August 3rd, 2006
TransGaming’s Cider Portability Engine Brings PC Games to the Mac
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
Games on the Mac. (We’ll wait while you stop laughing.) Thanks to the Intel chip in the latest Macs, it looks like PC games may get a toehold. A company called TransGaming Technologies has just released “Cider” a portability engine that converts PC games to the Intel-based Mac platform.
“Thanks to Cider, video game developers and publishers can extend their content to the Intel Macs quickly, cost-effectively, and with little to no effort on their part. Stemming from the same technology foundation as TransGaming’s Cedega, Cider empowers game developers and publishers to release Mac editions of their titles. Cider is so effective that publishers will be able to simultaneously deploy the Mac and Windows versions of their titles, even for new games already in development. With Cider, whole catalogues of games can be easily brought to a brand new audience starving for games. Another great benefit is that games migrated to Intel Mac using Cider will also run on Linux under Cedega, forging a path to another game hungry market.
How Cider Works
“Cider is a sophisticated portability engine that allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs without any modifications to the original game source code. Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are simply wrapped up in the Cider engine and they work on the Mac. This means developers only have one code base to maintain while keeping the ability to target multiple platforms. Cider powered games use the same copy protection, lobbies, game matching and connectivity as the original. All this means less work and lower costs. Cider is targeted at game developers and publishers and, unlike Cedega, is not an end user product. ”
We Say: Ported games usually run like an old lady, but we’ll reserve judgement until a real title comes out. Here’s to the Intel CPU!
While you are here..Check out NVIDIA’s Massive EXTERNAL video card.
(If you have $17K burning a hole in your pocket.)
John says:
I use TransGaming’s Cedega to play Windows games on my Linux box. And due to the power of Cedega those games run very smoothly. Basically it just takes the games Windows based API calls and outputs a Linux API call (or calls) that correspond to the Windows command. As long as you have a decent CPU (i.e. a little faster than the stated minimum required to play the game) you wont notice any slowdown between a similarly configured Windows box. I know this because I built 2 identical computers, one running Windows XP and the other Linux and there was no noticible difference between the two. TransGaming has put a lot of effort into Cedega, and I presume this new Cider product will work just as good.
August 3rd, 2006 at 6:05 pm
blah says:
“And due to the power of Cedega those games run very smoothly.
…I know this because I built 2 identical computers, one running Windows XP and the other Linux and there was no noticible difference between the two.”
Can I buy some pot from you? It must be good stuff if you think there is no noticable visual/performance difference between games on windows and games using cedega.
August 4th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
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August 6th, 2006 at 3:51 am