I wonder who's going to need Mac native games ported from PC a year later when new Macs can run Windows natively. As the old saying goes.."Why buy the milk when you own a cow"..The Mac game porting companies were already doomed when Apple released Boot Camp. My PC copy of Doom 3 runs perfectly well on MBP.
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TransGaming's Cider... Gaming for Intel Macs
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Whether traditionally ported or with Cider, there is a BIG need for Mac-native games, and I have no doubt they will continue to be offered. Rebooting (and defending myself from viruses when I go online--time wasted, at best) is not an acceptable alternative even if Windows were free, which it's not. Running Windows is a last resort, and it's nice to have the option, but it's no better than that. (Parallels is neat, but not for gaming now--and also not free, and also not immune from Windows viruses. And I'm inclined to believe Apple when they say they're not offering virtualization of their own.)
To that end, I look forward to seeing what comes of Cider. Given the timing, and the fact that it's a developer product, I wonder if Steve will demo it on Monday?
I can accept that Cider might entail a little CPU overhead: Intel's new chips are fast enough to handle it.
To that end, I look forward to seeing what comes of Cider. Given the timing, and the fact that it's a developer product, I wonder if Steve will demo it on Monday?
I can accept that Cider might entail a little CPU overhead: Intel's new chips are fast enough to handle it.
ictiosapiens said:
Haha. That made me laugh.
Anyways, I feel that this can only be a step in the right direction. If this works well enough that it is widely accepted, and we can only hope, then what does it matter if Mac game developers are phased out. Isn't there a lot more money in Windows games anyways? Those developers need to realized that the real money is not in Mac games. Although I am also positive that they are most likely not in it for the money, but still. If somebody has to lose to gain "gaming" for Macs, then by all means, I'm for it.
This seems like the perfect solution.
If I hit a nerve, I'm sorry.
Various porting companies already have libraries to support the major APIs of DirectX and convert them to native Mac OS X API calls, where Apple has them. They just don't sell what they've written for other companies to buy.
There will still be plenty of overhead but maybe they're better than the various companies who already have lots of experience with Mac OS X.
There will still be plenty of overhead but maybe they're better than the various companies who already have lots of experience with Mac OS X.
Uh, it'll allow publishers/developers to make Windows games Intel Mac compatible without PORTING the code. Just tack Cider onto a Windows game and you get an OS X one as well.amols said:
Transgaming's WineX/Cedega is a fork from the main Wine project aimed at supporting DirectX.shawnce said:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/winex/
Like Crossover there are both commercial closed and open source elements to the project.
B
rbarris said:
For serious? Why after WWD- wait........you know something.....
Also I wasn't directly targeting WoW, it was more of a blanket statement (but then again Im not even sure if it's true for other games as well).
I was sitting on Steve Jobs' lap the other day, spoonfeeding him his cappucino, and he said "Why EFI, Kalisphoenix?"
And I said, "Why the #@$% are you asking me?"
"Well," he said, "because we can toss a thin DirectX compatibility layer into it and add a hard-suspend hook into OS X so that you can sleep Aqua with the execution of certain programs, like... games... and have far more free memory and processor capacity, not to mention the total unload of a rather hefty compositor. Games will actually run better than they did on XP."
"Really?" I asked.
"No."
And I said, "Why the #@$% are you asking me?"
"Well," he said, "because we can toss a thin DirectX compatibility layer into it and add a hard-suspend hook into OS X so that you can sleep Aqua with the execution of certain programs, like... games... and have far more free memory and processor capacity, not to mention the total unload of a rather hefty compositor. Games will actually run better than they did on XP."
"Really?" I asked.
"No."
I can't believe the thread has gone on this long without someone complaining about how the fact that the mini and macbook use integrated graphics makes this annoucement irrelevant since the performance of the games will be crappy.
Now I don't necessarily agree with this statement. Especially since I have not tried this out.
I just thought every thread about games was required to have a complaint about integrated graphics on the first page.
Now I don't necessarily agree with this statement. Especially since I have not tried this out.
I just thought every thread about games was required to have a complaint about integrated graphics on the first page.
"Where such ports normally require total code conversion, Cider should eliminate that by using a shell that wraps around an existing Windows code base. It operates by first loading the app into memory (on an Intel-based Mac), and from there connecting to an optimized set of Win32 APIs."
That's from macnn. Kinda makes it sound like it takes more memory than it would normally take to run a regular mac native app. So, it brings up the question of how much extra memory will we have to have inorder to run these games at windows-like speeds?
That's from macnn. Kinda makes it sound like it takes more memory than it would normally take to run a regular mac native app. So, it brings up the question of how much extra memory will we have to have inorder to run these games at windows-like speeds?