MacOS User

Gaming On Mac OS X (Part 1)

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Written by Andrew Youll

Monday, 15 September 2008

I'm going to review what the various options Mac OS X users have when it comes to gaming on our Macs.

When It comes to gaming I do have to admit, that Mac OS X is sorely forgotten by many of the large games developers, there are a few software houses such as Blizzard who have a strong affiliation with Mac OS / X and have released their software for both Mac and Windows on the same disc(s), but the majority don't.

On old PowerPC Macs your only hope of playing games is either emulating a games console that could play your game i.e. Playstation, Dreamcast, etc or waiting for companies such as Aspyr or MacSoft to port them to Mac OS from windows, which would usually mean between a 6month and a 2year wait for a game to appear and even then only the popular games usually got ported and were not compatible with their Windows counter parts if they supported online / LAN multiplayer.

A good example is Age Of Empires III; which is a fantastic port I was a huge fan of this game on Windows, and now own it for Mac OS X, the biggest hurdle for these ports other than translating / re-writting Direct X calls into OS X compatible calls, is now Physics Engines such as Havok; games are increasingly utilizing these software technologies to enhance their realism. The issue is that Havok is not available for OS X and as such MacSoft had to re-write the Havok code for PhysX which is comparable in features and realism to Havok but works on OS X, and this is were compatibility starts to suffer, because by changing the fundamental parts of the code you can't have interoperability across operating systems if you can't guarantee that what someone using Windows will see is the same as what someone using Mac OS X will see on their screen.

So now that Apple has migrated to using Intel processors has the landscape of Mac OS gaming changed at all? Well yes, now endian issues are now mute as Windows and Mac OS X now both run on the same x86 hardware, the endian issue only re-surfaces for porting houses who wish to support the older PowerPC Macs. Other changes in Mac gaming are in the forms of API translation; namely WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator) which is a translation layer for Windows APIs, namely Win32 and Direct X.

WINE is currently available on Mac OS X in 3 flavours as it were; Code Weavers Cross Over range which uses the Open Source WINE implementation and wraps it up in an easy to use interface, there is then Darwine which is essentially just a customised build of WINE, and finally there is Cider which is produced by Transgaming and is based on years of closed source modification to the once BSD licensed WINE code, the modern releases of WINE are all released under the LGPL, which means any modifications to the codebase have to be released back to the community, where as the BSD license that WINE was released under when Transgaming was formed permitted the developer that right to not release his own code to the general public.

Due to the differences in terms of code base between Cider and WINE I will from here on it refer to them as separate "products" as it were.

The other methods of playing games are via virtualization of Windows using either, VMWare Fusion or Parallels both of which have Direct X 8.0 support, and Fusion even has experimental Direct X 9.0 support but that limits the games that are playable using them as anything released in the last 2-3years will more than likely be Direct X 9.0 based, and finally Bootcamp, Bootcamp allows you to run windows natively on your Mac, you install windows so you are no longer requiring a 3rd party product to allow you to play your games you are playing windows games in Windows and thats about it for Bootcamp.

Native Ports

So in regards to ports, well as in the past Mac OS X ports of games are constantly being undertaken, and more often than not being released as Universal Binaries allowing both Intel and PowerPC Mac users to enjoy the end product, the issues with porting to Mac OS X other than using Win32 rather than Cocoa is primarily Direct X, namely the lack of Direct X for any operating system other than Windows, but this is where things such as ATi's HLSL2GLSL project or DXGL Wrapper can help well looking at DXGL Wrapper it helps to a lesser extent as it only supports Direct X 8.1, but ATi's offering allows Microsofts Higher Shader Language calls to be translated to GLSL (GL Shader Language) calls, helping developers to port code to Mac OS X.

Once again as stated earlier in this article the games that are ported by companies such as Aspyr and MacSoft have some compatibility issues with their Windows counterparts namely in the realm of On-line / LAN gameplay, and as such it is very rare to find a game that runs on both Mac OS X and Windows that will allow both demographics to play against each other.

