Kinda lame title aside, this little entry is about my first successful go with Wine. No, not the alcoholic beverage destilled from grapes, commonly referred to as wine. I'll not keep it a secret, that I've had many successful goes with that in my life already. And probably more unsuccessful. No, this is about Wine. The Windows Simulator for Unix.
It's not really an emulator. It allows you to run windows programs and binaries natively in an environment such as Ubuntu Linux (among many other OS flavors). I've had half a mind to install it forever, but as I've described only too many times on this blog already, my encounter with the 64 but version of Ubuntu installed here beforehand, prevented me from daring. Now, things are different. And today, I figured what the hamsandwich... I'll give it a spin.
Yeah, so what to test out first? I wanted it to be something not terribly demanding of the system, readily available, and something that was approved in the Wine database over programs that will run out of the box, as they say. In other words, will run without a lot of messing around with files and what have we.
So I stumbled upon 1964. The Nintendo 64 emulator. I don't know if I have mentioned it, but I do enjoy the Mario games for Nintendo. I own a Wii at the moment, and I've bought most of the first Mario Bros games, and played them vehemently. My friends too! Which, I guess, is one of the reasons they are indeed my friends. They share a lot of the same affinities for the old pop culturesque things in life. Aaaaaanywho, that's not really the point. The point is, that I've played the Nintendo 64 games on my PC for many years, through an emulator. More specifically, I've played the game, Super Mario 64, arguably one of the better games ever made. For any platform. Yeah, you read that correctly. Any platform. It's that good imo.
So I'm thinking: Yeah. Let's go for an emulator. Looking through the Wine dbase of apps, I see 1964, and follow the link to the main article about this install. People claim things work perfectly straight away, and I follow another link to the download of 1964. I get it, move it to the right directory, and run it. I'm immediately greeted with a standard Windows installer, one that I'm only too familiar with. Now, it's not disconcerting at all. Just a little weird to see the timeless windows dialog box design in an Ubuntu installation. Yeah, it's my first time. So what?
I install it, and run it, and it actually DOES work. Minor flickering from time to time, when it comes to graphics, but nothing that bothers me at all. After fetching the rom from my ftp server at home, I'm jumping and fighting mushrooms, Mario style, in no time at all. It's great. Something to relish. I'll look into getting my gamepad configured as well, even though I doubt I'd be bringing it to work anyway. But it's nice to know that I can just whip up a game of the old SM64 whenever I feel like it, even when I'm in Ubuntu.
I saw Sims 3 in the list of games that apparently work well in Wine, so.. I guess I'll try giving that a go at some point. Would be pretty cool if it worked as well. I have my fears, though. As I always do. But anywho, just wanted to tell you guys that another pioneering point has been raked into my little account, and another move towards open sourced living has been taken. It's getting there... slowly. But it's getting there.
