How can I play Applications (PowerPC) games on my Intel Mac. Please help.

[gabrielleitao]

Hello,

I'm a little bit confused here. First of all, I am using an iMac 20", with Intel Duo Core 2Ghz, 512MB of RAM, 128MB ATI Radeon X1600, running Mac OS X 10.4.7 (Tiger).

I have a little problem with my Games compatibility. I bought a game called Jedi Academy, I installed it, but I cant play. I checked the infor of the .app file to open Jedi Academy, and it said "PowerPC", not Universal or anything similar. I figured out Jedi Academy wasnt available to play on an Intem Mac. However, I purchased Tony Hawk' Pro Skater 2, an old Macintosh game, I install it and I played it normally, without a problem. I checked under the Info of the game and I saw written PowerPC, but not Universal... but the game worked like a charm. I dont understand, and this also happens with another game I have, called The Sims. The Sims 2 works... but no the Sims 1... because the Sims 2 says on the Info that the application is UNIVERSAL.

Then, Im a bit pissed off, and I bet for someone to help me out here. This is my question. How can I play a game that says (PowerPC) on the info on my Intel Macintosh? Is it possible? Is there any plugin or configuration I can install to make it work?

Thanks a lot in advance for the help,

Gab

[nixgeek]

Remember that PowerPC-based Mac OS X apps run under the hardware emulation layer known as Rosetta on the Intel Macs. For this reason, you are able to run PowerPC-based Mac OS X apps. However, the Intel Macs don't support applications that required to be run under Classic on the PowerPC Macs. So if one game was a native PowerPC-based OS X application and another one was a Classic Mac OS game, then the only one that would run (although probably not perfeclty) is the OS X one.

That said, some games might exhibit issues when run in Rosetta. What you can do is check the software developer's site to see if they have provided a Universal Binary for that game so that you can run it natively on the Intel Macs with all the performance benefits. If not, then the only option is to run that PowerPC-based OS X game through Rosetta (which suffers from a performance hit since it is emulating a PowerPC processor in software).

Or, you could use Boot Camp to install Windows XP on a separate partition on your Intel Mac. Then you could boot into that to run a game that wasn't available as a Universal Binary on the Mac or was Windows only.

[gabrielleitao]

Thanks for your help... Im going to "do some Google" over there and there and see if I can find an Universal Binary solution for those games.