The following is an interview that was conducted over e-mail during the past week or so. Questions come from Tim Mullins & Jason Prince, the answers are by Vikas Gupta, TransGaming Co-CEO, President & COO, Gavriel State, Co-CEO & CTO, and Peter Hunnisett, Linux Development Team Manager.
Thank you for agreeing to do this Interview with DesktopOS.com. Today you have announced both a major new version of WineX, and a brand new name for WineX. Let’s take the new name first – why the change?
Vikas Gupta: The name WineX has been in use since October 2001, when we first debuted our Linux portability technology. To be completely honest, WineX was our internal code name and somehow it leaked and it stuck. Now, two and half years later, we’ve advanced the product so much and it encompasses such significant technological advancement that we felt if was only fitting to rename it with the landmark release of version 4.0. What we’re doing, in essence, is reinventing ourselves – we have a new product name, we have unveiled a new web site, we’ve created a new site specifically for our subscribers, www.transgaming.org, and we’re showing the world how excited we are about the amazing progress we’ve made. The new name we have chosen for our flagship Linux product is “Cedega” pronounced “Se-day-gah”. Cedega is a type of grape used to make the finest “Port Wines” in the world; a very fitting new name for our product in my opinion.
So what are the highlights of the Cedega 4.0 release?
Gavriel State: The Cedega 4.0 release is a major technological milestone for us. It contains more new features than any previous release we’ve ever done. Some of the biggest of these is on the graphics front which includes Linux compatibility for DirectX 9.0 titles such as BattleField: Vietnam and Star Wars Galaxies; we have also added support for Pixel Shader graphics technologies used in a variety of games for increased visual realism. Additionally, we’ve done quite a bit of work to increase the compatibility with InstallShield and MSI installers. And finally, this is the first release to incorporate our ‘ShmServer’ technology, which can provide a significant speedup for games that make very heavy use of the Win32 Kernel’s synchronization facilities. This can speed up some games by 50% or more.
What is new in Point2Play for this release?
Peter Hunnisett: The majority of the work in Point2Play 1.3 is actually support for all the new Cedega 4.0 features, such as our new ALSA sound backend, Pixel Shaders, and the Accelerated Interprocess Communications model. On top of this, we added refinement to a number of previous features and coded up fixes for a few minor anomalies. The biggest of those enhancements is making our language support downloadable. This effectively unbundles the translations from the actual release, allowing the translations to stay more up to date, and for new languages to be added on the fly. A user of Point2Play simply has to click on the Languages tab and select any languages they wish to use, click a button to download them, and then it's available for use!
Which Linux desktop operating systems does Cedega 4.0 support? Have you tested it specifically on distributions developed by companies with whom you have partnered, such as Lycoris and Lindows Inc.?
Peter Hunnisett: Because of the sheer number of distributions available we do our best to make sure we not only develop against a large number but we also test against an even larger number. Our developers primarily use Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, and SUSE. In house, we also do a lot of complementary testing, some of which is for our partner distributions. And then to complement that, our beta team members run another set of distributions. For those distributions that fall through the cracks, we always accept bug reports and do our best to ensure that they're resolved quickly.
One of the features that makes CrossOver Office so easy to use is its integration with the KDE and Gnome menu systems on many distributions. Have you considered attempting something similar in this release?
Peter Hunnisett: While Cedega does have some integration with the KDE and GNOME menu systems, we've found that their location changes so radically between distributions, or even versions of distributions, that it hasn't been worthwhile to worry about it - something we'll reconsider if they start following the same standards. We also find that a lot of our users do not use either GNOME or KDE and so, to them, that sort of effort is wasted. Our solution to this problem is Point2Play, which fully integrates all your application installation and configuration management needs.
Have you considered making a 30-day evaluation copy of Cedega available so that potential subscribers can test-drive the product?
Vikas Gupta: We have and this is something we’re going to be working on soon. We have subscribers from all over the world using our product and very happily for that matter. However, as we forge into new markets and new territories where we may be lesser known, we’d like to give consumers the opportunity to try our product first to build up their comfort level and to truly assess whether the product meets their needs and expectations. This also an important consideration as we begin to partner with more and more Linux distros, Linux software and service providers, etc. who have expressed an interest in OEM and distribution opportunities. Those who know us and have used our product give us the highest praise (thank you for this); we’ll be offering the trial version in those markets where we are unknown but recognize there is huge demand.
