Windows games on Mac

[cowlesz]

Hi. I'm new to Mac, so please go easy....

I want to be able to play games on my new macbook and most of them are only on PC.

So id there a way of playing windows games on a mac?

I've read on a few post here about Cider. Is it any good? There's quite a few complaints about it on here.

I know you can also use boot camp. But that looks like to much effort.

 

[VPrime]

Hi. I'm new to Mac, so please go easy....

I want to be able to play games on my new macbook and most of them are only on PC.

So id there a way of playing windows games on a mac?

I've read on a few post here about Cider. Is it any good? There's quite a few complaints about it on here.

I know you can also use boot camp. But that looks like to much effort.

Cross Over games is another solution. It can play some not all. I had some decent success with it.

Wine.. Basically what crossover is based off, but free and open source. No simple UI to get you going like crossover Games.. More tinkering is needed. But it is free.

Cider is more of a paltform that the publisher uses. It requires a bit of "modding" to work with other games.

Parallels5 can run some games, it is quite decent actually. BUT it is a virtual machine running windows as well, so it takes up a lot of resources and some more advanced games will struggle (or not play at all) on most machines.
Though this is the same effort as bootcmap, so might as well just go that route.

Bootcamp.. This is your best solution, as you are just running windows natively. I know it sucks having to restart just to play a game.. But if there is no mac version of the game, this is usually the best way to go.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Bootcamp.. This is your best solution, as you are just running windows natively. I know it sucks having to restart just to play a game.. But if there is no mac version of the game, this is usually the best way to go.

Agreed. I do have a couple of games installed on the Mac side, but they're mostly on Windows. Restarting does have the added benefit of being something of an inconvenience, so my computer time is clearly delineated into "work time" (Mac) and "game time" (Windows). Booting up a game if I feel like killing a few minutes that will turn into a few hours is a lot harder if I have to restart to do it.

 

[Dan73]

Hi. I'm new to Mac, so please go easy....

I want to be able to play games on my new macbook and most of them are only on PC.

So id there a way of playing windows games on a mac?

I've read on a few post here about Cider. Is it any good? There's quite a few complaints about it on here.

I know you can also use boot camp. But that looks like to much effort.

The short answer is no Windows games will not work on OSX. But there are ways around it.

• Buy Mac version of the game is there is
• Install Windows using bootcamp and use it for windows games, installing Windows doesn't take as much effort as you might think.

Also cider is just a way for game makers to take windows games and make them work on OS X. This is not something you can use.

There are other options but most if not all of them will cause such a performance loss that its not even worth it.

 

[alienapp]

If your trying to run window games its best if you install bootcamp. That way the game will have full access to the graphics card increasing game performance.

 

[VPrime]

Oh one thing I didn't mention..... You can use parallels, bbootcamp and crossovergames (or wine) to get a game working depending on the situation.

eg. Set up a bootcamp partition with windows and install your games there..
If you don't feel like restarting launch parallels and have it load your bootcamp partition to play the game and see how that works...
Parallels didn't give the results you were looking for? No worries, just launch Cross over games. Navigate to the bootcamp partition where the game is installed and launch it inside crossover. (may need NTFS-3G or something to write to an NTFS partition depending on the game)

This way you install the game in one place and have access to it most options. I do this for when I am really lazy. I restart as a last resort .

 

[BlueRevolution]

The short answer is no Windows games will not work on OSX.

Actually, as mentioned before, the short answer is that most Windows games can be made to run on OS X one way or another.