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is it just me

iancapable

iancapable

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2006
279
0
London, United Kingdom
or is mac gaming really heating up of late? Before I bought on a lot of people said it was dead and dying...

Now all of a sudden EA announce they will be porting their most popular current titles and every game from now on to the mac at the same time as the pc games...

The I read today on insidemacgames that epic is releasing Gears of War and UT3 on the mac as well!

http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/
 
Do the games run NATIVELY?:confused:
Or do they just run like virtualization or whatever?
 
They should run native. A lot of games are moved to macs by taking windows specific operating system calls and translating them into mac os equivalents. But this requires an x86 processor. Apple's Rosetta is along a similar train of thought by taking mac PPC programs and moving them to an x86 mac.
 
hawaiian said:
They should run native. A lot of games are moved to macs by taking windows specific operating system calls and translating them into mac os equivalents. But this requires an x86 processor. Apple's Rosetta is along a similar train of thought by taking mac PPC programs and moving them to an x86 mac.
Click to expand...
But most games (except those using Cider) do not need an x86. They are universal binaries.
How to they work?
Do they simply change the source code a little bit and compile with a mac os compiler?
 
ut3 i believe was always for mac. But gears coming to mac..... yesterday was a cold day in hell!
 
iancapable said:
really? I would have thought that it was due to macs selling so well...
Click to expand...

Macs are selling well, but we still haven't yet reached a level where we get anything but the most popular games (Sims, Civ, AOE, etc.). Also, game companies know the sad truth that, unfortunately, many gamers haven't embraced the Mac platform (and due to arguable lack of power and definite lack of "build-ability," some actively hate it).
 
iancapable said:
Now all of a sudden EA announce they will be porting their most popular current titles and every game from now on to the mac at the same time as the pc games...
Click to expand...

EA isn't porting anything. They're taking their windows games (code) and wrapping them with Cider - Cider is an on-the-fly windows API translator. That's not porting. Porting is converting the windows code to the Mac platform and Mac API calls ahead of time and not on-the-fly.

iancapable said:
The I read today on insidemacgames that epic is releasing Gears of War and UT3 on the mac as well!

http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/
Click to expand...

These will likely be ports as Epic has traditionally done ports and the UT3 Engine is already available on the Mac (we knew UT3 was likely to come to the Mac).
 
phanboyjohn said:
Macs are selling well, but we still haven't yet reached a level where we get anything but the most popular games (Sims, Civ, AOE, etc.). Also, game companies know the sad truth that, unfortunately, many gamers haven't embraced the Mac platform (and due to arguable lack of power and definite lack of "build-ability," some actively hate it).
Click to expand...

I dont know why people dont see this as a good thing?

Sure you dont get the obscure, but rarely ever good, game.

But you get the tried and true guaranteed to be good games. Though, not all of them of course.

Though, sometimes there are Mac ports that just make no sense at all.
 
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