So are there any visual differences between the Windows versions of games and their ported Mac OS counterparts? the only real differences on occasion is the general quality of the 3D graphics, this maybe just personal opinion but to me with everything turned up to high on my MacBook Pro (Early 2008) Age Of Empires III looks different in OS X when compared to Windows, the detail seems to be lacking, I think it is most noticable in the water, on OS X it seems to lack any depth it appears lifeless where as on Windows in comparison it just seems all together more visually pleasing. These visual differences can be attributed to the different 3D engines being used by both Operating Systems (namely Direct3D and OpenGL), the other factor in modern games determining their appearance is the physics engine being used, as I mentioned earlier Havok is not available for OS X and as such companies like MacSoft have had to re-write large swathes of games to use the PhysX engine in order to port the game successfully, the physics engines essentially make the game animations more realistic when a cannon ball hits a building or a group of units they react more how they would if it happened in the real world, and both engines react to these situations slightly differently.

The biggest issue with ported games is the time between the release of the Windows version and the Mac OS X version which can be upto 2years after the original Windows release at which point we're still paying £25.00+ for a game that Windows users can purchase for £9.99 or even £5.00 out of the bargin section at their local game store.

WINE / Cross Over Games

Now how does WINE allow Mac OS X users to play games? WINE supports quite a lot of games now due to its ever improving Direct X implementation some games that you wouldn't expect to run such as "Supreme Commander" do work albeit with a bit of tweaking, such as downloading *.dll files and altering the registry within WINE. Code Weavers produces to products based on the WINE project for Mac OS X namely Cross Over Professional and Cross Over Games, which at time of writing stand at Versions 7.0.2 and 7.1.1 respectively, the differences between the two products is really just the version of wine they're based on plus some patching that Code Weavers do to enhance compatibility with targeted applications, Cross Over Professional uses an older more stable build of WINE to ensure that programs like Office run correctly where as Cross Over Games focuses on using the latest WINE builds in order to give greater compatibility of games.

The biggest problem with using WINE for gaming is the fiddling around with downloading *.dll files and editing the registry, and because of these reasons the average user will not attempt to use it as they'd prefer an out of the box answer opposed to having to mess around with configurations for hours at a time which is sometimes necessary to get even some old games working such as Age Of Empires I, and even then due to missing features such as DIB Engine the games run painfully slow even on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo. The other issue with WINE is that most games can't see their CD / DVDs in the drive of the Mac so you have to result to NO-CD cracks / patches, I personally don't see this as an issue if you physically own the original media that the game uses.

If you have the aptitude and patience to fiddle around with WINE / Cross Over Games the results can be quite rewarding as I have gotten games from Windows running quite well on my MacBook Pro using Cross Over Games, games that I would otherwise not be able to play at all such as "Supreme Commander" which doesn't have a OS X release or I would have had to re-purchase all of my games which total in the hundreds of releases, so I'd rather not if I'm honest, it's nice to think that hopefully one day all my games will be playable via WINE as it advances and progresses.

For those of you who opt for the WINE route and invest in Cross Over Games, I'd advise you to ignore the Cross Over Games compatibility page as it is sorely lacking and is a pain in the backside to post your results to and is also slow when it comes to adding new games to the page, I'd suggest you use the WineHQ compatibility page which is concise and full of all the mod's and tricks you need to use in order to run your games.

Cider

Cider is Transgamings closed source WINE implementation, Transgaming forked away from the WINE code along time ago when it was still released under the BSD license, and has made itself a lucrative business of creating a WINE implementation dedicated to running Windows games, unlike WINE and Cross Over Games you can't physically buy Cider, instead Transgaming is targeting developers with Cider and re-packaging their software within Cider to allow them to run their software on Mac OS X, EA is the biggest name to use Cider and has allowed games such as Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars to come to OS X without the need to break compatibility with it's Windows counterpart, and more recently EA's Spore was released for Windows and Mac OS X on the same DVD, how is this possible? How Cider works on OS X is that it is essentially a container filer (as with all OS X applications) that contains the Cider WINE envrionment with all the required Win32 libraries and Direct X libraries to allow the game to run and inside the package is also the Windows version of the game.

