Transgaming's Cider enables new Mac games Options

[Guest_Mark White_*]

Transgaming's Cider technology (based on the open-source Wine) has recently received attention as it is the means by which EA is coming back bigtime to the Mac; it is a specialized technology that wraps Windows games to make them run as native Mac games would, with impressive performance and near-zero porting time.

However, Cider has recently seen an unofficial use - an "empty" Cider application package kit has made it to the web, allowing the needy to wrap some games of their own.

Far Cry, Grand Theft Auto (3, Vice City and San Andreas), Oblivion, Hitman Contracts, Need for Speed Carbon and many more games will now run natively as Mac games, bringing a lot more gaming potential to the Mac platform. Cider also opens up the possibility of publishers releasing games like Half Life 2 and other sorely missing top titles, as it literally just runs the untouched Windows exes.

[Rhys]

Does this have complete DX support? How about support for running on PPC? (I assume not)

[Guest_Mark White_*]

Does this have complete DX support? How about support for running on PPC? (I assume not)

DirectX 9, Pixel Shader 2.0. Intel only, being Wine-based.

[Rhys]

Does this have complete DX support? How about support for running on PPC? (I assume not)

DirectX 9, Pixel Shader 2.0. Intel only, being Wine-based.

I wonder how long it is before someone does a kind of reverse-rosetta hack to get it on PPC.

I still haven't figured out how Rosetta gets workable performance...

[Guest_Mark White_*]

Does this have complete DX support? How about support for running on PPC? (I assume not)

DirectX 9, Pixel Shader 2.0. Intel only, being Wine-based.

I wonder how long it is before someone does a kind of reverse-rosetta hack to get it on PPC.

I still haven't figured out how Rosetta gets workable performance...

It's because Rosetta just points the PowerPC calls to the exact same Intel calls of the same APIs etc. So OpenGL/gaming is native, just needs a little overhead in the bit swapping areas and performance-tuned code.

[nexus]

does this also mean game's networking features will work properly?

[Rhys]

They should.

[Karl]

This isn't like a community sideproject - it's being used by the industry's leading 3rd party developer/publisher for production software, and featured on the WWDC stage. You can bet it does pretty much everything the Windows version does, with minimal performance hit.

[Guest_Mark White_*]

does this also mean game's networking features will work properly?

Yes, meaning Mac gamers can play against Windows gamers with no problems, unlike many older games that required separate Mac/Windows online communities.