A friend of mine was playing Far cry on his MBP - at first I thought he was using bootcamp but he said that its a cider port of the game. Could someone tell me the legality of this this - I mean I believe the only way more mainstream games will come to the mac is that if the developers see more of a financial return- so I tend to buy games exclusively made for the mac. But if I understand this correctly, the program cider 'ports ' the game to Mac.

So is this open source now or something? Or are users taking the initiative and porting the games by themselves and then releasing their work on the web? Its not a port (thats really the wrong word to use). Cider is really nothing more than Wine or Crossover (crossover uses wine). If you don't know what Wine or Crossover is, google it, but to make it short it emulates windows API calls and essentially lets you run windows apps without actually running windows or a virtual machine.

Cider isnt a product you can just buy, they have a specialized wine version made mostly for games and its really nothing more than a wrapper for all these 'cider-ported' games. Originally posted by tkmd: OK if these PC games are showing up on your favorite torrent sites and people are claiming that they are playable (+/- some glitches) why dont the gaming companies use some of their clout and fix the glitches and release a mac os x version - I mean it seems like a gold mine doesn't it?

Sadly, that's what they've been doing. EA at least is doing this for all their games, and whoever 'ported' command and conquer to Mac OS did this too. The drawback though is that the performance is lower than native, and if you have a perfectly capable PPC Mac, it won't run the game. Originally posted by tkmd: OK if these PC games are showing up on your favorite torrent sites and people are claiming that they are playable (+/- some glitches) why dont the gaming companies use some of their clout and fix the glitches and release a mac os x version - I mean it seems like a gold mine doesn't it? As some background, as others have said Cider is really just a Wine application bundled up and ready-to-go (specifically, it's Transgaming's WineX/Cedega branch from Wine).

The upside to the current Cider ports is that (presumably) TG is tweaking each Cider build to work around and address the various issues so that all of the game features work and there are no major holes. The downside (presumably) to slapping any ol' app in there is that you'll likely hit larger portions of the app that don't function right or act as polished as you'd expect from a retail release. Fixing this up would require someone to commit the QA time and coding effort for the Cider portion, and of course paying to license Cider and solving the logistics of distribution and marketing. It's not quite as simple as flicking a switch.

A likely reason (IMHO) may be that PC publishers are really not selling that many PC units any more and so don't feel the extra money and effort will pay off to clean up and release a Mac port, particularly for older titles when they're also competing with Crossover Games (which is likely to run a game nearly as well as Cider in most cases) and Boot Camp. I've recently got an Intel mac and the problem for me is that booting in to Windows is kind of a PITA, considering I do everything else in Mac OS. If I want to play a quick round of Guitar Hero, even though it runs like complete crap in mac OS compared to Windows, I tolerate it because booting in to Windows sucks so much (takes time, none of my files/bookmarks/apps are there when I quit, so I can't easily hop from a game to working, etc.).

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I think other Mac users, esp. All the n00b iMac people who don't even know how to install Windows on their Mac, definitely appreciate Mac native-ness.

On the flip-side though, I can easily see a cider-ized game having better performance than a half-ass port. Command and Conquer 3 for example is Cider (you can look in the package and see the windows exe), but it runs fairly well.

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Games that are very likely candidates for Cider: ones that DON'T use A LOT of the DX9 extensions. Unfortunately, the latest and great ARE using not only all of the available DX9, but DX10 as well (yay, Vista). The reason why there aren't as many games for Mac users: there aren't nearly as many Mac users. Lots of game companies have folded (and are folding), it's not easy to pick a game, develop an engine and specify that it must work on XYZ platforms from day 1.

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Id has this knowledge and they DON'T ship with OSX support out of the box (ETQW is still waiting for an official patch from Splash Damage, but no one is going to play it). Get more gamers on Macs and have them demand Mac games. The reality is: I've given up and intend to dual boot.