Discovering I needed Wine to run anything Windows-based. I discovered I'd need DirectX to do anything significant, which in turn needed .NET framework. Using this (http://www.dedoimedo.com/games/wine-directx.html) tutorial for DirectX and downloading Wine 3.5 off of WineTricks, I thought I had everything sorted. Unfortunately, I don't. What worked fine on Windows either doesn't work or runs like it was stuck in molasses. Now, I know there are a lot of programs that have compatibility issues with Wine but what I don't understand is the slow-running programs part. Here are my system specs:
Toshiba Satellite L455D-S5976
CPU: AMD Sempron SI-42 Single-core 2.1 GHz
RAM: 3GB (2.7 technically)
HDD: 500GB
GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3100
Here's a partial list of the games I've been trying:
- Supreme Commander
- Command and Conquer: Generals (Zero-Hour)
- Assassin's Creed
- World in Conflict
- Star Ruler (Blind Mind Studios)
- Trackmania (Nadeo)
- Battlefield 2
- X3:Terran Conflict (Egosoft)
- Rubber Ninjas
Sim City 4
I would think that it was just my system being slow—I don't have the system requirements to really run AC—but here's the weird part. In the opening intro, it'll run at around 10FPS for about 3 seconds, and then 60 or so, faster than it ever had on my previous laptop which was actually better than this current one. And, for example, games like Rubber Ninjas, C&C, SupCom, and WiC all ran smoothly on my first laptop which was similarly specced to this one.
Oh! And another quick question—when I first installed WINE, unconfigured, I installed Derek Smart's Universal Combat and it worked fine. Now after some other games and some reconfiguring, it won't work at all, even if I reset to default settings.
So, am I doing something wrong? Does Wine need to be configured differently? I'm completely lost, here, and any help would be -greatly- appreciated, thank you. I do sincerely apologize for the wall of text, here, but I didn't want to leave any detail out, as that tends to make things harder for all parties involved.
P.S: I recently discovered ClockGen, found here (http://www.techspot.com/community/topics/overclocking-a-toshiba-satellite-laptop.32667/): and was wondering, is overclocking a viable solution? I don't remember what command I used to find my CPU speed—but it said my current speed was 2100MHz (aka 2.1 gigs), but the kicker was that my “max” speed was 4,000 MHz. Now, I would never DREAM of overclocking a laptop, or even a desktop, to that ridiculous speed, but even if I could get 2.4 or 5 out of it…and I would take full responsibility for the wrath I incur from the laptop gods. I would never run this thing unplugged—I don't anyway already so a battery's pretty much moot for me…and I have a high-speed fan running under any laptop at all times—scorched my pants with my first laptop and have been wary ever since.
Best Answer
You may not want to hear this but if you enjoy a lot of Windows-only software and need it to perform as well as it would on Windows then dual-booting - having an actual bare-metal Windows installation - is the best way to achieve this.
Any kind of emulation layer, and Wine is an emulation layer despite what people say the name stands for these days, has the potential to degrade performance.
In particular, DirectX is a big and complicated beast and providing an entire emulating API for it adds a huge amount of weight, so any 3D game is going to suffer greatly under Wine. Subroutines that are hardware-accelerated in Windows may be emulated in software under Wine, or they may be hardware-accelerated but in a different, and less efficient way. The bottom line is a lot of the time you will get severely degraded performance.
Wine is a great exercise in providing API compatibility for Windows applications, and should be admired for the success it has had in doing so, but one should never expect anything to perform as it would in Windows itself.
Note: some decent games are natively available for Linux, through Steam or otherwise, and should run well enough on Linux. What won't run as well are games released exclusively for Windows, particularly if they use DirectX which will be the heavier, slower emulation on Wine.