CrossOver Games released, designed to play Windows games on Mac and Linux

Codeweavers has released CrossOver Games, a games-specific version of CrossOver, their Windows emulation software. Jeremy White has the story behind the release over on their blog -- apparently the application team wasn't working quite as quickly as they wanted, but the games team was chugging right along in terms of compatibility, so they decided to go ahead and ship what they'd done with games on its own.

The compatibility list isn't bad (most of the Steam stuff is on there, which is great, although it is a little weird that they brag about World of Warcraft and EVE Online, considering that those two run natively on Mac just fine; guess you Linux folks need your MMO fix, too) but nothing really jumps out here that might encourage you to use CrossOver rather than just, say, Boot Camp-ing the game up yourself. DirectX 10 is apparently causing problems, too, since neither Crysis, Gears of War, or Unreal Tournament III are on there.

Still, a valiant effort, and if you're desperate to get one of these games working and playable on your Mac (and don't have a spare copy of Windows sitting around to install with Boot Camp), CrossOver Games might be just what you need. TUAW is working on getting a copy of it, and as soon as we do, we'll run it through the grinder and see what we can get to come out the other side.

[Via DF]

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Source: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/

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Codeweavers has released CrossOver Games, a games-specific version of CrossOver, their Windows emulation software. Jeremy White has the...

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billdogs

Ok so i got the new mac book pro fully loaded 4gigs of ram 128bit nividia card yada yada yada...... I got my hands on crossover games....my impression is that it sucks. unless u wana play there crappy small list of old out of date games that are supported. But who wants to do that! I want to play new games as they are released and it fails to install these unsupported games every time which makes angry. Unless crossover makes these new games compatible w/in a reasonable time after there release this program is worthless. Why cant I just play somthing new and cool!? im sick of wow. I hope cider is going to actually work.

June 10 2008 at 7:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

nvidia2008

Ironically TF2 installed quicker on my MacBook then my UberPC. As for running it... LOLZ We'll see... Hmmm Peggle is slow...

March 28 2008 at 11:42 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bob S.

I see nothing on their site about compatibility with a Boot Camp partition. (I checked the support pages, manual, and wiki.) Anyone know if I can install and point it to the Steam stuff that's already installed over there? I'd love to be able to play TF2 and Portal on the Mac side, but have no interest in having to duplicate the files.

March 28 2008 at 11:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Timothy VanBenschoten

I just installed it and played some CS 1.6 it worked well actually. Definitely playable. I have a MBP 2.2 SR, 4GB RAM and 128MB video. Frame rates were anywhere from 50-75FPS while in gameplay.

March 27 2008 at 10:00 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Robert Jones

Just to be precise, Crossover is not an emulator. It is based on WINE, which, um, stands for "Wine is Not an Emulator". It's a native (if not-necessarily-complete) port of the WIN32 API without any emulation layer at all.

March 27 2008 at 2:06 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Blaktornado

Any word on pricing?

March 27 2008 at 12:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Blaktornado's comment

nvidia2008

Price is USD 39.95

March 28 2008 at 11:51 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

driftwood

I tried the demo, bought Team Fortress 2, and it didn't work well at all. It just always stared at the ceiling no matter what I did.

Maybe this thing works better?

March 27 2008 at 11:10 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

JiN

This is a great app for casual users who want to play a classic game (Age of Empires I/II) but doesn't want to restart to do it.

March 27 2008 at 9:36 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Sam Colak

EVE online is not native - its running via the transgaming engine. Its no different to crossover !

March 27 2008 at 5:54 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Sam Colak's comment

James

Except of course that Cider is based on Cedega which is an older, forked version of the MIT licensed Wine whereas CrossOver is based on the latest LGPL version of Wine.

March 27 2008 at 7:06 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Crysis, Gears of War and UT3 all run under DX9. As far as I'm aware there are no DX10 exclusive games.

March 26 2008 at 11:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply