It can be done...

02.26.1999 - Geez it's been a long time since I've done anything with this page. Sorry for the lack of updates, it's been a busy, busy life lately. ANYWAY, Wine 990225 seems to be out now, and I've gotten reports from several places that the sound problems are almost fixed now. The music plays smoothly and there is only slight skipping in the sound effects, however this doesn't cause the game to jump. If you can live without sound effects, you'll be in pretty good shape! Also, there seems to be a problem in the D3D driver in the latest Wine release. Thanks to Jon DeNardis for a patch to this available here. Just replace d3dtexture.c in the graphics/ tree of the Wine source and recompile.
I'm working now on some stuff related to network play due to popular request. I've also gotten quite a few reports that Unreal's frame rate in Linux is a bit higher than in Windows. I'll try and get some statistics for this up pretty soon.
Also, the last Unreal patch is up to Beta-2.20. Nab it from the official Unreal site. That's it for now! I'll try to update this page a little more often in the future!

12.11.1998 - Well, I've got big news for Unreal fans this time! I just got through installing Wine-981211, and boy are you folks in for a treat! Not only did I run through the entire installation of Unreal within Wine, but the sound works! There are a few pops and clicks here and there, and it does seem to jump just a little bit, but we now have a perfectly legitimate reason not to have to run Unreal in Windows anymore. ^_^ On a side note, I should comment that I'm having serious trouble with my keyboard at the moment (as in NO keys are working yet), and I had to patch up to Unreal Beta 219 (I haven't tried any earlier versions) before it would run without seg. faulting. I'm going to go work on these little problems right now - I'll post any progress that I make here!

Later on... Well, I got the keyboard problems worked out, but it appears as through it doesn't want to load the levels at all. Every time I try to start a new game or load a saved game, it dies with some kind of error within Unreal. I don't know what the problem is...

Update! 10.26.1998 - I installed the new Wine (Wine-981025) about an hour ago, and have been trying to get Unreal to work with it. So far I've had absolutely no luck at all with it. I've tried Unreal 2.09 and 2.17, but I've not tried 2.18 yet (downloading it as I write this). Anyone else out there been able to get it to work? I've also had problems with some other programs that worked fine with the 981018 release. Let me know if anyone's been able to get it to work!

Since I reported my finding to linuxgames.com, and it made its way over to Slashdot.org, several people have written to me saying that they think I should put up an Unreal mini-HOWTO. So I'm going to do just that. It's going to be a little while before I can have that ready, so for those of you who want to get it working quickly, this is what I've found was needed to get Unreal to work in Wine 981018...

• Wine 981018 (981211 high recommended). No patches or anything special should be required. Just unpack the source, compile, and install it.
• Unreal Beta 209 or greater. The version that comes on the CD will not work. Beta 209 worked rather well, but took a long time to load. However, the newest beta, 217, loaded FAR faster (as fast as in Windows) and worked just as well. There were two differences however. 209 allowed you to switch between full screen and windowed mode, whereas 217 will seg. fault when you try to toggle between the two. Also, 217 doesn't clean up the 3Dfx display as 209 did. You should have something like Quake 2 or one of the Glide test apps ready to clear the screen when you exit Unreal if you're using 217.
• Note: the Linux kernel version that you're running shouldn't make a difference. I was able to run Unreal under both 2.1.130 as well as 2.0.36.
• Root permissions. Unreal _MUST_ be run as root if you're going to use the 3Dfx hardware. And I highly advise running it as root even if you don't use 3Dfx.
• Although system specs should be limited only to the system specs that Unreal requires under Windows, here are the system specs that I have running it with Wine: Pentium II 400, 128 megs SDRAM, Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo2.