Moss Technology (Substitute Page)

Transgaming, a company that speciliazes in making programs that allow people to use Windows games on other platforms, introduced Cider this week. Cider is an application "wrapper" (that is, not realy an application) that allows Mac gamers to go out and buy games made for Windows and install it and play it in OS X, the same way as they would in Windows -- all the work is handled by Cider in the background. Cider works by translating API calls in real-time into code that OS X can understand. This includes all the features of the game such as 3D acceleration, sound etc. This will help developers a lot, and maybe save the computer gaming market (you can't really call it a "PC" gaming market anymore can you). TransGaming says that by bundling Cider with their Windows games, developers can make games for Windows and Apple users can simply go out, purchase those same games, and bring it home and enjoy it on their Macs. There's no need for developers to develop "Mac" versions of their games, which is time consuming and sometimes doesn't produce a profit. But, Cider only works with Intel-based Macs, sorry Apple "G" users. According to TransGaming:

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.

But users may see a performance hit ranging from 10 to 15 percent compared to the same game being played in Windows. Apple is expected to talk about the future of gaming on the Mac platform at its World Wide Developers Conference this week, for this is a big boost for Apple who might intergate Cider into future OSes, maybe even into Leopard, which is scheduled for Spring 07 launch.

Posted by tlmoss on Tuesday, August 08, 2006 at 3:06 PM | Permalink