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.