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Power PC games on Lion
- Thread starter drybeer
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To be clear, there is no way to run PPC code in Lion without using emulation, and there isn't any PPC emulation right now that would do what you want. SheepShaver can run OS 9, but that's older than what you want and doesn't have the performance you need for the games you mentioned.
And lose a lot of performance. 3D games like the OP mentioned are going to have terrible framerates, even if they are old enough to be PPC.
Ah - that's good info.
Many thanks for all of the posts - to be clear I'm talking about the original Call of Duty...
Not for Call of Duty modern warfare et al.
Do you think this will be a patch or is this simply not possible in Lion (apologies for being somewhat dim on the subject - I'm no expert on Macs).
I don't know anything about Rosetta, but I wonder if Apple released it, could a 3rd party adapt it to run on Lion?
Well, we all know you can do the boot camp thing to run windows games on a mac. I thought about it - boot camp creates a 2nd partition on your drive which you boot from. So, a possible solution would be to create a partition on your drive that boots into Snow Leopard, then boot from that when you want to run games.
I wish they would. As it's highly likely that given the chance, a 3rd party would do a Rosetta patch.
FWIW, I'm all for progress, including with gaming, but OS X has some timeless classic games in native code (not Ciderized) that previously ran well on even fairly low-spec Macs.
I imagine that many gamers of various ages would love to keep the option of playing them on the latest Macs (some of which still have low specs) with OS X Lion. Eg., AoE 2, Rise of Nations, Diablo 2, Civilization 3, Starcraft, to name just a few.
Seems a pity to have lost all of those from the OS X games catalogue for the latest & all future Macs, just as the Mac platform was beginning to look a bit more solid gaming-wise for those who never want to use Boot Camp or buy a PC.
No. All the system files on Lion are intel-only now. There's no more PPC code left, and Rosetta needs that to work.
A good interim solution, but only useful for Macs that came with SL. Macs released after Lion can't run the older OS. A Virtual Machine may be able to run SL, though.
if performance is what matters to you... I prefer a performance hit and not having to install or run Windows at all.. and not losing access to my whole OS just to reboot to play a game. A performance hit is a much better trade off to me. While it might not be to you... its still nice to give everyone the options so they can do whats best for them.
True. With games, however, performance is top priority since low performance can be the difference between life and death. Ever lagged right off a cliff halfway into a very long mission forcing you to restart the whole mission? Sucks.
Not saying your way is wrong, but performance is generally extremely important in gaming.
Sometimes it's not an option. Half-Life 2 runs quite acceptably under Windows on my MacBook, but so poorly under OS X that it's completely unplayable. Granted, it's not an old PPC game that is the subject of this thread, just an example.
Install Snow Leopard on an external hard drive and use it just for games. That's what I would do. Cheaper than buying a PPC Mac (less space taken up too) and the alternative is Boot Camping it.
That's me! Though I did it mostly to run Quicken 2007. But the triple boot works fine. The only downside was that when I resized my Lion partition to make space for the Snow Leopard install, I lost the invisible maintenance partition. I might try to rectify that at some point.
I only carved out 10GB for the Snow Leopard install, which works fine. I disabled hibernation so the hibernation file wouldn't take up the extra hard drive space.
Cheers all!
But that's abvery extreme example. I prefer to sacrifice graphics quality and get acceptable frame rates rather than reboot into windows. If I can't get a stable or acceptable frame rate solution then I'm with you all the way. I play LotRO via crossover games but if I'm going on a raid then I'll reboot into windows as crossover occasionally locks up or lags in raids. I simply can't be bothered to reboot to log on just to do some solo/3 man stuff which is what I spend 90% of my time doing.
Well I never meant to try to play it if its unplayably bad. I just would rather turn down the resolution and a few graphics options and get the same frame rate. Its not really the "performance" that you sacrifice 99% of the time on newer games, just the graphics quality.