The Coffee Desk

Cider, transgaming for the mac

This week I will review how porting apps to a new operating system instead of rewriting them to take  full advantage of the operating system they are being moved to.

This review is in lieu of a COD4 for mac review as the purchase I made got cocked up in the download process.

Instead lets take a fun little romp down the road paved by the premier company for making games available across multiple platforms Transgaming.

AS you all know I am writing from personal experience not from research so your experience may have some variations.

The first time I came in contact with trans gaming was shortly after the vista beta trashed my computer and I was forced to make Linux my primary operating system. I quickly fell in love with Linux and when it came time to buy a copy of windows I shunned the idea for my speedy new friend.

Enter cedega – a fork of wine which betrayed their promises and for 5 dollars a month makes most windows games (at least the big name ones) work within Linux. While some games ran like trash at first (like eve online and oblivion, which ran nicely but lots of graphical corruption due to my sub-standard card) I found it played wow and doom just fine so I was happy with it for the time I had it. The 5 dollars a month actually seemed worth it.

Eventually I got a new computer which broke so I got a mac book pro under the shining glory of the fact that it is a Unix based product. Unix != Linux but I have to say i still don’t regret the decision because macs are getting increased game support now that the whole “x86 to ppc” barrier has been graciously broken.

I hastily downloaded eve online only to find out that the intel mac version of eve online is actually just a copy of wine with eve installed in one big executable package.

WTF I proclaimed as it became clear that my 5 dollars a month was funding a company that simply perfected how to turn directx9 calls into openGL calls.

A quick point that’s not porting in-fact its little more than emulating. (even if Wine Is Not an Emulator)

Whats worse though is the fact that all the games still have their right click based commands which is fine if you have a mouse but crap if your trying to play from the track pad (to all you who claim you can’t play a first person shooter with a track pad I say I have one hell of a talent to show you).

Either way the game worked fine so I figured I would keep my gob shut as its not the best solution but damned if it did not work.

Now while transgaming may toot their own horn to what I just said their latest working Idea, Cider, does not get the same praise.

Cider is essentially a series of libraries that a developer can link to so that porting to the mac does not require any extra work. The problem with this is not in the games’ functions but instead in start-up time.

Battlefield 2142 and Command and Conqueror 3 where my test subjects and both of them have a starting wait time that made me incorrectly believe the program was not launching at all. once they got running it was great but still the wait is unbelievable, and to the point where if you ask randomly on macrumors.com your bound to get a negative story about the game in general.

So where does that leave me thinking? How about Cedega for the mac. If you have figured out how to get it working leave a comment with a link or a story because I am at a loss.

Better yet here is a random idea: why not just remake the game for mac, since your’re going to make a console version that relies on OpenGL anyway just wedge it in some where instead of making a half-assed piece of crap.

Yes at-least one company is actually taking the time to port mac games and that is Aspyr who recently lead the charge for porting Guitar hero to the mac and while my brand spanking new mac book pro can’t play it with all the settings turned up to eleven like I can play Mass Effect on the windows vista partition of my computer, it still starts up and plays like a normal PC game with no noticeable drop in graphics quality. For more on how effective Aspyr is your going to have to wait for me to get my copy of COD4 which will fuel both a review of the game and a review of Aspyr as a company.

For now Transgaming you get a 3/5 and a hand shake for putting more games on the mac but not quite doing it the right way