When reading through the WineConf 2006 Summary , I was really excited to read that there finally could potentially be some progress in the area of supporting copy protection schemes.. I quote:
As far as 1.0 goes, […] copy protection would be really nice to get in the tree and Ivan Leo Puoti reiterated that he had patches available. Alexandre responded that there are some critical parts of the design that need to be fleshed out because “the Wine maintainer is a pain in the ass.”
[…]
I overheard a conversation between Ivan and Alexandre about copy protection that basically laid out a roadmap for getting it into Wine. There’s quite a bit of work involved since Alexandre would like to see a services.exe created that can be used to load the Safedisc drivers. In turn, that means there needs to be some communication with it, most likely via RPC, and that will require quite a bit of interface design.
Why do I care? 🙂 I believe it’s one of the main showstoppers for running windows games on linux. Okay, there’s always a lot of work on the DirectX emulation and stuff, but there are a lot of people able to help there. Supporting the ‘dark routines’ or intricacies of windows, which copy protection schemes rely on, seems like a lot more difficult , so less people commit themselves..
I don’t buy many games, but I do own Trackmania Sunrise, which I think is a marvelous game, yet simple in design. I believe it would run pretty well in wine, but right now it’s impossible due to the starforce protection… which I find a real pity! It is even more a pity when you realise the Trackmania Nations edition is even a free game but still has the copy protection applied!
So the day Wine will support Trackmania, I’ll be a happy linux gamer 😉 Please vote! 😉