Crossover - Play PC games on your Mac
Friday, May 23rd, 2008 - 10:56am
I saw this on joystiq and I am in the process of installing steam on my Mac!
Give it a shot. There is a 7 day trial. Hopefully it performs well on my work g5 mac pro
Thanks for standin' still Wanker!
-XBox Gamertag: Tempest Blaze (Without the Y)
TF2 'works'. Unfortunately it was totally unplayable on my macbook pro (2.4ghz c2d, 2gb ram, 8600GT). Paralells isn't any better.
Getting killed, though? In a way that you don't like? Suck it up, Gertrude.
It's nice that someone is working on this, but I'll just stick to dual booting on the rare occasion where I want to play a PC game.
XBL/PSN: zeroKFE | BHA: zeroKFE
Thats a shame. I am downloading CS 1.6 to test it out. I am going to start out at the low end and work my way up. Hopefully I have better luck on my tower.
Thanks for standin' still Wanker!
-XBox Gamertag: Tempest Blaze (Without the Y)
When I tried it last time, it seemed to be partially a driver issue. The forums at codeweavers had some information that basically said Apple's driver for the MBPs 8600GT was to blame for the poor performance. I believe people with ATI video cards were fine (not great but okay) so it depends on your video card and drivers.
Getting killed, though? In a way that you don't like? Suck it up, Gertrude.
I dual boot to play games in Windows on my iMac. You get fantastic performance, up to par with whatever your specs are, that way. Regardless of how well they get these kinds of emulators going, there is now way you can match it in performance.
If you want to run run of the mill programs, like Word, or even text based games, I think you will be fine. It's been several years since I tried playing Diamond Mind Baseball while running Virtual PC. It was pretty bad still.
Speaking of playing games on your Mac, I'm debating jumping into this whole Age of Conan thing, but I think even dual booting, I'm pretty limited in my specs. For one, I will have to do a complete re-partition of my hard drive, as I only allocated 30 Gigs for Windows when I set it up, since I never planned on playing many games in Windows.
I have a 2.0 Ghz Intel Core Duo, and two gigs of RAM. The video card is a Raedon 1600. I can add 2 more gigs of RAM, but I'm pretty much stuck with the rest.
My guess is that I am best off waiting until it comes out for the 360, which is what I had decided to do in the first place when I left PCs and their Window's world behind.
Until companies start building for the Mac, all we will have a workarounds. And since there is not enough of a Mac market to commit to, it won't happen. I think we're better off doing our gaming on other platforms until then, which is probably forever.
Xbox Live: JayhawkerGWJ
last.fm: JayhawkerGWJ
Did you try it, yet, Tempest? How did it work?
Getting killed, though? In a way that you don't like? Suck it up, Gertrude.
I haven't had much time with it yet because I have it on my Mac at work. I only got a chance to play CS 1.6 which is running at 75 fps average.
That does not bode well for TF2 if CS 1.6 runs at that FPS. I will see tomorrow.
My mac is 2 x 2ghz dual core Xeons, 3 gb of game, and a 7600gt
Thanks for standin' still Wanker!
-XBox Gamertag: Tempest Blaze (Without the Y)
I was mistaken when I said it didn't run well. I was thinking of vmware's fusion. I have a friend who runs crossover in linux and it runs TF2 pretty well. Not at full speed but it's quite playable. He has a 7900 GT and an Athlon X2 5000+.
I downloaded crossover and I'm going to try it as well. Hopefully, it will work well enough to be playble.
Getting killed, though? In a way that you don't like? Suck it up, Gertrude.
I was about to post a question about this a few days ago.
My GF just bought a MacBook Pro (latest specs as of today, a week away from WWDC) and I have to say I'm falling in love with the little bastard. The thing is FAST and I had never experienced such smoothness: when it wakes from sleep, it really WAKES and not remains groggy like the wintel machines I use at work.
But I don't really care to make Calendars of my photos, or movies of my vacations; it's a nice feature but one that I will give a quick once-over and send into oblivion. I want to play games.
I've heard VMWare Fusion was getting really good reviews, but I'd rather hear it from people that have experienced the real thing; If I bought a MacBook Pro, added the extra 2GB of RAM, could I play most Wintel games with BootCamp+Windows? And by most I mean anything bellow Crysis or AssCreed, which specs exceed even the 3-year-old monolith I have bellow my desk.
How does TF2 handle on the MacBook Pro? Jayhawker, what games have you played with Dual Boot?
Thanks!
|Steam:Hobbes9999|PSN:Hobbes9999|Wii: I need to write it down...|
I've been running games under Wine on Linux on-and-off for ages now, and it really does work, though it can require a lot of tweaking to get good results from, though I'm not sure how much of that Crossover has addressed with its GUI shininess. I've played a bit of TF2 on my PC, and it (and everything else in The Orange Box) definitely works, but to get good performance you need to force it to run in DirectX 8 mode, rather than trying DirectX 9 mode -- the DX9 stuff in Wine is still relatively new and immature, so it's both buggy and slow. It does work well enough to run COD4 with some patches, but the performance is pretty woeful (I'd say close to unplayable, even for single-player). This is on a 2.55Ghz Core 2 Duo system with 2GB RAM and an 8800GT.
