On June 22, TransGaming announced the release on WineX 4.0, renaming it Cedega Linux. As a rule, I'm skeptical of vendors' claims for their products, but Cedega Linux lives up to its billing: it takes Linux gaming into new territory and puts Linux gaming back on the map. In short, Cedega is fine wine, indeed!

TransGaming renamed WineX "Cedega," which is more conventionally known as a grape used to make Port wine and which enables TransGaming (and columnists) to engage in lots of wordplay. The name change reflects significant changes and improvements in the product:

• Support for DirectX 9.0
• Support for high-performance pixel and vertex shaders
• A new version of the Cedega user interface, Point2Play

Without going into the gory details, Cedega makes it possible to run Windows programs, specifically, Windows games, on a Linux system without having to have copy of Windows installed. Cedega provides all of the necessary Windows functionality because it dynamically links Win32 API calls to native Linux code.

You might think of Cedega as being a "port" of the Windows gaming API to Linux. Supported Win32 APIs include Direct3D for 3D graphics, DirectInput for mouse, keyboard, and joystick input, DirectSound for audio, and so forth.

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