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TransGaming's Cider... Gaming for Intel Macs

shawnce said:
The performance gain exists... I wasn't questioning that... I was questioning the context of your post.
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When you boot Windows on an Intel iMac, you use DirectX, plain and simple, his post makes perfect sense.
 
ictiosapiens said:
That was too funny...
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It's basically how I feel about Apple in general. Everyone's seen that "Apple Product Cycle" thing, but I'd like to make it a bit more personal.

Day Zero: WWDC.

Week One: Excitement about Core Fiddler and XCongrabula gradually dies out. "Why didn't they do that 'fast-OS swapping' or 'new Front Row' or 'adding some better configuration options to skinning/slideshows/et cetera'? Oh well, at least it's faster and less buggy."

Week Two: "Oh well, there's always MW Paris."

Week Three: Desperation sets in. "I can't possibly make it until Paris." *smokes a joint* "Hey... what if they turned OS X into a ZUI, incorporating those touchscreens that you don't touch? What if the OS could drop back to EFI and use that for Front Row? What if Apple made .Mac free?"

Week Four: In need of a shave, our hero stays up until all hours of the night defending his brand o' choice against Windows users. "I didn't buy my Mac to play games, you silly bastards. Fast OS swapping doesn't really matter to me. Nor does a new, less-crippled Front Row, or all the configuration options that I deeply want. And Leopard will be faster and less buggy."

Week Five: Hero bittorrents a dev version of Leopard and accidentally nukes his hard drive trying to install it (including well over 1100 painfully-detailed pages of ideas for his next book, 100GB of music he loves, his "Worms 3D" savegame, and his secret cache of Monica Bellucci pictures). He accepts it philosophically. "At least I'll get to play around with Leopard."

Week Six: Our hero finally boots into Leopard. "Hmm. The menu bar is a bit less shiny. The Apple in the Apple Menu is a bit flatter in color. The Dock is a bit more transparent." He attempts to play with Core Fiddler and XCongrabula, but suffers from kernel panicks.

Week Seven: The week before MW Paris. Any discrepancies between the chronologies of this chart and reality should be blamed upon the heroic doses of psilocybin mushrooms he has been taking in between frantic "Don't make it feature-complete yet! I HAVE AN IDEA!" emails to sjobs@apple.com and pleas for career advice from Stephen King.

Week Eight: MW Paris. The iPod nano gets a higher capacity, a different case, and a new iGadget. Doors are locked, windows are barred, and our hero's beard grows even longer.

Week Nine: A dinner with Dean Koontz ends in tragedy. World rejoices. Hero is comatose for many weeks, but when he wakes up.... he thinks it is still

Week Ten: MWSF. Steve Jobs makes a sly allusion to the next version of OS X, called "Lynx." Rumors abound that it might contain fast-OS swapping, a zoomable UI, drops to EFI, and so forth. Hero shaves and steps out into the bright light of a new day.
 
amols said:
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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Boot camp is not the best solution. Don't get me wrong it's very cool.

But having to completely reboot your machine to play a game is a complete PITA. I often have plenty of other apps running in the background when I'm playing a game of Civ 4 on my Mac. In other words, I actually use my computer for something other than pure gaming.

Oh, and I'd rather just pay $40-$50 to play Doom 3 instead of $150 (Doom + the cheapest version of Windows available).
 
greenstork said:
When you boot Windows on an Intel iMac, you use DirectX, plain and simple, his post makes perfect sense.
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No s%*t =P

Yes true but I was asking in the context of running WoW under Mac OS X on an Intel Mac... maybe I miss read his original post... because I thought that was what his statement was about... looking back now he did say windows... my bad.
 
If Battle Front 2 gets a couple of pints of Cider and the benchmarks are good I will need to get me one of the new Intel towers that may be released next week. Then I can shoot the snot out of my PC using friends :D
 
Apparently this is for commercial games only. According to their FAQ, their pricing model pretty much excludes any shareware or freeware game developers, which really, really sucks:

5) How much does does Cider cost?
The business model for Cider is based on a revenue share with the publisher with no upfront fee, no risk and lots of upside potential.
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So rather than charging a reasonable fee for the product, they want a piece of your revenue forever. What if you have little or no revenue? I'd much rather see them charge $1000 or whatever for rights to use it in any product you create thereafter. Just like libraries that come with any compiler.

Of course, they're probably just looking for a big payday if they can get one of the really popular game makers to sign on.
 
This is good news and I think it will show most developers they can have games on a Mac. As long as the speed of the games are very playable this will be very good news for Mac gaming in the long run.
 
Electro Funk said:
dear god people... if i had a $1.00 for everytime someone said this here at MR i would retire this year... :rolleyes:
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I wish I was in on that as well, but seriously people are panic merchants especially when it comes to Mac gaming any small change or decent development we see the "that's the end for games on Apple forever posts".