If you want to know more about how it works, I wrote some stuff about it for a local magazine not long ago:
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=22&CIID=105627&p=3
There's also a tutorial for Linux users here:
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?SCID=22&CIID=110548&p=1
Xbox Live: pneuman | PSN: pneuman | my tech/games/rant blag
You can play ANY game with bootcamp. You are running windows natively. You can load vista, xp, or linux. Heck, you can triple boot with bootcamp if you want. Speed is pretty much exactly as it would be on any comparably specced machine.
If your main reason for running windows is games bootcamp is by far the best option. VMWare, Parralells, and Crossover are all hit and miss. Some games will run fine but another runs poorly or not at all.
Getting killed, though? In a way that you don't like? Suck it up, Gertrude.
Sweet!! Starting to look like I'll leave the Borg ranks and become yet another 'unique' and 'special' creative Mac user. I'll finally get to be cool like that guy on the TV ads!< /sarcasm >
Anyway, I'll give it a go in my GF's Laptop and hope not to kill the machine in the process.
I love the Mac system, but only from afar. Every time I actually interact with it, my decades of Windows make my fingers go to the wrong place to minimize, double click, open a file etc.
It feels like knowing English and hearing German, or Knowing Spanish and hearing Portuguese, it's close enough to give you that sense that you understand what you're being said, but when you try to answer, you fall flat on your ass.
Thanks for the feedback!
|Steam:Hobbes9999|PSN:Hobbes9999|Wii: I need to write it down...|
I have Parallels installed on my system. It works fine for browser testing (which is all I really need it for). I have also heard quite good things about VMWare Fusion, but I can't imagine trying to run anything resource-intensive through emulation.
It mostly runs happily on my first-gen MacBook Pro. I have some occasional overheating issues, but I think that's a consequence of running on a laptop, rather than an artifact caused by BootCamp.
Quintin_Stone wrote:
I've run TF2 and Portal, Civ IV, and World in Conflict with no issues at all. The Crysis demo and The Witcher crushed my iMac. I was considering checking out Age of Conan, but I'm now pretty confident that it would not be playable either. So I will probably check it out for the 360 instead.
Xbox Live: JayhawkerGWJ
last.fm: JayhawkerGWJ
I use it for starwars galexies...kinda-SOE hates me so it doesnt want to work, and would use it for postal but the actual game wont work, I am going to try VMware next to see if that will play it.
I support the second amendment
I'm starting to get that look that goes along with "little pig, little pig; let me in!".
Oh, and my wallet looks pale and drenched in cold sweat.
--------------------EDIT--------------
Wait, the Wolf doesn't get the pigs in that story...
OK, change story where I get a Mac in the End.
|Steam:Hobbes9999|PSN:Hobbes9999|Wii: I need to write it down...|
Sometimes I think Microsoft is sending me personalized messages to embrace all things Apple;
http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080527/windows-7/
something tells me W7 will make Vista look like Vista made XP look, which frightens the bejeeus autta me...
|Steam:Hobbes9999|PSN:Hobbes9999|Wii: I need to write it down...|
Yeah Bootcamp for Windows games. Any other option is basically a joke.
Oh and EA Mac games are basically Windows games running through CrossOver or Cider or something like that which means they run like crap on top of the typical EA quality.
Uhh, really? That's the game you choose for the top of the compatible games list? WoW already runs natively in OS X, and it runs beautifully I might add.
I'll jump in and agree that if you've got an Intel-based Mac, Bootcamp is really the only sane option. My Macbook Pro is the fastest Windows laptop I've ever owned, and outperforms many Windows-only machines.
Doogiemac on: Xbox Live | Steam | WoW | PSN
It's not just a Mac product though -- Crossover has been around for years (and Wine for years before that) on Linux, with the Mac version being a relatively new addition. If that list is from a Mac-specific page, though, then yeah, it's a bit silly.
Xbox Live: pneuman | PSN: pneuman | my tech/games/rant blag
Tempest, I tried TF2 last night and it worked pretty well. I didn't get much change to mess around but it was significantly better than the last time I tried it. It was quite playable at 1024x768. It crashed when I changed the resolution but I think that is 'normal' behavior. Runs better in boot camp, of course, but for a quick game its pretty good.
Getting killed, though? In a way that you don't like? Suck it up, Gertrude.
Yeah i'm sold. Sins and Civ 4 run very well so thats great for me when I got downtime at work. I did try TF2 and it runs okay but I wasnt expecting much.
Thanks for standin' still Wanker!
-XBox Gamertag: Tempest Blaze (Without the Y)