How to play Oblivion on Wine/Cider?

[Hackfix21]

Hi,

I'm playing Elder Scrolls Oblivion under Bootcamp, but am finding myself put off more and more by the delay of switching from MacOS into Windows/ Bootcamp.

I've heard something called Wine/ Cider being mentioned as a way of playing this game under MacOS, but a quick forum search didn't reveal anything more concrete.

How does this work?
Is it like an emulator (ie like Parallels) in that (i) it still takes a lot of time to start Windows, and (ii) you lose a lot of performance ie need a much more powerful machine than under Bootcamp, and (iii) you get a lot of crashes?

Thanks!

 

[Hansr]

Parallels isn't emulation.

Check here for the Cider wrapper:
http://forum.portingteam.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=4210

 

[doh123]

While they call Parallels and VMWare "virtualization" now.. the fact remains, it really is an emulator... as much of the PC hardware in the virtual machine is emulated.

Anyways.. Wine based stuff (like Cider which was forked off of Wine) run Windows software directly... it does not run Windows at all, so it would run Oblivion directly on OSX.

There are Cider wrappers floating around, that are basically hacked from other games... its also possible to run it in Wineskin, but as far as I can tell right now, the frame rate is a bit higher with Cider.

 

[cluthz]

Is it like an emulator (ie like Parallels) in that (i) it still takes a lot of time to start Windows, and (ii) you lose a lot of performance ie need a much more powerful machine than under Bootcamp, and (iii) you get a lot of crashes?

It does not take any time to start up, it's just like the game in windows.
If you have played games like The Sims, Fifa2012, Dragon Age 1 and 2 on mac, then you have played a game running in cider.

Performance is better than parallels, but not as good as bootcamp, and it can vary from port to port. Official ports like Dragon Age 2, runs almost as fast in cider as it would in bootcamp, unofficial ports can vary, some are fast, some are not. One thing common is that some have issues with laggy music in combat.

Some people are questioning the legality of wine and cider. Wine is a 100% free and open source project and there are no concerns. Cider can be a bit gray zone, depending on where you live and if you own any cider titles or not. Basically cider is a commercial offspring from cedega, although some of it are open source and free to use, there are some parts of it that's not.