Print

[sili]

I'd have to say lately all I do with my xbox is try to get dos/win32 games running, and watch the occasional video. Anyone want to contribute to a compatibility list along with what you did to get it running? I'll start out with...

[This thread has been updated from its original content to keep the list current and to add hints/explanations. If you're trying to get a game running, post your question here and i'm sure someone will try to help you]

XDSL is a very lightweight linux install. I recommend all testers try to get your game running under this, using either keo-keo's winex xdsl extension, or if you're feeling ballsy compiling from CVS. I ran into some dep issues I think when I tried to compile it 6 months or so ago, so I've been using gentoox (home, not pro, I work 6 days a week and actually want to use my xbox, compiling blows) with transgaming cedega (The demo version will work for 14 or so days with full function) and It seems to be pretty compatible.

Now before you post, if you've never done anything like this before, there are a few things you should know. No this won't run halflife2, running wine on your xbox will not grow your lost hair back, walk your. dog or do your dishes. There is no 3d support whatsoever...BUT...for years, there was a point in time back in the glory days when you did not need a dedicated videocard to run games. They would use software renderers and put the load on the cpu and other hardware. There were some excellent games such as duke3d(There's a port for this already, don't bother), Blood2, Tribes, Shogo-mad, etc... Check what you have laying around, and give it a try. I'd imagine from 2002 down would be a realistic area to look at.

Before you ask, the reason there is no red option (for not supported) is because I'm not qualified to make that decision. So you can know what the pretty colors I made are for (If they're hard on your eyes, let me know) here is a legend.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Legend:

Gray - A gray area. This game has no actual compatibility issues (to the best of my knowledge), but a performance hit is taken and the game doesn't run as smooth as it should. Further work with creating a simple wine engine framework is needed, or another way to minimize overhead and increase overall performance. [/color]

Orange - This game had a somewhat serious problem under one or more distros. It could still possibly be playable (Worms for example runs into a problem creating a multiplayer game, but singleplayer works fine). Testing under another distro is needed to narrow down or resolve the problem.

Green - This game is confirmed working by more then 1 person. I may not have tried this out personally, but I'm fairly confident it should work fine, if I havent tried it myself. See the description of the game for more details on working configurations.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Now on to the reason you're here

Diablo2 on Battle.net - Running (a little slow) under gentoox with transgamings cedega. Logs into battle.net fine using d2loader for v1.11b. I simply installed to the pc, installed nocd patch, verified it was working, and moved it over. deffinatly having some performance problems when there are enemies onscreen. I had this installed way back in the day and running fine back when xebian first started showing promise. The performance was much better, but unfortunatly my dvdrom drive is fubar and I havent looked into a way to cheat and install from HDD, since it isnt supported (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif) XDSL would be the better alternative, but I get problems that I can't dedicate a full day to fix.

Starcraft - Look around on the forums for the thread, keo-keo posted a full tutorial I belive that detailed how to get it running. I don't have a copy, don't like RTS games, and will probably never install it...ever.

Worms Armeggedon(demo) - Runs fine with same setup as above, hangs when starting multiplayer game. Singleplayer runs great. I had some problems with this under xdsl with winex.

Worms World Party(demo) - Menu system works fine, crashes when game loads.

The 7th Guest - Playable under Dosxbox by Xport, but choppy while moving between rooms. Playing with frameskip and cycles fixes this to be almost bearable, but still is very noticable.

Age of Empires
Wine
640x480
ingame has frame rate issues, everything's too slow

Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire (linux version)
Wine
800x600

Business Tycoon
Wine
800x600

Caeser 3
Wine
640x480

Civilization 2 Multiplayer Edition
640x480
cant start a new game, can only load a saved game (just start a new game on your pc then save it then ftp it over to your xbox and load it), runs smoothly

Divi Dead
Wine
640x480

Dune 2000
Cedega Engine 5.1
640x480
runs smoothly, scrolling a map ingame's slower than usual

Fallout
Wine
800x600

Fallout 2
Wine
800x600

Fatal Relations
Wine
640x480

Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (linux version)
Wine
800x600

Simcity 3000
Wine
640x480
runs smoothly, it takes 10-15 seconds to load the underground view (when selecting pipe or subway rail)

Stronghold
Wine
800x600
runs smoothly, scrolling a map ingame's abit slower than usual

Traffic Giant
Cedega 5.1
800x600

Warcraft 2 Battlenet Edition
Wine
640x480
havent tested battlenet online but it runs normal in campgains/single player mode with no issue

Xchange
Wine
640x480

I haven't had much luck getting cedega/wine/winexCVS running under xdsl ( I think it would help lots ), but having alot of problems getting anything to work. There is a previously made xdsl module of winex by Keo-Keo, but I havent had luck with it under xdsl either.

This post has been edited by sili: Feb 26 2006, 10:18 PM

[sili]

If any mod thinks this would get better reception in another forum, feel free to move it

[pdottz]

sili.

care to give a little help on how you got those games to run? im thinking WINE? reason i ask is cause i'm planning on using a bare minimum xdsl to laucnh win/dos games through. like xmugen.

i think if more people did this we could have LOTS of freeware dos/win/linux games running without the extreme hassle of porting.

currently im trying to get gltron to run under WINE. ( im not knowledgeable enough to get it run in DSL let alone xDSL.

[Chron Johnson]

There would be a massive amount of interest in a tutorial in this forum on the nature of running Win32 games on your XBox.  The majority of people who frequent this forum aren't even aware such a thing is possible.  The majority of those who know it is possible do not know how to do it.  It would be received with as much fervor as the Mugen and ePSXe threads.  This thread could become it.

