Cedega (formerly known as WineX) was the proprietary fork by TransGaming Technologies of

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

, from the last version of

under the X11 license before switching to GNU LGPL. It was designed specifically for running

game A game is a structured type of play usually undertaken for entertainment or fun, and sometimes used as an educational tool. Many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports or video games) or art ...

s created for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

under

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. As such, its primary focus was implementing the

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

. WineX was renamed to Cedega on the release of version 4.0 on June 22, 2004. Cedega Gaming Service was retired on February 28, 2011. TransGaming announced that development would continue under the GameTree Linux Developer Program, however this proved moot as the company's core technology divisions were shuttered in 2016.

Licenses

Though Cedega was mainly

proprietary software Proprietary software is computer software, software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing t ...

, TransGaming did make part of the source publicly available via CVS, under a mix of licenses. Though this was mainly done to allow a means for the public to view and submit fixes to the code, it was also frequently used as a means to obtain a quasi-demonstration version of Cedega. TransGaming released a proper demo of Cedega because of complaints of the difficulty of building a usable version of the program from the public CVS, as well as its outdated nature. The demo released by Cedega gave users a 14-day trial of a reasonably current version of the product with a watermark of the Cedega logo which faded from almost transparent to fully opaque every few seconds. This demo was removed without comment. While the licenses under which the code was released do permit non-commercial redistribution of precompiled public-CVS versions of the software, TransGaming strongly discouraged this, openly warning that the license would be changed if they felt that abuse was occurring or otherwise threatened. TransGaming similarly discouraged source-based distributions like

Gentoo Linux Gentoo Linux (pronounced ) is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for ...

from creating automated tools to let people build their own version of Cedega from the public CVS. The Wine project originally released Wine under the same

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

as the X Window System, but owing to concern about proprietary versions of Wine not contributing their changes back to the core project, work as of March 2002 has used the LGPL for its licensing.

Functionality

In some cases it closely mimicked the experience that Windows users have (insert disc, run Setup.exe, play). In other cases some amount of user tweaking is required to get the game installed and in a state of playability. Cedega 5.2 introduced a feature called the Games Disc Database (GDDB) that simplifies many of these settings and adds auto-game detection when a CD is inserted so that settings are applied for the inserted game automatically. A basic list of features: * Some types of

copy protection Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, is any measure to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media. Copy protection is most commonly found on vid ...

* Pixel Shaders 3.0 * Vertex Shaders 3.0 * DirectX 9.0 * Joystick support including remapping axes * The ability to run some Windows games

History

Cedega subscribers dwindled as users expressed a number of complaints due to lack of updates, fatal problems with supported games and with Wine having achieved a number of features that were unique to Cedega, giving even better compatibility in some cases. Users attributed the apparent lack of interest from TransGaming on Cedega to their focus on

Cider Cider ( ) is an alcoholic beverage made from the Fermented drink, fermented Apple juice, juice of apples. Cider is widely available in the United Kingdom (particularly in the West Country) and Ireland. The United Kingdom has the world's highest ...

, a similar Wine-based API layer for Mac OS X systems, supported by

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...

to bring their Windows native games to Mac. On November 13, 2007's Development Status report, TransGaming explained that a number of modifications had been made to Cedega's code to add Wine's implementation of the MSI installation system and to be able to incorporate more of Wine's codebase. It was never confirmed if those changes were in conformance with Wine's LGPL license. Also on the November 13, 2007 report, it was announced that all of the work done on Cider would be merged back into Cedega (since both share the same code). Among the new features are “new copy protection, 2.0 shader updates, a head start on shader model 3.0, performance upgrades, a self-updating user interface” and others. On September 23, 2008, Cedega officially presented the new version 6.1. Cedega Gaming Service was retired on February 28, 2011.

Controversy

TransGaming's business practice of benefiting financially from the Wine project, without contributing anything back to it drew criticism. TransGaming obtained the source to the original Wine project when it was under the

and this license placed no requirements on how TransGaming published the software. TransGaming decided to release their version as proprietary software. Cedega included licensed support for several types of CD-based copy protection (notably SecuROM and SafeDisc), the code for which TransGaming said they were under contract not to disclose. They had initially pledged to release their code if they reached 20,000 subscribers, but this never actually happened. In 2002, the Wine project changed its license to the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). This means that anyone who publishes a modified version of Wine after the license change must publish the source code under an LGPL-compatible license. TransGaming halted using code contributed to Wine when the license was changed, though this later resumed with TransGaming integrating certain LGPL portions of Wine into Cedega and placing those portions of the source code on their public servers. TransGaming offered a CVS tree for Cedega without the Point2Play GUI, copy protection support, and texture compression through its own repositories with mixed

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

, AFPL and bstring licensing. Scripts and guides have been made by the community to facilitate building Cedega from the source tree.

References

External links