OS X help in running windows game on a mac

Your only option is Wine, and yeah, Crossover is Wine, just preconfigured for ease of use, and tailored on a per-application basis.

Wine is a perfectly valid option for older games, but anything more recent will be hit or miss. It might run perfectly, might run okay with a few hitches here and there, or might not run at all. If you want to know how well a game will run, hit up Google and type, say, for example, Witcher 2 Wine, and hit the appropriate link to WineHQ. It'll tell you how well it works, and give you a list of all the hoops you'll have to jump through to get it up and running.

As much as you don't want to, Windows on a Mac is perfectly fine if you're using it for gaming. You'll not have to really worry about viruses and such if you're just booting in to Windows to launch games. No to mention, 95% of the games will have their best performance running under Windows since they're most likely going to run natively under Windows and not OS X.

Just look at it this way: an operating system is a tool. A carpenter that wants to use a shoe to hammer nails vs a carpenter that wants to use a hammer will likely end up frustrated and unsatisfied with the final product in the end.

If you want to go down the Wine road, you'll find some great front-ends / management utilities on Mac. The Mac Wine community is actually pretty active and has come up with great projects that will help you making a game to work.

Wineskin and Barrel are two excellent examples of the above. FWIW I was able to play Skyrim from beginning to end without any problems using a wine wrapper with almost zero performance loss when compared with bootcamping it. However, the older the game, the better for performance/compatibility.

I see Windows via Bootcamp as the mostly viable way to play Windows games on your Mac. Even using Steam (Windows Steam). Not me, but some people complain about poor performance on the MacOS. You'll get absolutely the best game performance possible running Windows. It sits on it's own partition so no worries about Windows bugs getting into you MacOS.

Just do bootcamp, with an SSD it takes about 10-15 seconds to boot to windows, just as long as using parallels or trying to get Wine to work..

antonis said:

If you want to go down the Wine road, you'll find some great front-ends / management utilities on Mac. The Mac Wine community is actually pretty active and has come up with great projects that will help you making a game to work.

Wineskin and Barrel are two excellent examples of the above. FWIW I was able to play Skyrim from beginning to end without any problems using a wine wrapper with almost zero performance loss when compared with bootcamping it. However, the older the game, the better for performance/compatibility.

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Please, tell me what you used to get Skyrim running on OS X! Did you use WineSkin? A wrapper from thePortingTeam? Or something else? I live that game, and booting to Windows is so wasteful. Plus my MBP trackpad acts weird and the computer runs hot and so on / so forth. Man I would love to be able to play in OS X.

What's your secret?!?

Dekard said:

Just do bootcamp, with an SSD it takes about 10-15 seconds to boot to windows, just as long as using parallels or trying to get Wine to work..

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Except that booting into Windows cuts off access to all normal workflow, i.e. all OS X functionality.
Booting in and out of OS X is a major pita - in my opinion.
The minor hit in performance when using a good wrapper, or even the latest Parallels is well worth not having to use Bootcamp.

I consider myself a serious gamer and really the best thing is to use Bootcamp. I have used Wine directly, used Crossover with the "cross-ties," Parallels and Bootcamp.

Bootcamp blows them away because it is native Windows with optimized video drivers, etc. Parallels is good, but you are using their video driver as an intermediary. Crossover is not bad when it works, but there are a lot of games that don't work or work with issues. And when a new version of Crossover comes out, it will often make some games that were unplayable playable and some games that were playable, not playable.

I eventually just built a separate box that is just for gaming. It only has a Core 2 quad, but has a nice Nvidia card. So, if you want great performance, go with Bootcamp everything else will be some sort of compromise, but depending on which games you play, it may be acceptable.

imacken said:

Except that booting into Windows cuts off access to all normal workflow, i.e. all OS X functionality.
Booting in and out of OS X is a major pita - in my opinion.
The minor hit in performance when using a good wrapper, or even the latest Parallels is well worth not having to use Bootcamp.

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Except that if playing games is your goal, OS X functionaly really won't do much for you.

imacken said:

Except that booting into Windows cuts off access to all normal workflow, i.e. all OS X functionality.

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The only thing my Boot Camp installation of Windows can't do that OS X can is iMessage. E-mail, word processing, photo editing, and pretty much anything else I have set up to do with either operating system, so there is zero disruption in "workflow." If I'm playing games, that is my focus. I have nothing else going on in the background. I will not interrupt my game to check e-mail or whatever.

Booting in and out of OS X is a major pita - in my opinion.

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On an SSD-equipped Mac it takes 30 seconds or less to make the switch. Even on a system equipped with a 5400 RPM hard drive, it doesn't take more than a minute or two. Hardly a time sink.

The minor hit in performance when using a good wrapper, or even the latest Parallels is well worth not having to use Bootcamp.