[sili]

pdottz, yes, transgaming cedega is a specialized version of wine that I seem to have better luck with. I get too many errors trying to compile winex from CVS using XDSL, so i'm running cedega on top of gentoox and it's actually working out pretty nice. I think if we could tweak XDSL a little bit (or if i can figure out what i'm doing wrong with keo-keo's winex .dsl extension(It rarely loads anything)) or even use another distro that is barebones (just kernel, xserver, and a WM) we could get some decent win32 stuff running on here.

Most games seem to run, but need to be installed to a pc hdd, apply a nocd patch, then move over to the xbox. I also don't have any problems running games right out of FATX partitions which means you dont have to put that 1.5GB game install inside your 4GB loopback ISO

cmon people, I want to hear what everyone else is doing on the win32 front, I know I cant be the only one

[pdottz]

i got Rivier City Ransom Hacky running under the wine dsl plugin. it's on the MYDSL repository uinder testing. rcrhacky is pretty much impossible to find on the net anymore ( hope nothing ever happens to my copy)

it runs. in a window like it does on xp. but fullscreen can be achieved aswell.

here are my goals so people can help out with this.

can someone make a VERY bare xdsl for us?  running X, vm, qjoypad and cedaga? ( maybe a vncserver with some of our default settings so we dont have to use the onscreen keyboard and can vnc into the xbox for testing and compilation purposes.

i already no how to script auto loading in xdsl. this means i can make xdsl autoload cedaga/wine and then have the initrd load wine with the paramater to load a .exe

[guybird]

Actually I have a friend that's working on this issue at the moment.  I was speaking to him about xmugen and how it just needed a swap file to get it to run smoothly.  He knows linux very well, and is currently working on making a bare minimum install similar to xmugen, but with swap file support.  Plus since he is building it himself, he would know how to tweak it out to run great.  So once he gets the base system up and running, technically you could add in any other program you want with a few minor changes.  I told him that if he got it to working we could really "port" anything (as long as it could run with the xbox's specs).  He started a thread in the linux section asking for a few pointers: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=490104

[potman09]

pc games that work in xdsl using wine:

divi dead
dune 2000 (sometimes it freezes, be sure to save often)
sim city 3000 (sometimes it freezes, be sure to save often, im gonna try sim city unlimited linux version later, im sure it works tho, with no freezing issue)
warcraft 2 battlenet edition+expansion (sometimes it freezes, be sure to save often)
civilization 2 multiplayer edition (u can only load a saved game, u cant start a new game or it'll freeze)
caesar 3
xchange
fallout 1
fallout 2
heroes of might and magic 3 (linux version)
alpha centauri alien crossfire (linux version)
and of course starcraft brood war

all of these games has no framerate issue.
your display set config must be set to 800x600 to play all of these linux version games.
gonna post more working games info later.

can u guys give me a tutorial on what kind of cedaga i should get and how to run it in xdsl? i wanna play alot of pc games that doesnt work with wine, wine only has directx6 i guess, most of games i tried with wine said they need directx7 or above.

This post has been edited by potman09: Feb 16 2006, 12:22 AM

[pdottz]

another good one would be gltron (requires the opengl plugin) or armagetron (has network playing)

[sili]

Impressive list Potman, It's a shame I can't edit the first post to add them. Does anyone know how much overhead xdsl takes, and how much ram/cpu we'd be able to free up? how light of a windowmanager could we use? I think it would be nice just to have a launcher screen(with a console button of course) and the main wine-esque program. I could stand to lose all the extra shit like firefox, taskbar(we could just alt+f4 the wine window and be back at the launcher), virtual desktops, etc... I bet this could be done easy enough by just uninstalling shit from xdsl, but i'm not about to break my install now that i've got it working so good

btw, cedega is not a free program, I know, it sucks. You can find copies if you look hard enough(at their website, there's a $5 monthly fee). It works great though, comes with a frontend called "Point-2-Play" which makes sure all the win32 installs go good, manages shortcuts for easy access, etc...

[BanjoK]

My name is BanjoK and I approve of this thread.

[hargle]

QUOTE(sili @ Feb 16 2006, 03:18 AM)

Impressive list Potman, It's a shame I can't edit the first post to add them.

Sili,

Just a suggestion, but I think you should start a Wiki for this.  THen anyone can edit it and add in their input, change colors, etc.

I have a few items up on www.seedwiki.com and it has worked out quite well so far.

Oh yeah, it's free too.

[BanjoK]

Ask the moderators for edit access. They will give it to you if they see that it is beneficial to Xbox-Scene. They have given it to others before for their compatibility lists.

This post has been edited by BanjoK: Feb 16 2006, 10:18 PM

[Chron Johnson]

Yes I agree, this thread should exist for many years and see much traffic and innovation.  I'm going to now invalidate my agency to make such an endorsement by asking a question which will reveal my ignorance of Linux on XBox and its nature...would it be possible to port WINE to XBox natively ala DOSXBox?  Say if one were some type of programmer.

[sili]

Well AFAIK wine needs linux to run under it, but this can be accomplished using (what we're speaking about above) an extremely stripped linux distro. It would need net and sound, etc, but the smaller all the stuff, the quicker it will load. I'm sure it still wont run as fast as an xbox native app would...maybe this is possible using a special frontend that can load linux in the background(I know the xbox has no multitasking capabilities, and it would need to load a linux bios into memory, so i'm guessing this is out of the question), or configure everything beforehand and have it autolaunch the game from the files it made? What takes the longest when booting linux? Is there any way we can minimize the risk of a corrupt file system without having to shutdown every time?

I think we'll need a linux coder to give us some input with what direction would be best to head in...

Geek gods hear our prayer

This post has been edited by sili: Feb 17 2006, 01:06 AM