good news for ppl wanting pc games on their macs

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1937


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AppleInsider Staff said:

Portability engine promises Windows games for Mac

By AppleInsider Staff
Published: 06:00 PM EST
A company specializing in software portability technology has released a portability engine that is supposed to give game developers the power to deploy Windows-based games on Intel Macs almost instantly and without the need for traditional arduous porting.

On its Web site on Thursday, TransGaming introduced the "Cider" portability engine, proclaiming that: "No longer will Mac users be forced to wait months or years for the few top tier titles to get into their hands."

The Toronto-based company said Cider is so effective that publishers will be able to simultaneously deploy the Mac and Windows versions of their titles "with little to no effort", even with games already under development.

"Cider is a sophisticated portability engine that allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs without any modifications to the original game source code," the company said. "Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs."

According to TransGaming's product information, developers need only to maintain one code base in order to target multiple platforms. Windows games wrapped in the Cider portability engine are said to use the same copy protection, lobbies, game matching and connectivity as the original title.

Additionally, the company said, games migrated to Intel Macs using Cider will also run on Linux under Cedega, allowing developers to forge a path to two game hungry markets at the same time.

Click to expand...

Ya, I read this elsewhere too. I just don't see it happening myself...

i get a blank page with an ad up top.

I'm a little skeptical. It seems to promise similar performance between OSX and Windows, but any sort of emulation slows things down, especially so with something so processor-intensive as DirectX-to-OpenGL graphics commands.

If the games play okay, I might buy some, but I'd much rather have QUALITY ports made (which is a rarity these days, look at Civilization IV) so that the games can run natively on OSX.

Hopefully, at the very least, this technology will convert a few people over to Macs.

If it's using Windows APIs and Intel hardware, there will be very little "emulation" per-se. There would likely be virtualization though, which is very different from emulation.

I found a board about Cider gaming: http://www.setbb.com/ciderboard/
Haven't registered yet, though, but I'm gonna do it as soon as I get my Intel MacBook Pro back (it's currently broken...)!

You have to register and sign in to see it....

Well, I couldn't wait to see it, so I decided to give it a try and they're just starting the board (I'm only number 5) but it seems nice... they're building a list of games that work with Cider etc...