Games on Mac

[cadumg]

I am thinking about buying a MAC. I had on in 1997 and was not a good experience because I did not find some compatibilities that I needed.

Now I see that most of the softwares that I use have a MAC version.

Are the games compatible with MAC ? Games like Half Life 2, Fifa 2006, Nhl 2006, Civilization 4, etc. If not, is there any way to emulate it ? Is it good ?

Thanks!

[Thank The Cheese]

hello cadumg,

The one thing Mac OS X does not do particularly well is games. Of those you mentioed I think Civ4 is the only one that has a Mac version.

But anyway, if you are a windows user now, it is safe to say you have a copy of Windows XP, and if you have Windows XP then on the new Macs you can install Windows onto the system and play games that way. That way, if you want to play games you an boot into windows, and for everything else, you can boot into mac OS X.

[nixgeek]

Don't forget that this requires Boot Camp to be installed. Plus, Boot Camp is still in beta. Once 10.5 is released, either installing Windows or running Windows apps virtually from OS X should be possible without worries. Of course, I heard that the new firmware that was released by Apple allows the Macs to boot a Windows XP SP2 disc for installation on the Intel Macs...but I could be wrong on that.

Now I wouldn't totally count out the Mac OS X operating system for gaming. There are some top-billing games out there that have been ported to the Mac. The only concern, especially with these new Intel-based Macs, is native support. If they haven't provided Universal Binaries that will run natively in OS X for Intel and PPC, then the application will run using Rosetta which is a PPC emulation layer. You'll take a performance hit because of this, and the app might not play nice with Rosetta.

[cadumg]

What about emuling then ? I've tried it on linux once, but don't know if it is a good option on mac.

I am pretending to buy a G4, so I think I can't count on bootcamp.

[Mikuro]

Emulating Windows games on the Mac ranges from impossible to impractical. On x86 hardware it might work (in Linux, for example), since most of the code would be running natively, not through emulation, but on PPC hardware, forget it. You can emulate old DOS games decently (...sometimes), but don't try anything more advanced.

[Lt Major Burns]

basically, under emulation, it can run, but doesn't have good (or any) access to hardware acceleration of any kind. hence why dos games run well, as 3d accelerators only started coming in at the end of the dos era.

[Thank The Cheese]

aah DOS games, they were great weren't they! Remember how you had to fiddle around with all the settings in setup.exe in order for it to work -- the IRQ settings were the worst!

memories...

[ex2bot]

I've played UT2004, Doom 3, World of Warcraft, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Tron 2.0, and several other top billed games on my Macs.

Other games available: The Sims 1 and 2 and expansion packs, Call of Duty (2 coming soon), True Crime: LA (AVOID, AVOID, BUGGY, ARG, CRASH), Civ 3 Complete, Civ 4 (coming), Homeworld 2, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, Star Wars: Battlefront, Knights of the Old Republic, Jedi Academy, etc.

Look at http://guide.apple.com/uscategories/games_us.lasso

As for me, I'm saving my pennies for an XBox 360. Oblivion, Here. I. Come.

Doug