TransGaming offers a subscription-based service that requires potential customers to commit to either a recurring payment or a hefty up-front fee. In addition, many Linux users dual-boot with Windows, which makes it fairly easy to avoid the need for a solution such as Cedega altogether. How do you intend to address these issues moving forward?
Vikas Gupta: TransGaming was actually one of the Linux pioneers in how subscription services are structured and offered to consumers. For a negligible monthly fee, or the aggregated yearly subscription fee paid upfront (which we believe is priced extremely competitively and fairly), our subscribers (also known as TransGamers) have ongoing access to our technology and the regular updates and releases we give them (we now have 2-3 major releases per year and updates every 6-9 weeks). Included in their subscription fees is support, participation in our discussion forums, and the very unique and compelling ability to “vote” on what they’d like us to work on next. This last point is extremely important since our TransGamers direct our development efforts, giving them a degree of control as to how their money is invested. Our customers voted on support for DirectX 8 quite some time back and we complied, giving them the ability to play hot games such as Max Payne. They wanted WarCraft III and GTA Vice City, both of which we delivered within a matter of days after the commercial release of the games. Today, TransGamers have asked us to support DirectX9 and a variety of MMPORG titles; again, we’re thrilled to deliver with the release of Cedega 4.0! Going forward, we’re going to keep working hard to make sure our customers’ dollars are being well spent and that they can continue to play the latest and greatest games. With the multitude of hit games being released regularly, we continue to remain busy since we want our TransGamers to have the ability to play these games the day they hit store shelves. All that for a negligible monthly fee is not bad.
As for your question regarding dual-boot, this is precisely the reason why TransGaming and Cedega are so crucial and pivotal to the proliferation of Linux. In actuality, it doesn’t make sense to have two operating systems on your computer. What that says is that neither operating system is capable of giving users all the functionality they really need – a statement that may have been true 2-3 years ago but today Linux has reached, if not surpassed, the feature set and capabilities of Windows, including having a wealth of software applications available on it. Unfortunately, game developers still do not regard Linux as a large enough market to develop games for, which is why most Linux users contend with a Windows partition. Our objective is to free Linux users from the need to dual-boot by giving them the ability to play their favorite Windows games on Linux through Cedega. I get e-mails regularly from our customers thanking us for freeing up their Windows partition.
Gavriel State: To add to Vikas’s comments about dual booting, while dual booting is possible for some users, for many others it is simply not an option, even if Windows is available on a second partition. If you’re using Linux as your day-to-day desktop, rebooting means shutting down your instant messaging client, your e-mail, your open web browsers, P2P sharing applications, and anything you might be in the middle of working on. That’s not convenient nor is it practical. Cedega extends Linux users’ systems to include games.
Can you explain to us exactly what Cedega does and how it enables Windows games to run on Linux desktops?
Gavriel State: Cedega’s roots are in ReWind, the BSD licensed branch of the Wine project that TransGaming has been contributing to since 2002. There are essentially two main things that need to happen when running a Windows executable on Linux: the binary has to be loaded into memory on the Linux system, and then dynamically linked to code that provides an implementation of the Win32 APIs that the program is using. The binary loader portion from the Wine project has been fairly stable for a long time. It’s really the implementation of the APIs that is the hard part.
The APIs that Windows games are mostly built on top of are primarily based on Microsoft’s DirectX system. These APIs include facilities for handling 3D graphics (Direct3D), mouse and keyboard input (DirectInput), audio (DirectSound), and so on. TransGaming works to create Linux compatible versions of these APIs that work on top of the Linux equivalents such as OpenGL, X11, and the OSS and ALSA sound APIs. Cedega 4.0 is the culmination of over 4 years of effort on these APIs. Our engineering team’s knowledge of DirectX is probably second only to Microsoft’s own.
How difficult is it to reverse-engineer the various APIs that are required by games?