So Cider is basically translating Win32 and Direct X to Cocoa and OpenGL, but rather than the end user doing it, the original developer does it and this ensures that the game will work using this method. That means for the end user their should be no fiddling with configurations at all as the developer has set everything up so it just works.

The problem that this creates though is that PowerPC users can not play Cider games as with WINE, Cider requires an x86 CPU in the case of Macs an Intel CPU in order to run, and systems such as those with G5 processors that would have been able to easily cope with the game had it been ported in the traditional way are left out in the cold.

But this appears to be the price we pay for wanting games as soon as possible on the Mac platform. This method of releasing games on Mac OS X also leads you to the next question what does this mean for native game development on OS X? I personally do not know, I would like to think that porting houses will continue to do their great work and release "native" versions of our favourite games but with Cider and WINE it is becoming easier for developers to just create one release and then re-package it with Cider and sell it to us as a Mac version. The only consolation is that both versions come on one Disc now opposed to special versions for each.

In terms of computer requirements the developer using Cider to create his Mac version also increases the system requirements as there is now an additional layer of code to be processed namely Cider itself which in turn needs processing power in order to translate Win32 and Direct X calls to Mac OS X compatible calls.

Virtualization

Lastly their is Virtualizing Windows in order to play games, both VMWare Fusion and Parallels support Direct X 8.1 with Shaders, and Fusion also has beta Direct X 9.0 support, but this does limit you in what you can play as Direct X 8.1 is quite and old release of Direct X and as such modern games are not playable but if you play some quite old games such as old RTSs you should be in look but don't expect your latest and greatest games to run at all in either Fusion or Parallels.

As with Cider / WINE there is a performance penalty for this method of running games but the hit is far larger than that of Cider as you are actually running a full copy of Windows within OS X rather than just translating the calls. Also in my own tests only Windows XP is supported for 3D gaming in both Fusion and Parallels, so you can't use Windows 2000 or Vista for example.

Cost?

So what does each one of these methods cost the end user?

We'll start with Bootcamp, in terms of initial outlay the Bootcamp software itself is included with Leopard free of charge, but then you have to include a license for Windows either XP or Vista for arguements sake we'll take XP as the majority of Windows games still run on XP: £189.00 (Inc VAT)

For ported games they can range from £9.99 to £45.00 depending on what game you would like to purchase, the ported games generally cost more for longer meaning that even though the Windows version has spent the last 2yrs of its life in the bargain bucket does not mean you'll find the Mac port for the same price.

With WINE you don't have to pay anything at all, it doesn't require a Windows license and doesn't even require you to pay for it but you must compile it yourself from source code if you don't wish to pay for Code Weavers Cross Over Games: £0.00 (Inc VAT)

Cross Over Games is a commercial product leveraging Open Source code namely WINE and re-packaging it into a user friendly product that doesn't require a Windows license: £25.99 (Inc VAT)

Cider is absolutely free as the developer pays the licensing cost of the software to Transgaming: £0.00 (Inc VAT)

If you decide to virtualize Windows to play games you will have to pay firstly for the virtualization software which varies depending on whether you use Fusion or Parallels and then you still have to pay for Windows: £44.98 (Inc VAT - VMWare Fusion) or £39.98 (Inc VAT Parallels) plus £189.00 (Inc VAT which means a final cost of either: £233.98 (VMWare Fusion + Win XP) or £228.98 (Parallels + Win XP)

Final Words

In my personal opinion there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to gaming on Mac OS X, I personally use Cross Over Games with the hints from Wine HQ, I also use ported games such as MacSoft's Age Of Empires III and I even play Cider based games such as C&C3 and Spore. It all depends on what games you want to play and whether or not how you run the game bothers you.

In my next installment of "Gaming On Mac OS X" I will compare the actual performance of the various ways of playing games on Mac OS X, as well as look in depth into how systems like Cider and Wine actually work.