CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I was reading about Aion, an upcoming MMO from NCSoft. It looks like a very interesting (and beautiful) game. Now I lost the link so forgive me, but I read that it has an anti-cheating system in it called Gameguard that does some low level stuff with the Windows kernel. The site also said this is the reason things like Wine/CXGames would never be able to run it. But, CXGames already does the impossible (run Windows programs without Windows) so I was curious if this would ever potentially be supported? I'm sure anything is possible but it might be a case of the amount of work required outweighing the benefits (just to support one game).

Seems in this world all things are possible :) As far as Aion in crossover goes, it uses Gameguard anticheat techs... so, until such a time as it's possible to use Gameguard in wine Aion would likely be out without disabling gameguard. From what I've read, Gameguard support is incredibly difficult as it's actually a windows kernel rootkit. Since there is no windows kernel in wine, there's nothing for it to rootkit.

Thank you for the response! I suppose there's nothing CodeWeavers could do about it then. It's a shame too because it sounds like NCSoft couldn't even make an official port to Mac OS X if they wanted to because Gameguard isn't available for other platforms.

I assume that the Steam version of Aion will be downloaded and installed without game guard. Most of our supported Steam games are unsupported in non-Steam (re: CD) form for this reason - copy protection devices that don't jive with Crossover.

Of course, how well Aion runs in CX Games is another (untested) matter...

Good point. I'll buy my 3rd box via Steam instead of Gamestop and give it a run in the next beta if life allows.

Since GameGuard is a cheat protection and not a copy protection, I'm pretty sure that the Steam version will include it too. (Even if it was just a copy protection there would be a high chance for it to be in the Steam version too ... only a few publishers rework their code to fully use Steam; most just wrap it around their already existing product.)

May be worth noting, at launch time for Aion, gameguard will not be included. That said, I haven't had a chance yet to test Aion with cxgames, nor do I believe that it will forever be without gameguard.