Cedega (formerly known as WineX) is TransGaming Technologies' proprietary fork of Wine (from when the license of Wine wasn't the LGPL but the X11 license), which is designed specifically for running games written for Microsoft Windows under Linux. As such, its primary focus is implementing the DirectX API.

WineX was renamed to Cedega on the release of version 4.0 on June 22, 2004.

Licenses

Though Cedega is mainly proprietary software, Transgaming does make part of the source publicly available via CVS, under a mix of licenses. Though this is mainly done to allow a means for non-TG staff to view and submit fixes to the code, it is also frequently used as a means to obtain a sort-of 'demo' version of Cedega. Due to complaints of the difficulty of building a usable version of the program from the public CVS, as well as its outdated nature, Transgaming released a proper demo of Cedega. 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 and it is not clear if it will be re-released in the future.

While the licenses under which the code is released do permit non-commercial redistribution of precompiled public-CVS versions of the software, Transgaming strongly discourages this, openly warning that the license of TG-copyrighted sections of code will be changed if they feel abuse is occurring or otherwise threatened. Transgaming similarly discourages source-based distributions like Gentoo Linux 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 as the X Window System, but owing to concern about proprietary versions of Wine (WineX) and 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 mimics 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/or 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
• Pixel Shaders 2.0
• Vertex Shaders 2.0
• DirectX 9.0
• Joystick support including remapping axes
• The ability to run some Windows games

Present

Cedega subscribers have been reducing constantly and have 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 attribute the apparent lack of interest from TransGaming on Cedega on their focus on Cider, a similar MS-Win32, WINE based API layer for Mac OS X systems, supported by Electronics Arts to bring their Windows native games to Mac.