Running windows aps on Mac

I have a feeling this must be a very common question so apologies if this is repetitious of other posts and should be merged.

I am looking for a way of running Windows programs on Mac, without going to the extent of installing the entire Windows OS.

I found something called Wine Bottler but its unfortunately-named "howto" section made no sense to me whatsoever. From what I've read elsewhere, it's not for people new to this sort of thing like me.

If anyone can help me out that would be great.

Thanks in advance

There's Wine that you have found or CrossOver.

Both are pretty straightforward but take a bit of reading about. But neither can run all windows apps so it really depends on what you want to run.

As mrplow said, Wine is an application that can allow a good number of Windows applications to work without requiring Windows. There is a list of these applications at winehq.com that you can check out.

You should, however, first try to see if you can find a OS X native application to replace your Windows program before trying to these emulation environments. If no native application is available and Wine or other similar applications can't run the applications you want, then going with Windows in a VM is a fairly non-intrusive way of getting the applications going..

I've had good luck with the latest version of WINE included with the WINE Bottler app. However, most of the Windows stuff I run with it is so ancient that it probably doesn't matter. I love those old Windows games that I used to play in Windows 3.0. Remember Windows 3.0? (I'm telling my age.)

I DO remember Windows 3.0, but since I had to be in DOS to get there first, most of my games were just DOS-based at that time..

Tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the right amount of EMM to load a game..WOW, those were the days..

Hours spent freeing up ram to play x-wing ah those halcyon days

Ahh X-Wing, a man after my own heart..

Life was great when I found QEMM..

Anyway, I think I've hijacked the thread enough..

I prefer the wine based Wineskin, which creates a .app file that contains all necessary files. It also offers many older/different versions of wine incase your program doesn't work with the current build of wine.

I've tried WineBottler before but it didn't work quite well on my system.

Sorry for the late reply, everyone, and thanks a lot for the info.