need to buy a laptop, ibook or PC laptop?

I'm a linux-only user since some time, but I have to admit that you won't get far with gaming experience this way. I do watch the development of the Wine project (implementing a lot of the windows APIs on a unix system, so you can run them natively - not to be confused with a full-blown emulator or a virtualization). There is a lot of development in the source tree but there are still a multitude of bugs that are not fixed and won't get in the near future. I have for example reported a graphical bug with Max Payne since some months. Some minor thing but it really bothers the user when playing the game. I also found the position in the source that introduces the problem. The d3d developer is well aware of this problem, but it still isn't fixed in the latest version of wine (that came out some days ago).

Another example is copy protection. You won't get most SafeDics, SecuROM, whatever games to run on Wine. You either use a crack and hope it then works. Most of the time it does, but sometimes it doesn't.
Problem: Sometimes you won't find cracks for the latest games, but only something like Mini-Images. Now you don't have an optical drive emulator like dtools on linux. So you can't use these images, fucked.... (most of the time I wouldn't work anyway)

You see, if you want to run recent games you better stay with Windows.

What works great on Wine is older software. I can e.g. play Counter-Strike 1.5 without any flaws. Runs better than on Windows.

DOS games run great in DOSBox, I'm currently playing the old BlueByte game Albion. So if you're a bit into retro-gaming you can find a lot of good software on the unix side. Recent games -> Windows or you want to experiment with the latest wine source (or start hacking source yourself... *g*)

I can't give you any specific tips on the hardware.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by zander

i am pretty into my retro games, just not pc retro. Right now i'm mostly using ePSXe for playing PS1 games which i'm sure also works for linux . i don't really play that many PC games but its just the ones i want to play are usually towards the high end graphics cards. its just so its there if i want to play them, and i keep hearing how good the hardware is on an apple, so i thought it would work better.

The problem with emulators on linux is that there are only a few ones for the Playstation. ePSXe is also rather old, not updated anymore and so on. The developers have lost all the source in a crash some years ago, so the project is not coming back. There is however the pSX emulator which is updated on a regular base and Xebra, which is windows-only, but I've heard that it works under wine with minor performance impact. There is also a fork of the old and abandoned pcsx project, named pcsx-df IIRC. So Playstation emulation on linux can be done, it's not impossible. I'm e.g. playing FF9 on pSX, working smooth (although my laptops video card has virtually no 3d acceleration...)

Originally Posted by zander

edit: is cadega any good for playing windows games or is that just a branch off of wine?

The Cedega/Transgaming team ripped of the source from Wine some time ago. At this point the Wine project used a not so restricting license for their code. This enabled Transgaming to use their code, modifying and selling it (making a lot of money) and not giving anything back. The Wine developers were quite pissed and quickly changed to license type so something like that won't happen again. I can really understand them. You invest countless hours of programming work into this project for free and then one small company comes, copies your code, makes some changes to it and sells it. And when asking them about contributing something back to the project they give you the finger...
Anyway, the Cedega project had the better D3D9 implementation some time ago. But that didn't last long. Now Wine's d3d9 code is much better than the Cedega one. The only thing that still makes Cedega superior is some additional code that enables some copy protection techniques to work. This code was supplied by the copy protection authors themself, and probably won't ever make it into Wine in this special form. You better spend your money supporting the Wine team, instead of getting a copy of Cedega. A bunch of code thieves if you ask me...

There's nowhere I can't reach.