I remember hearing these rumors when Apple first announced we are going to use Intel processors......
 
ezekielrage_99 said:
I wish I was in on that as well, but seriously people are panic merchants especially when it comes to Mac gaming any small change or decent development we see the "that's the end for games on Apple forever posts".

I remember hearing these rumors when Apple first announced we are going to use Intel processors......
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I think people are worried the little that is there will just go away and they will be forced to use windows forever :eek:

I personally would like apple to provide a bit of support to game developers, I hate to agree with balmer but its all about the developers, and if apple started kissing game developer ass maybe we would see more native games!
 
any performance hit?

Macrumors said:


InsideMacGames reports on TransGaming's announcement of a software portability engine called Cider.

Cider allows video game developers to deploy their Windows-based titles to Apple's new Intel-based Macs quickly and easily without the need for "traditional" porting.

According to the press release, this portability engine could allow publishers to release to both Windows and Mac simultaneously, ending the long delays that Mac users have come to expect with gaming titles.



Cider requires no changes to the original source code. Instead, Cider actually loads the Windows-based game and links them to a set of optimized Win32 APIs. The process is similar to how WINE/CrossOver works allowing users to run Windows applications under Mac OS X without emulation.

These games, of course, would not run on PowerPC Macs, and could have consequences with Mac-focused developer companies which have provided porting services in the past.
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-Sounds good but is there a performance hit using this?

-I dont think it would kill native development, but could spell the end of porting houses.
 
Well, guess what, folks. This article sounds like a dream come true for Mac gamers, right? Turns out the Linux gaming crowd has been dealing with the company putting this out, Transgaming, for a while. They have a similar software portability engine for Linux called Cedega. Here's a fairly represenative comment on THAT engine:

Cedega is the most unstable, buggy, and alltogether awful gaming product on Linux. It has done more to hold back Linux gaming than anything I can imagine. Why should a developer waste any resources when "Cedega allows you to run Windows games in Linux!" Newsflash: The games don't F***ING WORK.

Transgaming brags about all these great results on their website but the sheer number of workarounds and hacks to get a game to play are unbearable. And what's worse is that the games, once installed, randomly crash, screw up graphics, display incorrect fonts, lose mouse control, can't position correctly on the screen, takes an inordinate amount of Microsoft software to even function... BLAH.
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If Cider is anything like Cedega, I wouldn't hold my breath for the "end of an era" as one poster put it.

For a more detailed discussion of this topic that goes beyond the typical MacRumors post of "uhhh.... this good!" see:

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/03/2051230&from=rss
 
Cider is not about being able to run Windows games on your Intel Mac running OS X, but it's a commercial product for "(ex-)porting houses", or the original developers, to "translate" Windows games to an Intel based Mac very easily.
So, Aspyr could bring out F.E.A.R. for Intel based Macs very fast, and probably very cheap.

I just wonder how well a DirectX game will be transformed to OpenGL.
What about surround sound?

Still, it seems good news to me.

This could be a scenario:

Call of Duty 3 released for Windows PC
- You could use Boot Camp to play it right away.

Call of Duty 3 released for Intel based Mac.
- Probably the same week, or either very shortly afterwards.

Call of Duty 3 Universal released (or just PPC??)
- Nice. Now my Quad can be used in playing this. But it would have taken about 4 months....

Parallels with DirectX support released.
- Great! Hardware 3D grfx and sound support in Parallels. No need to reboot using Boot Camp. Still needs more RAM and CPU power as both operating systems are running simultaneously....
But can use the original Windows version of COD 3.

I wonder if the consumers will be able to figure out which COD 3 copy they should buy.... Windows version? "Cidered" version? Wait for PPC release? Can you run it using Parallels?

:D
 
tveric said:
They have a similar software portability engine for Linux called Cedega.
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There's a big difference. Cedega is aimed at the end user and allows them to play games that were released as Windows only on Linux. While Cider is aimed at developers and not the end users at all.

B
 
tveric said:
If Cider is anything like Cedega, I wouldn't hold my breath for the "end of an era" as one poster put it.
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Cider is like the Winelib SDK (but with Cedega's DirectX support).
 
Stridder44 said:
Awesome. Now if only games didn't run slower under OS X in the first place.
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Oddly enough, games run slower under OSX because of OSX's better handling of multitasking. In Windows, a task can easily take complete control of the processor, and in doing so, will make the task run at its fastest. A consequence of that is, however, that the OS is prevented from performing many necessary tasks in a timely manner. This can cause the OS to crash. With OSX, an app simply can't take over the processor completely.
Another reason is the fact that game developers hacen't written proper multiprocessor optomized games yet, when that happens, games will get better.
 
They used my name!!! I was going to use cider for a Mac version of Wine. I was going to make it open-source too.

Never got round to making it though (the reason might have something to do with the fact that I don't own an intel mac :p).
 
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