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best windows emulator for gaming?
- Thread starter mooseeka
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If you are willing to do a little more legwork, WINE is almost the same as Crossover and it's free. I've found it's fairly easy to create a "prefix" (basically a Windows file structure/group of folders), find the folder (just do a spotlight search of whatever you named the prefix), then use WINE to install any Windows applications you want to that folder system. You can either drag the files into the folder system manually, your you can open them with WINE and tell Wine to install the files in that prefix. You can even make aliases of the .exe files and set them to always open in WINE so that you just need to double click on them to get at your games.
WINE is the open source project that Crossover is based on. The money you pay for Crossover goes to fund WINE development. Nothing fishy about it.
VMWare and Parallels work fine for DX9 games, but you need a copy of Windows and there is a performance hit from the overhead of running both Windows and OSX, as well as a performance hit from them emulating the graphics card. If you have a copy of Windows, download a trial and see how it is. In fact, download trials of Crossover and WINE, too. Pick whatever you like. None of those programs will come with spyware.
VMWare and Parallels work fine for DX9 games, but you need a copy of Windows and there is a performance hit from the overhead of running both Windows and OSX, as well as a performance hit from them emulating the graphics card. If you have a copy of Windows, download a trial and see how it is. In fact, download trials of Crossover and WINE, too. Pick whatever you like. None of those programs will come with spyware.
On Mac OS X, Wine is not quite as great as it is on Linux... this is mainly because Wine is made to use X11 for windowing, which is not Mac OS X's native windowing method.
If you use default generic Wine, you will be stuck with everything running under X11.app... Xquartz X11 is getting better and is rather decent, but Apple's default X11.app is pretty bad.
Crossover uses Wine, but tries to make it more user friendly. Its a rather good product, and they custom build their own version of X11 made into it that runs MUCH MUCH better for Wine than Apple's X11 does...
I run a project called Wineskin, which also uses Wine where you can basically port your Windows apps/games over into a stand-a-lone Mac .app application. It is "free" as well because its Open Source under the same LGPL license that Wine is. I have a built in X11 in it as well with some enhancements to get around the issues that Apple's X11 has making it much better for gaming than normal Wine or any builds using X11.app.
That said, if you try to use some method that just uses your systems X11, go get the newest Xquartz version and make sure you use that instead... you'll need that if you use normal Wine (which is actually all command line) or the Wine.app or WineBottler.app builds. I use Xquartz builds for the X11 in Wineskin as well.
I didn't really like any of the ways to run Wine on Macs, which is why I started and am still actively working on Wineskin. I know its not ultra simple.. nothing with Wine is... but if you try it out and can think of anything it needs or ways to make it better, I love input... Everything it is at this point is not totally from my own ideas, I change and make everything to what my users ask for.
If you use default generic Wine, you will be stuck with everything running under X11.app... Xquartz X11 is getting better and is rather decent, but Apple's default X11.app is pretty bad.
Crossover uses Wine, but tries to make it more user friendly. Its a rather good product, and they custom build their own version of X11 made into it that runs MUCH MUCH better for Wine than Apple's X11 does...
I run a project called Wineskin, which also uses Wine where you can basically port your Windows apps/games over into a stand-a-lone Mac .app application. It is "free" as well because its Open Source under the same LGPL license that Wine is. I have a built in X11 in it as well with some enhancements to get around the issues that Apple's X11 has making it much better for gaming than normal Wine or any builds using X11.app.
That said, if you try to use some method that just uses your systems X11, go get the newest Xquartz version and make sure you use that instead... you'll need that if you use normal Wine (which is actually all command line) or the Wine.app or WineBottler.app builds. I use Xquartz builds for the X11 in Wineskin as well.
I didn't really like any of the ways to run Wine on Macs, which is why I started and am still actively working on Wineskin. I know its not ultra simple.. nothing with Wine is... but if you try it out and can think of anything it needs or ways to make it better, I love input... Everything it is at this point is not totally from my own ideas, I change and make everything to what my users ask for.
If you want to game, you are better off just running Windows via a second partition.
CrossOver is a closed source development of WINE, essentially. It's just as unstable as anything else you'll find.
CrossOver is a closed source development of WINE, essentially. It's just as unstable as anything else you'll find.
If your willing to spend money on something thats "stable" why not pick up a copy of windows and use bootcamp?
You'd need to buy Windows if you wanted to use a VM anyway.
I use WINE/Crossover sometimes, but there are a fair amount of games that don't play nice with it.
Boot Camp with Windows is really the best way.
except Bootcamp to install windows isn't any kind of "emulator" or anything close. Its simply just running Windows directly just like any normal Windows PC.... you boot into Windows and have no access to your Mac software while in Windows.
Another thing to consider...
On my MBP, I've got a BootCamp partition (with WinXP), so I can boot into a thoroughly unsimulated Windows environment, and I also have VMWare, and when initially setting up VMWare I chose some option that made it construct a special VMWare "image" that points at my BootCamp partition (sorry, don't have the right terms at hand). I've also got a "normal" VMWare image with WinXP as well.
Anyway, this makes it so that I can: 1) run Windows in an entirely standard VMWare environment (with that cloned image that's sitting on my Mac partition as a 10GB-ish folder) and get all the standard VMWare goodies, like snapshots and suspending the VM without having to shut it down, or, 2) I can run the "hybrid" BootCamp-under-VMWare image in VMWare, under Mac OS X, and have access to my whole Windows partition (though you have to shut down the virtual machine before quitting VMWare), or 3) I can reboot into Windows and have a no-gotcha no-compromise WinXP environment, if some game demands more performance than VMWare can muster.
I really like the versatility this setup affords me. I believe you can do similar with Parallels, but I only have experience with VMWare.
On my MBP, I've got a BootCamp partition (with WinXP), so I can boot into a thoroughly unsimulated Windows environment, and I also have VMWare, and when initially setting up VMWare I chose some option that made it construct a special VMWare "image" that points at my BootCamp partition (sorry, don't have the right terms at hand). I've also got a "normal" VMWare image with WinXP as well.
Anyway, this makes it so that I can: 1) run Windows in an entirely standard VMWare environment (with that cloned image that's sitting on my Mac partition as a 10GB-ish folder) and get all the standard VMWare goodies, like snapshots and suspending the VM without having to shut it down, or, 2) I can run the "hybrid" BootCamp-under-VMWare image in VMWare, under Mac OS X, and have access to my whole Windows partition (though you have to shut down the virtual machine before quitting VMWare), or 3) I can reboot into Windows and have a no-gotcha no-compromise WinXP environment, if some game demands more performance than VMWare can muster.
I really like the versatility this setup affords me. I believe you can do similar with Parallels, but I only have experience with VMWare.
I have used VM at work, didn't install it myself and never really knew how well it will do for gaming. but it seems like bootcamp is the best solution. I'm gonna replace the hard drive with a 500GB 7200 SSD, now I guess I should get 64bit windows then? should I pick XP or 7 since running of a Mac? also I guess its best to partition the new drive for bootcamp iat the start since I'm prepping a new drive>