Macworld Expo 2011: CrossOver goes to version 10 with Impersonator

Discussing virtualization products without including VirtualBox in the options is... kinda crazy. It's free, allows you to install not only any flavor of Windows (3.1 - Win 7), but also any flavor of Linux. Meaning that any application for those OSs runs natively. The only drawback is that you need to have a Windows license, but that's not that much more expensive than Crossover, and is pretty much guaranteed to run anything that runs on Windows. I highly recommend it.

I have been using CrossOver For Mac for several years now. It is a great way to run Windows-Only apps without the expense of, first, purchasing a virtualization app (Parallels, VM Ware, etc.), and second, purchasing a copy of Windows to run on it.

If you must be in a Windows environment all day long, then virtualization is the way to go. But if you have one or two windows-only apps that you need to access periodically, then CrossOver can't be beat.

"While compatibility listings are good, there are still a few trouble spots in terms of getting things working."

Few? Major apps like IE 7 through 8 have numerous issues and many such as Office 2010 do not work at all (and even older 2007 have many major issues). Before spending cash on Crossover, peruse their compatibility list and make sure your apps have gold medal (at least silver) compatibility rating.

To the Author,

Crossover is not an emulator, it runs wine. Wine is an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator".

Thanks.

From WINE HQ

"1.3. Is Wine an emulator? There seems to be disagreement.
There is a lot of confusion about this, particularly caused by people getting Wine's name wrong and calling it WINdows Emulator.
When users think of an emulator, they tend to think of things like game console emulators or virtualization software. However, Wine is a compatibility layer - it runs Windows applications in much the same way Windows does. There is no inherent loss of speed due to "emulation" when using Wine, nor is there a need to open Wine before running your application.
That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator; both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode.
There are a few things that make Wine more than just an emulator.
Sections of Wine can be used on Windows. Some virtual machines use Wine's OpenGL-based implementation of Direct3D on Windows rather than truly emulate 3D hardware.
Winelib can be used for porting Windows application source code to other operating systems that Wine supports to run on any processor - even processors that Windows itself does not support.
"Wine is not just an emulator" is more accurate. Thinking of Wine as just an emulator is really forgetting about the other things it is. Wine's "emulator" is really just a binary loader that allows Windows applications to interface with the Wine API replacement."

why would you bother to write an article like this if you must include the statement "...though I didn't spend a lot of time checking out how it ran."

good stuff

I've been using Crossover 9 to play my beloved Rollercoaster Tycoon (original) and it works perfectly. It integrates games into OS X as if they are Mac games. Can't recommend it enough.

They had me at I.