TUAW hands on with CrossOver Games

Mike!

What about your Portal wallpaper? Where is that one from? It is awesome.

I wonder if Civ IV (non-STEAM version) would run with this on a different Mac. I know that if you were to use BootCamp, the game would not run on the Mac Mini because the GMA950 is not one of the few integrated graphics chipsets that the game is compatible with.

On an unrelated note, I hate the Mac port of Civ IV. I'm fairly certain it is just running on an emulation layer. On my MBP, it runs terribly at the lowest settings. If I boot my machine into XP, I can max out the game's settings and never have even a little slowdown. So, if I choose the Mac version of the game over the Windows version, I pay more money and get significantly worse performance.

Been running Counter strike source for a couple days now, works great.

It's well worth trying the CrossOver Games demo with the game you want to run before buying it; you have a week's free use in demo mode in which to do this. Whether a game will work or not is entirely down to the game, and isn't as simple as saying "if it's supported it'll work, and if it isn't, it won't."

The game I personally wanted to run was Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete (as the Mac version is Classic-only and hence no longer runs under Intel or even PowerPC-Leopard).

And I can confirm that HoMM3 works *perfectly* under CrossOver Games. Really well, in fact. (It didn't work well under CrossOver 6, but under Games it's great.) And, though I haven't tried them yet, I'm certain that other games in the Heroes series (Heroes Chronicles, Heroes IV, Heroes II etc.) will also work, because they /almost/ work well under CrossOver 6, and CrossOver Games entirely fixed the problems they exhibit with Heroes III. Actually, there's a very minor problem with Heroes III in terms of switching between windowed and full-screen modes, but if you're prepared to play in one or the other and not switch, that's the only fault at present.

Anyway, that was the clincher for me. Being able to run Heroes III made CrossOver Games well worth buying.

Natural Selection, Day Of Defeat and other popular Steam games runs very good.

Thanks for clarifying.

However, based on what I'm hearing about performance, I don't se how this will ever be an acceptable replacement for running these apps natively (on a Mac) through the use of Boot Camp.

Alex, do you see this type of application ever running processor / memory-intensive Windows software @ an acceptable speed?

@icepulse

It's not an emulator because emulators create a virtual machine which behaves like a completely separate computer running a completely separate OS. WINE, and its derivatives provide an implementation of the WIN32 API to allow WIN32 apps to run directly on the OS. There's no second OS and no second (virtual) machine.

Additionally, it should be noted that WINE stands for "WINE Is Not An Emulator".

Would people please stop referring to this as a virtualization app? It isn't. At all. As Dale said above, this is based on WINE which again is not a virtualization app or an emulator or whatever other incorrect label you want to give it. It's a set of libraries and other binaries intended to provide the right environment for Win32 binaries to run on other platforms, in this case Mac OS X.

I don't get it...

Why not just run BootCamp? I run Oblivion, DX2, HOMM5, Fallout: Tactics, Far Cry, BioShock, Silent Storm and more, without a hitch. Simple as copping a new copy of XP Pro on Ebay and loading up on cheap-ass PC games from last year!

Well, I think I found the Civ4 problem. From their website:

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/group/?app_id=1728

"Steam version supported in CrossOver only. Other versions of this game are unsupported at this time."