LinuxGamePublishing. ;)

Overview of Cedega 6

Cedega 6 is the latest update to TransGaming flagship product. (originally referred to as WineX) It's touted
as having a substantially large non-graphical performance increase, support for Pixel Shaders 2.0, and the ability to
(possibly) run many more older games that could before, among other things. Though, Pixel Shaders 2.0, and an
increased support for older games do stand out in the change log, they are nothing in comparison to the said non-graphical
performance increase, which, a quick sift through the TransGaming forum threads show that the Cedega code was badly
in need of an overhaul. I, after reading this, was quite excited to tear open the tar ball to put this claim to the test.

Along with the said major updates, others that do stand out are:

- Support for Oblivion without the need for the OldBlivion patch.
- Support for Need for Speed Carbon.
- Support for Battlefield 2124.
- GLSL support.
- Shader Model 2.0 Support.
- Improvements for ATI Support.

For a full coverage of what was added, visit http://cedega.com/cedegainfo_c60.html.

At First Glance

I decided that it would do me good to just wipe my current running copy of Cedega from existence off my hard drive, so
to start off clean, and (hopefully) have an error free experience. It seems some do so anyways, so I followed in their footsteps.
I don't have the luxury (or is it..) of using RPM's or Debian packages, but with a couple months of experience, it is not difficult
to install using the tar ball, but I can see where a newcomer to Linux would be ripping off their shirt and turning green, if posed
in the position of only having this install method. So anyways, I did just that...

Upon first firing up Cedega, a slew of problems cropped up. I wouldn't put the heat on Cedega, more so on me. I use
Gentoo Linux. Which, in case someone doesn't know how it's user friendliness stands, if put into an analogy, it's whatever the
opposite is of those '2 step 3 step setup' iMac G3's, Apple's campaign advertised all those years ago. Well, the software needed
were dbus and HAL. Which were promptly installed and added to my default boot process script. Something Cedega 6 needs to thrive
because of *insert reason here*. Once I got the Cedega UI in my face, I noticed that I couldn't select Pixel Shader or Shader Model 2.0
for any game I had previously installed. Thankfully, the ever so helpful community at TransGaming's forums soon
fixed my problem. I just had to select GL Shading Language, in the Graphics tab located in my Steam profile. Other than that,
nothing stood out that was noticeably different from the previous Point 2 Play UI.

After moving my mouse arrow around in a few circles, I decided to jump into the games.

The Games

Lo and behold the section which you long awaited for. I decided to choose a game at random, so I closed
my eyes and launched my finger into the large case of games I own, and found that my finger landed on a StarCraft disk.
I -really- didn't feel like playing that during the moment, so I just fired up the Steam installer I found in my Downloads directory.
If anyone actually read the release notes, you would know that the new MSI based SteamInstaller doesn't want to
play nice (actually, at all) on Cedega. So you will have to hunt an older version, something which I thankfully was not forced to do.
After sleeping for a little more than 3 hours downloading Counter-Strike: Source, I was pumped and ready to head into the action on line.

Just to note, very little was done to increase the performance of the game(for a reason stated later), other than changes the
screen size, and the PS and SM version. You may see better results with a little bit of tinkering.

NOTE: A few of the games tested were on the following hardware / software:

- Dell Inspiron E1505
Intel Core Duo 1.6ghz
1024MB DDR2
GeForce 7300 Turbo Cache 384 megs of shared memory.
5400 RPM SATA Drive
Intel Advanced High Definition Audio
Linux 2.6.17.6

- "Other Computer"
Intel CoreDuo 4300
2GB Ram
Nvidia 7900GS 256MB
Archlinux Voodoo / Windows XP


The Games - Steam - Counter-Strike: Source

I was reluctant to NOT play a game immediately, for this review had to be done. Here are some benchmarks using Half-Life 2's Video Stress Test.
A few different setups were done:

All had the default video settings.
+ Model Detail = High
+ Shader Detail = High
+ Shadow Detail = High
+ Texture Detail = High
+ Water Detail = Simple Reflections
+ Anti-aliasing = none
+ High Dynamic Range = none
+ Filtering = none
+ 1024x768 4:9 aspect ratio

They were in this order, with their corresponding
statistic:

-- TESTS AVERAGES --

- With PS 2.0, SM 2.0 = 22.3 fps
- With PS 1.4, SM 1.1 = 23.3 fps
- With PS 1.3, SM 1.1 = 37.3 fps

That was about enough for me. It would be better to not go optimizing the game by editing scripts and so on, for (presumably) an average
Linux user wouldn't want to do such things. It didn't seem long, and it wasn't, but when you know this version is (supposed to be) the 'One',
your anxious to play. Which I finally did.

As soon as I got to the menu screen, I turned off voice chat*, destroyed the default key settings and I jumped right into a game of de_dust2.
I was surprised to notice I was in game before settling correctly in my chair. I'm not sure if the speed had to do with the fact that de_dust2 is pretty
bare map, or not but It was a hell of a lot faster than when I stopped playing during Cedega 5.2.x reign. This must be the work of the improved file handler
TransGaming said they have implemented. A definite positive.

The frames are not impressive, even though an improvement in performance was visible. The FPS were around +8 frames per second over the previous
version running CS:S. Of course it varied depending on the map. (If you know a thing or two about CS maps, you may have guessed Inferno and Aztec were not friendly)
Not much of an increase, but looking back at my hardware setup, I can see why.

* I didn't have a microphone, so I couldn't test that portion of CS:S. Though, it had worked in the past, It probably still works. Besides, I wasn't up to hear
5 years up past their bed time, playing a mature game spamming the voice chat. So was it all that bad?

The Games - Steam - Counter-Strike 1.6

Theres no real need to elaborate much on the details with Counter-Strike 1.6. It was included from the shear amount of players still playing it to this day, and those
who would love to play it on Linux without hiccups or other problems. It plays at a fairly decent speed, using the default graphic settings at 1024x768.
My only gripe is the steadiness of the frames, or lack of it, while playing. If anything pokes at me more than all else in emulated games is watching a good frame rate
slip off a cliff. I would be pleased to have a constant 40fps, with no drop offs, than have the game waiver the frames back and forth from 15 - 60. And as with the CS:Source,
Aztec and Inferno (and more than likely, others as well) weren't too kind.

The Games - StarCraft

Eventually StarCraft once again saw the light of day, or space in RAM. This game has been working well the past few years, with the exception of Battle.net. From distorted
fonts, to undecipherable menus. StarCraft was a mess. Cedega 6 fixes most problems, if not all.(if there were some still lingering, they were not noticeable) Thankfully,
and finally, making use of the 12 dollars I spent 3 or 4 years ago. Other than that, thats about 'nuff said.

The Games - Non-Support - GunBound

I decided to try a free non-supported game using Cedega 6, in hopes a miracle would occur, such as I have done many times before. My hopes did not prevail, a not very
helpful (to me) memory occurred was shown in a message box, but I wasn't really expecting this game to work anyways.

Other Tests

Sadly, I did not have many newer games, nor the hardware to test, but, I was put in contact with someone who did. Here are the results of his tests based on several newer (and older) games:


Conclusion

I understand that my Lin-top is barely clinging on with the games now a days by the skin of it's teeth. With that being said, the performance
increase was still there, even on my lowly laptop, and especially on my contacts' machine, as promised by TransGaming. So It's probably safe to say that newer, more brutal machines will fly over the one's that have been tested.
So, if you have a relatively beefy machine, and have been experiencing withdrawals from dropping your uber Windows games, you may stop scratching the green spiders off
yourself and get back into the games you have long been away from with Cedega 6. ;)

-- George T. & Fischer C.