[Janichsan]

I think the hype COG has received here justifies a own thread for experiences with its compatibility to see if it lives up to the hype.

Let's face it: Codeweavers compatibility database is pretty useless. Only 25 games are officially supported by Codeweavers, and while the complete list contains more games (more than 800 at his point) most of them are marked as "not tested". The WineHQ app database contains more results (>2600) which usually also apply to CrossOver (since this is basically Wine with a nice GUI), but sometimes don't (for what reason ever) or are very outdated.

So let's have some first-hand experiences!

So far I tried the following games (all with the recent COG 7.0.0 – it was a long evening yesterday):

Falcon 4.0 Allied Force
Doesn't run at all.

Il-2 Sturmovik Complete Edition
Requires NoCD patch. Works and runs rather well (~30 fps in full detail), ugly graphic glitches in the clouds, but: no joystick support at all – that makes the game essentially unplayable.

PlaneScape Torment
Doesn't run at all.

and just for fun:
Doom 3
Doesn't run at all (!) – this could be intentional, though. Wine stopped supporting D3 when the official Linux version came out.

[QuantaCat]

Planescape torment was actually designed for Win98, wasn't it? So it was already a bonus that it worked under XP, if it did at all. (I actually had a dual boot system for a long time, with both win98 and xp on, just to run older games, it was fantastic, since Win98 > XP, although XP defenitely beat out the bugs now!)

[Janichsan]

QuantaCat, on March 27th 2008, 09:55 AM, said:

Planescape torment was actually designed for Win98, wasn't it? So it was already a bonus that it worked under XP, if it did at all.

It definitely works under BootCamp with Win XP. Aside from that, CrossOver allows you to choose the Windows version it's supposed to impersonate – no help.

[txa1265]

QuantaCat, on March 27th 2008, 04:55 AM, said:

Planescape torment was actually designed for Win98, wasn't it? So it was already a bonus that it worked under XP, if it did at all.

PS:T, like the Baldur's Gate games, is a 2D game and therefore not prone to the issues that 3D games had in terms of problematic compatibility (I had exactly *one* PC that would run Shadows of the Empire ... ). So it really shouldn't be a major problem.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

QuantaCat, on March 27th 2008, 02:55 AM, said:

since Win98 > XP, although XP defenitely beat out the bugs now!)

At one time Win98 did have better games support than the NT based systems like XP\2k but that didn't make it better.

[Janichsan]

Three more:

Star Wars Battlefront II
Doesn't work at all.

Out Run 2006 Coast2Coast
Requires NoCD patch. Runs rather well, but irritating graphical glitches: the shadows of the other cars are floating weirdly all over the screen. Suffers also from lacking gamepad support.

Silent Hunter III
Requires NoCD patch. Big surprise: runs really well. Fluid, almost all graphic effects work. Only one irritating glitch: the ships' wakes are black.

[txa1265]

Unreal Gold - installs and plays well enough. I unfortunately chose 'Direct3D' as the renderer and that didn't go well. Safe Mode works great ... and performance is excellent.

Now for some others ... OK, update:

Temple of Elemental Evil (2003 Troika RPG) - installs fine, tries to start and dies.

Wizardry 8 (Sirtech 2001 RPG) - problems installing, won't even try to launch.

[Janichsan]

Two easy ones – or so it seemed:

Half-Life 2
Plays fine, very smooth, most effects work (on DirectX 8.1 level), but flickering textures now and then.

Counter-Strike Source
Works fine, flickering textures as above, but: I couldn't connect to a single server. The game finds a plethora of them, but connection always fails.

And now the disappointment:
Portal
Doesn't work. Game starts, but freezes at loading screen. This can't be CrossOver's usual overly long loading times when it comes to Source games, since I actually took a shower and had some dinner in the meantime. Nothing happened.

[Janichsan]

One more for tonight by popular request:
Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich
Works. Almost perfectly. No kidding. The only issue I see is some (rather funky) flickering of the characters' textures when they are in the shade.

[Brad Oliver]

Janichsan, on March 28th 2008, 03:44 PM, said:

One more for tonight by popular request:
Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich
Works. Almost perfectly. No kidding. The only issue I see is some (rather funky) flickering of the characters' textures when they are in the shade.

It's probably worth mentioning what video card/Mac you are testing on. I can foresee some games acting differently between ATI, nVidia and Intel GMA cards.

