All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

Or... Should I keep paying for Cedega? :(

I have to start by saying I appreciate what Cedega does - thanks to them I can play Eve-Online on linux and was finally able to completely drop Windows... I still keep a dual-boot of Windows XP in case I need registry keys or something from a program, but otherwise I've been running pretty much 24/7 in Linux since last December.

I was going to babble on about the history of waiting for the latest (not sure about greatest, there's good and bad...) Fallout, but that doesn't have much to do with Wine vs Cedega in regards to Fallout 3.

When it finally arrived I popped the DVD in, auto-mounted it, set up a new wine directory using export WINEPREFIX=~/.games/fallout3, launched the installer, installed everything, crossed my fingers, and attempted to launch it...

Talk about disappointment... I figured it was a long shot, but I was hoping it would work. I started googling and found forum posts on winehq and elsewhere with people trying to figure out how to get it to work...

I tried Cedega and ended up with nothing either - even worse, using the GUI to launch it gives me no feedback like when using wine from the console.

I resorted to using my Windows dual-boot in the mean time, promising to drop this stupid rebooting thing once it worked on linux...

A couple of weeks later I mentioned something about it in the #tulsalug on Freenode and somebody posted a link to Fallout 3 in the winehq's appdb. Was I surprised - last time I had looked the only thing they had on Fallout 3 was the Van Buren demo.

The way to get Fallout 3 to work under wine requires a patched and freshly compiled wine. It gave more info on registry items to add in case of issues. I still haven't gotten around to patching and compiling wine, but I noticed a wine update for ubuntu and installed it...

I deleted the Fallout 3 directory I had set up and started over, using winetricks to install directx9, and then installed Fallout 3 again... Oh so close - the launcher comes up pretty quick and it seemed to auto detect things fairly well. I clicked Play, Fallout 3 launched, and got to the game menu. Clicking new and then yes gives me the loading screen and then at some point it seems to stick and never repaint itself, but the music keeps playing.

The sad part is an unpatched wine at least gets me that far. Cedega on the other hand takes forever to even run the launcher, detects my video settings fairly quickly, and then, when I click Play, Fallout 3 doesn't launch... Even though the launcher music plays I was getting an error stating that Fallout 3 requires audio in order to run... I changed a bunch of settings, switched from ALSA to OSS, switched back, checked and unchecked various checkboxes... Now I'm getting a popup stating:

Fallout 3 does not appear to be installed and the installer could not be found. Try exploring your DVD-ROM drive and selecting setup.exe to install the game.

Considering I can't vote for Cedega to pay more attention to Fallout 3 at this point in time (they're changing the voting system and it's been down for a while)... Considering the only thing I'm using Cedega for at this point is Eve-Online via the Eve-Online linux installer (which you don't need a Cedega membership for)... Considering most of the games I used to need Cedega for now run just fine under wine... Considering Cedega can't even figure out how to tell Fallout 3 that I really do have sound (and this isn't a problem at all under wine)... I'm really wondering if my $5 a month or whatever it is for Cedega is really worth it.

I don't know about other people, but considering how bad and pathetic (or DRM infested - Mass Effect Reviews: An expensive game rental which installs malware and Rental versus purchase: Beware) most games are these days I don't buy very many games any more... I usually find myself going through my old games and playing through them. This includes Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout: Tactics (all 3 Fallout classics for $5.99 each on GOG.com - yes, that's the NMA link).

Hmm... Looking at the page again for GOG I think I might get those even though I've still got the CDs around... $5.99 for the original sound tracks in mp3 format is good... Now, if I could just find the Fallout 3 soundtracks, specifically the music played on GNR, for $5.99... I can get more of Pete hackin', whackin', and choppin' at meat without having to reboot to Windows.

Maybe over Thanksgiving I'll have enough time (and can be patient enough to wait) to compile wine with the patch...