Gavriel State: It’s important to clear up this popular misconception that products such as Cedega require the use of reverse-engineering techniques. TransGaming never attempts to disassemble Microsoft’s DirectX code. We obtain the majority of our information from publicly available sources such as online documentation, header files, as well as the occasional technical paper by a game developer. We use this information to craft the APIs and then we extensively test our versions of the APIs against various games.
We do use tracing tools that allow us to monitor exactly which APIs are being called by a program and what parameters are passed. This is the primary tool we use when we see a divergence between expected and observed behaviour. It does leave us scratching our heads in some cases though, because we can only guess at the underlying logic being used by the program.
It sometimes seems that TransGaming has to play a continual game of catch-up to support new games as quickly as possible after they are released? Are you exploring ways to work with game developers to ensure that their games work with Cedega on release, rather than months later?
Vikas Gupta: New games are being released at a greater frequency than ever before and this trend will continue. As more games are released more frequently, we get busier and busier since we want to ensure complete support for the top titles as quickly as possible. The interesting thing here is that many game developers who had no intentions of supporting Linux contact us and offer us their assistance. In some cases, it’s because they have people internally who are already TransGamers and they know we’re working on supporting certain titles and want to help. In other cases, developers just think it’s amazingly cool to have their new titles running on Linux without them expending any effort on their part. Thus, they’re happy to help however they can. These types of interactions are occurring much more often with the end result being support for games even before they’re released to the market.
One of our new initiatives, in light of this positive feedback from developers, is to create a game developer partnership program. This new program will be a formalized partnership between TransGaming and developers who are interested in seeing their games supported on Linux and will encompass greater co-operation. We’re working on the details right now, and are in discussions with a broad array of developers and publishers, and expect to launch the program in the fall with a fair number of developers already participating in the program.
You currently use a voting system to help determine the directions that your work with Cedega will take. How does this system work exactly?
Peter Hunnisett: One of the biggest perks of our subscription service is that as a TransGamer you have a direct say in what we'll be working on next! Every month we have a number of poll items chosen by TransGamers available to be voted on. With a standard subscription you can choose to cast anything from -2 to +2 to indicate your relative desire for each game or technology item. Those interested in having more voting power can purchase additional votes. At the end of the month, the poll items that have a positive score are automatically rolled into the following month, and the others are removed. We then let everyone know our progress on the top 5 games and top 5 technology items through our Development and Voting Report in the month following the poll close.
Can you tell us a little about the history of the company? How did the company come to be founded, and whose idea was it to commercialise a reimplementation of Windows gaming APIs?
Gavriel State: I founded the company in mid-2000 after having led software portability teams at Corel on both the Macintosh and Linux side for several years. I’ve been an avid gamer for years and saw that the gaming market was growing tremendously but was also extremely fragmented. With the simultaneous growth of Linux into the robust desktop capable platform that we have today, putting together a company designed to focus on gaming portability with an emphasis on Linux seemed like a natural opportunity.
I met Vikas thereafter and he formally joined the company in 2001 to lead the business and financial aspects of TransGaming. Our roles compliment each other very nicely, which is why we run the company as co-CEOs.
When TransGaming was founded, the company promised to release the entire code tree for WineX/Cedega under an open source license when the subscriber base reached 20,000. What happened to this goal?
Vikas Gupta: This has got to be one of the most commonly asked questions when we are interviewed. The philosophy related to releasing our source code was conceived almost four years ago and was representative of the state of the Linux community at that time. A lot has changed since then, including dramatic changes to the Wine license itself. TransGaming has to evolve as the Linux community itself evolves and we are adapting to changing times. Today, Cedega contains some extremely sophisticated source code that we simply cannot share publicly due to our agreements and relationships with some of the very companies whose games and technologies we support; this includes source code that handles copy-protection, DRM, and other IP that allows us to continue to offer a valuable product to our customers. That being said, we still contribute a great deal back but it must also be noted that Cedega, today, is very different from Wine.
Gavriel State: One of our original concepts was that of the ‘Street Performer Protocol’: set a goal and release everything when that goal is reached. We had hoped to have a continual series of goals that we could set that we could use on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, external factors such as the LGPL relicensing of the Wine code made it impossible for us to maintain that model.
Instead, we have moved to a model where we release and share certain portions of our work, but still keep our graphics crown jewels to ourselves. Over the years, we’ve released tens of thousands of lines of code to both the Wine and ReWind projects and we expect that we will continue to do so with some portions of our work.
