Emulation and Virtualization
Over the years there have been a number of emulators for the Macintosh that allowed it to run MS-DOS or Windows software, most notably RealPC, SoftPC, SoftWindows, and Virtual PC. Although more or less adequate for business applications, these programs have tended to deliver poor performance when used for running games, particularly where high-end technologies like DirectX were involved.
Since the introduction of the Intel processor into the Macintosh platform, Windows virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion have been seen as more promising solutions for running Windows software on the Mac operating system. In some ways they are better solutions than Boot Camp, as they do not require rebooting the machine. VMware Fusion's public beta 2 supports hardware-accelerated 3D graphics which utilize the DirectX library up to version 9. Parallels Desktop for Mac version 3.0 has announced support for GPU acceleration, allowing Mac Users to play Windows-based games.
Another application is CodeWeavers' CrossOver products, which use a compatibility layer to translate Windows' application instructions to the native Macintosh operating system, without the need to run Windows. CrossOver is built from the open source Wine project and adds a graphical frontend to the process of installing and running the Windows applications through Wine. It is a similar approach that TransGaming uses to run Windows games on the Mac OS. CodeWeavers is an active supporter of Wine and routinely shares programming code and patches back to the project.
PlayOnMac and Wineskin are free versions of the same technology, also based on Wine. Wineskin creates self-contained ("clickable") Mac Applications out of the installation.
A list of Wine-compatible Windows software, including over 5,000 games and how well each individual game works with Wine can be found at appdb.winehq.org. 1,500 games are listed as "Platinum", which means they work "out-of-the-box", while 1,400 more are listed as "Gold", meaning they require some tweaking of the installation to run flawlessly.
Read more about this topic: Mac Gaming
Famous quotes containing the word emulation:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)