Wine and Windows Game Binaries
 

I'm fairly new to Linux and Wine but I seem to recall one of the selling point of Wine being that you could not only run Windows programs as they are, but also recompile them into native Linux binaries. A lot of people in this forum seem to be complaining about the speed of games in Wine. Would recompiling a game make it run faster?

-Brandon

That's impossible. WINE is just an API layer (if I'm not mistaken) and will run the binary, but cannot recompile it (since it doesn't have the source, and it wasn't coded for Linux in the first place). If you're looking for a speed boost in games, try WineX (it works superb for me) or look for native installers or straight up native games (like UT2K4). Since all games aren't ported to Linux as of yet, a combo of WineX and Native Games should get you through :D.

Yeah, I'll second that - $5/mo (min 3 mo) will get you RPMs and let you vote on which games you wanna see supported with WineX. www.transgaming.com. I'm getting better performance with OpenGL in Linux than in DirectX under Windows with Counter-Strike. WineX is fabulous and is well worth the money.

sparky - Recompiling for Linux would definitely speed things up, but most Windows games are not portable (they're written with DirectX and Windows APIs). It is possible to develop games using a portable wrapper that plugs into both the Windows API and X (Borland Delphi/Kylix one such example of a package). That aside, very few (if any) of the commercial games out nowadays are open source.

In response to GT_Onizuka:

My mistake. I just now had another look at the Winelib page. I hadn't played around with it before and was under the impression that it actually read through a Windows program and built a native Linux app, replacing Win32 calls with equivalent Linux calls (basically doing all the extra work that Wine does at run time, but doing it at compile time instead)... similar to how some video game system emulators recompile a binary into more-or-less native code when the ROM is loaded to memory so it can then be run almost directly. My prime example being the N64 emulator SixtyForce which replaces N64 graphics calls with native OpenGL calls. But, of course, Winelib doesn't work like that. Instead, it just recompiles source (assuming you have it... as unlikely as that may be)

Brandon