[Janichsan]

Brad Oliver, on March 29th 2008, 04:12 AM, said:

It's probably worth mentioning what video card/Mac you are testing on. I can foresee some games acting differently between ATI, nVidia and Intel GMA cards.

Good Point. All my tests were made on a MacBook Pro (1st gen.), 2 GHz, 2 MB RAM, 256 MB ATI x1600.

Three more:
Sam & Max: Abe Lincoln Must Die!
Doesn't work. Well, maybe it does, but the game insists on opening an Explorer windows before starting the game, which cannot be closed.

Guild Wars Factions
Works indeed very well. Some minor glitches and tends to stutter from now and then, but runs well at 1440x900 and maxed out settings.

Operation Flashpoint
Runs and is playable, but timing problems in the cut-scenes (speech is too fast and skipping) and errors in the shadows.

[alldaveallen]

Janichsan, on March 29th 2008, 10:10 AM, said:

Good Point. All my tests were made on a MacBook Pro (1st gen.), 2 GHz, 2 MB RAM, 256 MB ATI x1600.

Well, I don't know how much of a problem it would be that I have an nVidia GEforce 7600 GT 256 MB graphics card. Anyone? Mr. Oliver?

[hooks]

I got Counter Strike Source to run very smoothly and connect to servers without a problem. I will say this, If you use duel screens and are having problems with loading up the game at launch, unplug your external monitor from your laptop. (Unplug your DVI cable). and it will load up perfect. That little issue took me like 3 days to figure out. so ya, i average 32 fps, the lowest ive seen it drop was 15 fps when i was smoked and taking fire, on certain maps my frames will stay as high as 45-50, with everything on high, AA at 8x. so it runs way better than i would have ever thought.

my specs
15" MBP 2.16 CoreDuo
2gb ram
ATI X1600 256mb

[bobbob]

hooks, on March 30th 2008, 03:15 PM, said:

If you use duel screens and are having problems with loading up the game at launch, unplug your external monitor from your laptop

Unplug your duel screen? Isn't that dangerous

Oh well, my second needed killing anyways.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Not really.. it may not be the best idea to unplug it while the power is on but it wont automatically kill it. With the power off there's no problem.

[bobbob]

Smoke_Tetsu, on March 30th 2008, 08:55 PM, said:

Not really.. it may not be the best idea to unplug it while the power is on but it wont automatically kill it. With the power off there's no problem.

If I'm in a duel it's not the screen's life I'm worried about...

[Janichsan]

Dark Messiah Might and Magic
Requires NoCD patch. Runs smooth, but in-game menus are unreadable (only boxes - probably a missing font) and some shader effects don't work. Unfortunately, that includes the Night Vision spell, which strongly affects playability.

[teflon]

Janichsan, on March 28th 2008, 11:12 PM, said:

Portal
Doesn't work. Game starts, but freezes at loading screen. This can't be CrossOver's usual overly long loading times when it comes to Source games, since I actually took a shower and had some dinner in the meantime. Nothing happened.

lame. but then again, you could just boot into windows for 2 hours and complete the game in that time.
I find it odd that it doesnt work though...

Janichsan, on March 29th 2008, 06:10 PM, said:

Sam & Max: Abe Lincoln Must Die!
Doesn't work. Well, maybe it does, but the game insists on opening an Explorer windows before starting the game, which cannot be closed.

yeah, S&M opens up a launch window which is part of its demo/shareware style licensing. I assume that that kind of thing will never really play nice with CrossOver Games unless its specifically tweaked to go with it. It might work in CrossOver office though...

Quote

Operation Flashpoint
Runs and is playable, but timing problems in the cut-scenes (speech is too fast and skipping) and errors in the shadows.

shadows seem to be quite problematic across the board really... not too surprising from where Im sat.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

bobbob, on March 31st 2008, 01:40 AM, said:

If I'm in a duel it's not the screen's life I'm worried about...

Oh, I wasn't even looking at that misspelling.

[Janichsan]

teflon, on March 31st 2008, 11:43 AM, said:

yeah, S&M opens up a launch window which is part of its demo/shareware style licensing. I assume that that kind of thing will never really play nice with CrossOver Games unless its specifically tweaked to go with it. It might work in CrossOver office though...

CrossOver Office and Games are actually not that different. I tried some non-gaming applications in COG and found that they don't run much different than in COO.