Transgaming Technologies and Mac Developers

ZerocarboN writes "With such current Mac publishers as Aspyr and MacSoft typically spending months to bring games to the Mac, Mr. State said: "We imagine that they are re-evaluating their business models. Our technology does revolutionize how games are brought to the Mac, which we believe will result in a paradigm shift in the Mac game publishing landscape." He added that TransGaming has no plans to license Cider to other companies, but "we are always open to discussion.""

Comments

Transgaming is NOT the only solution!

[mrchaotica]

There's also Crossover Mac coming, from Codeweavers. Not only is this better because the user can buy it instead of waiting on game makers to port stuff, but it's also better because unlike Transgaming, Codeweavers contributes back to WINE.

Of course, there's also vanilla DarWINE, but I haven't had any success with it on my Intel iMac yet.

Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution!

[pAnkRat]

Cedega ist available from CVS.

The difference between Cedega from CVS and the commercial package is mainly the copyprotection stuff.
Commercial cedega is able to play games from the original disc using the original binaries with copyprotection.
Transgaming cannot release the code for this because it is the IP from another company, Transganming is licesing the code.

If you use Cedega from CVS, you have to use some hacked binaries from gamecopyworld for most of the games you play.

AFAIK wine does not incorporate CEDEGA's code because they implement their own way of DirectX 9.0
For some games it works even better then the cedega version, YMMV

Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

CVS is almost always way outdated and last time I looked missing much more than the copy protection, and besides, it's not under an open source license.

But, yeah, at this late stage the WINE people have just said fuck it, we're not going to get anything from Cedega, and wrote their own stuff.

Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution!

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Cedega ist available from CVS.

I assume you're talking about this, which hasn't been updated since June, and which barely has any discussion except about internationalization. Or maybe you're talking about ReWind, the BSD-licenced fork of WINE, which is even more lifeless.

Contrast that with WINE, which is actively developed, discussed, and used enough to justify "weekly" news articles.

Cider

[kevin_conaway]

Since the summary didn't explain what Cider is:

technology that promises to convert Windows games to Mac OS X on Intel processors without the need for the long porting process traditionally required to bring titles to the platform. The company said that it has already forged agreements "with a number of the top tier video game publishers" to bring many of their titles to Intel-based Macs "in the next few months."

Re:Not Good

[rhesuspieces00]

if you are including every headless beige box that gets assembled and stuck in a corner to serve files, that might be true (although I think you're making up statistics), but among computers purchased and used by actual people (the part of PC sales interesting to game developers), apple is most certainly growing, across the board but in laptop sales especially.

Re:Not Good

[vegasmacguy]

Where the fuck do you Apple kooks get this crap! Apple's worldwide marketshare has been in a constant decline ever since Jobs took over.

Where do you get yours? Are you reading financial reports from 6 years ago? Apple has been in steady growth cycle for the last several years. They have consistently reported that 50% of thier sales or more were not previous Mac owners.

Apple Financial Results

Here's some more links on the subject

http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/12/02/safari.popu larity.growing/

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun 2006/tc20060615_080175.htm

http://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/07/19.18.s html

Explaination of the Myth of Market Share (Google Cache)

Re:Not Good

[Time Doctor]

You have an interesting definition of emulation. From wikipedia:
A software emulator allows computer programs to run on a platform (computer architecture and/or operating system) other than the one for which they were originally written.

Note the part about "operating system" emulation. Just like Gnu's Not Unix, Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are just names, Wine most certainly is an Emulator, and Gnu's Not Unix when they can't pay for the name, but it sure is Unix otherwise.

not the silver bullet

[oliderid]

Take a look at their support forum. And you will see the problem.
It looks like transgaming needs to tweak its engine for every video games. When the game receives a patch, some of them stop to work and gamers have to wait another tweak from transgaming. It looks like a lot of users are frustrated.

Transgaming may dramatically reduce the time you need to port a Windows based video game to Linux and MacOSX but it isn't such a clean way yet. They do not provide a 100% compatible DirectX 9.0 framework.