On 30 Dec 2002, Tathagata Banerjee wrote: > On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 22:33, Russell McOrmond wrote: > > > There are also less expensive ways to do porting, as has been proven by > > TransGaming which is partly in the business of porting MS Windows games to > > Linux for various companies. http://www.transgaming.com/ > > does transgaming do any porting? i thought they only developed an > emulator.
It is my understanding from chatting with them over the years that most of their money is made in porting for the game companies. When game companies offer a "linux version", it is often a version compiled with the emulator libraries. I believe one of their largest clients was Loki. This is the same thing that Corel (another Ottawa company) were doing for WordPerfect Office - they just upgraded WINE to be sufficient to link with WordPerfect Windows to create WordPerfect Linux. These things 'seem' like 'native' programs, but are just better optimized emulations very similar to what you would get running the Windows version under the emulators directly. Emulators shouldn't be considered a 'bad word', especially in the context of WINE which is called "Wine Is Not an Emulator" for a reason. These are just libraries that provide a different API to the software developer - rather than linking to one library, you link to a different library. Similar libraries are offered by RedHat in the form of http://www.redhat.com/software/cygwin/ which provides POSIX API's to developers so that they can port applications from POSIX to Windows. Having software be cross-developed like this is a good thing, IMHO. It makes the applications less dependant on a specific OS, and thus makes that OS less important. Note to Sumeet Madhukar Moghe (RE: pirating games) I can't pirate games as I simply don't run proprietary software, under Linux or any other OS. One of the advantages of FLOSS is that the whole concept of software "piracy" simply goes away. Copyright infringement (by a developer or distributor) is still possible, but so-called 'piracy' is not. > - t. --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> Any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, VCR's, or personal computers, must be under the control of the citizen and not a third party. -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/ -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
