TacOps on Unix - works (sort of, for some uses)

[Redwolf]

I can run TacOps under Wine in Linux and FreeBSD. Not entirely perfect but good enough for me. I could run in vmware all along but it wasn't a big enough improvement over having a backyard machine running Windows.

Anway, the instructions for setting up Wine for TacOps are on this webpage:

http://schlepper.hanse.de/redwolf/tacops-on-unix.html

Please, post your feedback here. I want to improve that page so that anyone can run this stuff, I will add FAQs and troubleshooting sections based on your feedback.

Since I'm not a native speaker I would also appreciate spelling and grammatics corrections (should probably go by email, it's in my profile).

[ April 03, 2004, 09:21 PM: Message edited by: redwolf ]

[phil180]

Alas, I'm not having much luck with Wine (on Linux on i386) and the demo of TacOps 4. Curiously, the symptoms vary between different machines (tried three!) and different Wine/WineX builds (the suggested 20030911 Wine build, Wine 20040309, and a recent WineX).

Some of the symptoms are similar to the parts listed as `What doesn't work quite so well yet' on your web page (e.g., lock-ups when touching arrows in the artillery support window). Unfortunately, the best running machine locked-up randomly during the combat phase. Oh well.

Others threw exceptions or locked-up during the initial placement of units, or while selected the scenerio file.

Have many people reading these forums had much success with running TacOps on Wine? Did it need any tweaking, or is it really very sensitive to both the underlying hardware and Wine[X] build (as it seems from my attempts so far)?

Cheers,

Phil.

[Redwolf]

Since I wrote the initial post a few more tings came up (I think I edited the webpage):

1) the machine where the scrollbars worked does not actually always work, for some reason the lockups are just rare as compared to 100% in the other installations. Unfortunately that blocks this from using the working version for debugging

2) overall Wine is not good enough for any kind of multi-player. I only use it for hotsteat experiments and answering the odd PBEM move. Running a server for a non-umpire-intensive CPX also worked but you really have to watch the scrollbars and the fire range display.

I strongly recommend using VMWare to run TacOps on Wine. The vmware situation changed over the last years in that today's mainstream PCs are very much powerful enough to run it. A P-III 600 could run TacOps in vmware but it was slow. A modern ninja-macho 2500+ whatever PC makes it entirely feasible.

Personally, I change my original scepticism about Wine to optimism but I am now back into the forget-it camp. If you follow WineX you can see that they very deliberately make one narrow set of software work and have to work hard to do so. I interpret that as a sign that they are still very far from being an universal emulator.

Plus the Win32 API stinks anyway...