Some of our Open Source contributions include: the complete rearchitecture of the DirectDraw 2D graphics system and the DirectSound audio system, a number of DirectInput improvements, a 2D DIB rasterizer, the TG-Martlett font, vast amounts of work on the OLE, COM, and DCOM APIs used for Installers and other software, the Wine IDL compiler, WIDL, work on the WinInet APIs, including support for https over SSL, and the prototype ShmServer for accelerated Win32 Kernel calls.
In March you announced the completion of a Mac OS X port of Riddle of the Sphinx II. Other than Cedega, what other development areas is the company currently focused on?
Vikas Gupta: Riddle of the Sphinx is among one of the many MacOS X titles we’ve worked on. Some of the others include SpyHunter, Law & Order, Indiana Jones, and TRON 2.0 and James Bond 007: Nightfire, both of which are being released any day now. While we remain very dedicated and committed to supporting Linux, we’ve also realized that our technology can be cross-pollinated to support other platforms and, in the end, this has a positive outcome for everyone. Thus, as you can see from the “Products” page on our new web site, we are also starting to support consoles and possibly wireless/PDA devices in the future. By building technologies and products for a variety of platforms and devices, we gain exposure to a wide spectrum of source code, hardware, development toolkits, etc. which increases the robustness of all of our products. As a result, consumers of each such platform or device have the benefit of knowing they are getting optimal game play and performance on their platform of choice since we have expertise and experience in optimising games and our technologies against many disparate systems.
Right now you sell subscriptions to Cedega itself and a number of games that have been ported to Cedega, while you also receive revenue from your other porting activities. Can you tell us more about possible new revenue models you may be considering for the future?
Vikas Gupta: Each revenue stream is independent of the other but the value to our customers (subscribers, corporate customers, etc.) is the expertise we apply to their specific area of interest that we may have gained from other areas. Thus, every Mac port we do, for example, gives us access to some interesting source code. The insights we gain here allow us to strengthen Cedega for our Linux customers. Our revenue streams are structured very simply: subscription revenues directly from end-consumers; OEM/distribution revenues through Linux companies who are distributing Cedega; professional services fees plus a per unit sold licensing fee for every title we port (to Mac or console); retail style revenues for the products we sell from our web store. We are developing some new revenue models and new economics for other areas that we are forging, such as wireless, but I am not at liberty to disclose the specifics at this stage.
Gaming is one of the key areas holding Linux back from widespread consumer adoption. Application compatibility is improving rapidly, but it seems that success with game compatibility is limited. How do you see TransGaming helping to address this issue over the next few years?
Vikas Gupta: Quite frankly, we’ve already had a tremendous impact in the area of game compatibility on Linux. WineX 1.0 supported a mere 5 games and Cedega 4.0 supports over 300 top titles on Linux including MMPORG titles such as City of Heroes, Lineage II, EverQuest, and the unreleased World’s of WarCraft. That’s far from limited success. If a consumer has been holding off on migrating to Linux because their favorite games don’t run on Linux, then please visit us at www.transgaming.com and there should be nothing holding you back from moving to Linux completely. As we move forward, TransGaming is starting to work with some of the largest and most important Linux companies in the world in various capacities. In some cases, Linux distros are trying to break into new regions but are meeting resistance precisely because of the lack of support for games. These distros are now negotiating OEM agreements with TransGaming to diminish any barriers to entry into some of the world’s most lucrative markets.
What is next for Cedega? Where is the development headed now that you have released version 4.0?
Vikas Gupta: Cedega is a constantly changing and evolving product. As long as there are Windows games being released, we will continue to work hard on supporting them on Linux under Cedega. We have lots of wonderful things planned, not just for Cedega as a product but also our subscription services and for our subscribers. However, some of those details we’ll share with you in the next interview " src="file:///K:/Websites/DesktopOS.com/Google%20backup/DesktopOS.com%20Interviews%20TransGaming%20Technologies_files/icon_wink.htm" />
Finally thank you very much for participating in this Interview over the past weeks, we know that our readers are going to enjoy it. For more information about TransGaming Technologies, please visit their website, www.transgaming.com.
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3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."
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