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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?"
So it's just Transgaming's derivation of winelib, right?
I've never really underderstood Transgaming's focus on cross platform gaming. Most Linux and Mac users aren't heavy gamers. Most people tend to use Windows or consoles for gaming. If you're using OS X or Linux it's generally to get something (real work) done.
Not that Linux and Mac aren't technically viable game platforms, but that's not their general use.
As long as these games perform well on Intel macs this can only be a good thing as games are different to other applications.
With games then they're usually full screen and you see none of the usual OS user interface and so a game does not need a Mac look and feel like for example a word processing application.
So for apps an approach like this would be bad, imagine companies stop producing their mac apps because they could easily port over using something like winelib then you'd lose the mac experience, but for games it does not matter as they don't follow platform conventions anyway.
with OpenGL.
This, just a few articles up from the "Vista sucks!" story.
The biggest road blocks I hear of for switching from Windows to a Mac are "price" and "games". I won't fuel the flamewars by making definitive statements about either point, other than to say that it looks like those blocks are starting to come down.
Microsoft has to be worried about this.
Even if you don't need to change the source code, you might need to link it with other libraries, or even run the source code through a preprocessor before compiling. You would then need to create additional wrappers to launch the game, etc.
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Mac users expect things to just work. Selling Cedega to them would mean lots of pissed off customers who've realised it doesn't actually let you play many games properly.
I'm pretty sure they didn't want to run Windows, that's why most of them don't buy a normal PC. They want to run MacOS, but they still want to run certain Windows programs.
I, too, want to run windows games, but on linux. There is a certain amount of truth to the idea that if I want the games to be on linux, and not on windows, that I should pay for them. The problem is that the only game I actually want to play that is available for linux (at least, the only commercial game) costs more than twice as much for linux as it does for windows. I'm just not going to support that kind of behavior. I'd rather dual-boot. Or, as I am now doing, I'd rather run windows, and put linux in a vm so I can run linux software.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's why I don't use Cedega. I've already paid for the games, and if I have to spend MORE money to play them, I'm just going to spend $400 for a Windows PC. Yeah, it's more expensive, but it'll play 100% of my games 100% of the time. It doesn't make sense to pay for something that doesn't work.
I guess that's a benefit of only playing older games.
Maybe not
they need to open up all their code and do a massive sync with the Wine/Darwin, React, & Crossover groups. Between the groups they just about have the whole windows clone thing whipped. If you put all the programmers together from the groups, they could just about lick this thing. And that would make MS really happy!!!
If this is for real, then we might just see more Mac ports of games ...
No, this will not mean more Mac ports. If anything it may mean fewer. Developers considering Mac may be able to blow off native Mac ports using the same reasons that they blow off native Linux ports: (1) Dual boot. (2) Emulation of the Win32 gaming APIs. Under PowerPC dual booting was not an option and emulation would mean emulating a CPU not just a gaming API. Since running the Win32 version of a game on Mac hardware was not realistic, a native port was justified. If Ciders allows Win32 games to run "well enough" then there is no economic reason to do a native Mac port.
The market for a game is *not* the number of Mac/Linux purchasers. Yeah, that sounds odd but hang on a minute. The market is really only those who refuse to dual boot or emulate and won't buy unless they have a native port. Those who are willing to dual boot or emulate and run the Win32 version don't count because they do not add any revenue. They are already customers buying the Win32 version. A native Mac/Linux version would generate no additional revenue from these people, it would only move a sale from the Win32 column to the Mac or Linux column. So there is no new revenue, but there are the expenses from development and support, and these expenses have to be paid for by those who would never buy the Win32. Under Linux there are too few of these people.
Today Mac has the advantage over Linux that Mac gamers have a proven track record of spending money. If developers can get Mac gamers to to accept Cider in large enough numbers then native Mac ports will no longer occur.