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If it works for you, that's fine, but don't even try to pretend that this is the optimal solution for gaming on a Mac.

iMacFarlane said:

Please, tell me what you used to get Skyrim running on OS X! Did you use WineSkin? A wrapper from thePortingTeam? Or something else? I live that game, and booting to Windows is so wasteful. Plus my MBP trackpad acts weird and the computer runs hot and so on / so forth. Man I would love to be able to play in OS X.

What's your secret?!?

Click to expand...

Been some time since I've played Skyrim from launch, but I'm sure I've used a pre-made wrapper from PortingTeam. I've played it from start to end (doing as many as possible side quests) without any problems at all. I also remember that I never done any updates to the game.

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saturnotaku said:

If it works for you, that's fine, but don't even try to pretend that this is the optimal solution for gaming on a Mac.

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Well, optimal is not always a matter of frames-per-second exclusively. If you don't want to do anything else in windows besides running a game, and you want to play in small time-fragments, switching back and forth is surely a pain, so optimal could be when using a wrapper.

FPS-wise, virtualization is not an optimal solution, of course. Although, on my iMac mid-2010 model, running Skyrim in windows compared to running it in a wrapper didn't have any improvement in performance. But Skyrim somehow is an exception on that.

saturnotaku said:

The only thing my Boot Camp installation of Windows can't do that OS X can is iMessage. E-mail, word processing, photo editing, and pretty much anything else I have set up to do with either operating system, so there is zero disruption in "workflow." If I'm playing games, that is my focus. I have nothing else going on in the background. I will not interrupt my game to check e-mail or whatever.

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So, I guess you are pretty well off then, with Windows AND OS X licences for Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, Freeway PRO, MS Office, Dreamweaver, Mail Designer, Xcode..... and many others that I use on a daily basis (of course, some of these aren't available in Bootcamp, are they!)

saturnotaku said:

On an SSD-equipped Mac it takes 30 seconds or less to make the switch. Even on a system equipped with a 5400 RPM hard drive, it doesn't take more than a minute or two. Hardly a time sink.

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Never said it was a 'time sink'. I said swapping back and fore is a pita, and it is - for me!

saturnotaku said:

If it works for you, that's fine, but don't even try to pretend that this is the optimal solution for gaming on a Mac.

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You seem to looking at this purely from a fps point of view, and I agree, from THAT point of view. However, there is a lot more to life than a few more fps. The solution I suggested certainly is optimal for me. I don't care if I get 60fps compared to 75fps in Bootcamp. That obviously matters a lot to you.
Each to his own.

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iMacFarlane said:

Please, tell me what you used to get Skyrim running on OS X! Did you use WineSkin? A wrapper from thePortingTeam? Or something else? I live that game, and booting to Windows is so wasteful. Plus my MBP trackpad acts weird and the computer runs hot and so on / so forth. Man I would love to be able to play in OS X.

What's your secret?!?

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I used the Porting Team wrapper and my Steam Skyrim worked perfectly throughout @2560x1440.

3-D gaming, FPS is everything. It's gotta be Windows 7 or 8.1 via Bootcamp. Works great, as good as any PC, but you do have to pay attention to your video card and make sure you have the appropriate Windows driver.

imacken said:

So, I guess you are pretty well off then, with Windows AND OS X licences for Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, Freeway PRO, MS Office, Dreamweaver, Mail Designer, Xcode..... and many others that I use on a daily basis (of course, some of these aren't available in Bootcamp, are they!)

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So do you constantly swap back and forth between Call of Duty and Photoshop? Headshot! Photoedit!

imacken said:

So, I guess you are pretty well off then, with Windows AND OS X licences for Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, Freeway PRO, MS Office, Dreamweaver, Mail Designer, Xcode..... and many others that I use on a daily basis (of course, some of these aren't available in Bootcamp, are they!)

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Making a lot of assumptions there, chief.

saturnotaku said:

Making a lot of assumptions there, chief.

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No, not really. I'm sure you understand my point.
Chief? Wow, I've just had a major life upgrade!

I don't know why people often go back and forth on this. It is a subjective thing, whether rebooting is okay or not and what compromises are okay or not. You guys could go back and forth forever and never get anywhere but on each others nerves really, you know?

Personally, I really dislike rebooting. I removed my bootcamp partition and decided I'd rather go with a mix of native games, games with Wine or Boxer, games in a Parallels VM or just head out to the living room to play in comfort there on the Playstation. That's plenty of gaming for me personally and does not require rebooting which again, I do not like. I find it a pain in the rear and I won't go on about why. It doesn't matter why I don't like it to someone who is fine with it. It also doesn't matter to me if someone really needs or wants more FPS, etc. I can appreciate that too. It's all in what you personally prefer.

I just don't think there is one single standard here that everyone should adhere to. We're all individuals with individual needs, wants, preferences, etc.

In my particular case I would like eventually to be entirely divorced from Windows and Microsoft completely and permanently and that is the direction I am headed in. However, I respect your rights to do what you will. As long as we are all having fun playing computer/video games it's all good. That's what counts. We're all very fortunate to have these pleasures.