Windows Games on Macs Without Windows

Dotnaught writes "TransGaming Inc. is making its 'Cider' portability engine for Apple's Intel-based Macs available to Windows game developers. The software promises to let Windows games run on Intel Macs without Windows or Apple's Boot Camp. 'Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs,' the company claims. Cider is a software for game developers, not end-users. Cider-enhanced games are scheduled to appear as soon as October. If Cider works well, will there be any more Mac-specific game development? And if not, will it matter?"

Comments

Re:Cool!

[WhiteWolf666]

Transgaming already does translate DirectX and Direct3D to OpenGL with little overhead. If the rumors are true, they are currently working on Pixel Shaders 2.0 and up.

Cedega is a fork of Wine from back when Wine was BSD licensed. It's really cool; I play lots of Windows games on Linux with it.

Presumably Cider is a Winelib-style toolkit to generate OS X games from Windows games. I, for one, welcome our Cedega-lib powered OS X overlords ;-)

Re:Please ... NO!!!!

[MBCook]

I switched to the Mac last year (I have a G4 so this is a moot point for me for now). The fact is I think this is an EXCELLENT idea. Now I agree that this is not a long term solution. But look at it this way: how many millions did it cost to port and test Civilization 4 for the Mac? It was still viable though.

Now if porting games was (almost as) easy as re-linking with an extra library, we'd see many more games for the Mac. The problem would be that they have to pay money to get the library, but it doesn't cost as much as a full port. Now they can do this and get a bunch more money.

Now the suits take over, as well as some logic from the programmers. "Sure, we made money off the Mac there. But with a little more time upfront and using OpenGL we can make this next game Mac too without having to pay for that library! It will probably perform better too."

Next thing you know, more and more games are Mac native. If that doesn't happen, then what's the loss? Mac gamers still get more games that we have now. It's not ideal, but it's a plus.

I agree that OpenGL/OpenAL/SDL is the ideal solution. But this may lead to that.

Now let's not forget just how many games these days (especially big name stuff like movie games, etc) are put on EVERY platform. They are put on the PS2/GC/XBox/360/Wii/PS3/PC. Guess what runs on almost all those platforms? OpenGL. If you want to make it easy to go on a console later (or multiple consoles) then just use OpenGL. Oh... look... now making it work on a Mac is trivial.

This is either useful, or will propel steps in the right direction. Either way, it's good.

Re:NOT COOL

[smallfries]

How much of this is down to Cedega? I've got a dual-boot so that I can play Civ4 on either windows, or in linux. Actually, that is literally why I have the machine... it's a very addictive game. Since the 1.52 patch came out it has been as stable on linux as on windows, and I've stopped rebooting to play it. I wouldn't go as far as to actually call it stable, but then it isn't on windows either. It tends to fall over after running for an hour or so. It sometimes can't reload games if they've gotten too complicated. And when it does decide to crash it can just fall flat with no warning at all.

But this is Firaxis's programming - this is the state of the game under windows. And sadly it has improved a hell of a lot since the shipped version...

As far as installation goes. This was a bitch at first, but most of those forum posts are about how to get the game installed *before* Cedega supported it. Now you just run the installer (selecting XP mode or whichever way round it is) and then hit properties afterwards to set the right windows version. Everything else is automatic.

Re:Cool!

[treak007]

The ones that are supported actually run faster than native on windows. Don't ask me why, as it is natural to assume that the translation would slow them down. It could just be that OpenGL/linux is faster than DirectX/windows

That is because Wine is not an emulator but rather a set of libraries. Running a set of libraries is very similar to running the game native. You could think of Wine more of a directx install for linux, however the problem lies in the fact that Wine does not provide support for every function in DirectX. Also, the performace boost can also be attributed to the Linux kernel being more effient.