Sweet taste of Cider: Intel Macs may mean more games on Linux

[msandersen]

TransGaming has announced the availability of Cider, a portability engine for Macs based on the same technology as Cedega. However it is a Game Developer product, not an end-user product, that basically wraps the Windows game in a Win32 compatibility layer. Or as they say; "Games are simply wrapped up in the Cider engine and they work on the Mac". It's unclear what effect this might have on the native Mac games market. Wine has previously been announced for the Intel Macs.
The upshot is that games can not only be brought to the Mac simultaneously with Windows games, but Linux via Cedega:

With Cider, whole catalogues of games can be easily brought to a brand new audience starving for games. Another great benefit is that games migrated to Intel Mac using Cider will also run on Linux under Cedega, forging a path to another game hungry market.

http://www.transgaming.com/index.php...isplay&ceid=24

And yes, Cider is an alcoholic beverage derived from Apples, just as Wine is derived from grapes.

[NyTE]

Im skeptical,I mean transgaming has made loads of false claims before.
Lets just see when the cider games come out and see how good they run on
cedega.

Time will tell.

[msandersen]

It is a sales pitch, to be sure. "Just Add Cider and Away You Go!" Yeah sure. I've never tried Cedega, but I do know it doesn't support all the games out there. Wine itself is still a work in progress with limited compatibility, and often requiring a bit of handholding/configuration to work for a particular app, if at all.
But it's interesting to be sure. Apparently their terms are a cut of the profits, so I don't know how enticing it is. Frpom the FAQ:
http://www.transgaming.com/index.php...eid=38&meid=#5

5) How much does does [sic] Cider cost?
The business model for Cider is based on a revenue share with the publisher with no upfront fee, no risk and lots of upside potential.

It's a pity about the PowerPC platform not working out, frankly, but the switch has opened a lot of opportunities and interest from people who otherwise wouldn't have been. It used to be that there was only Virtual PC for running Windows apps on Macs, and not that fast, and that was snapped up by Microsoft. No sooner had the first Intel iMacs come out and VMWare and Parallels announced support, while Microsoft's VirtualPC is nowhere to be seen. On top of that, official support for dual-booting Windows - on a Mac!
Macs do present a potential boon for other Unix/Linux systems, as they are as yet the only popular Desktop Unix systems, and once someone has gone to the trouble of porting to Intel Macs (which also use GCC and OpenGL), it is potentially that much easier to also support Linux. That is the possibility that TransGaming mentions as part of their sales pitch. Of course, the trouble with Wine/Cedega is that they in effect discourage local ports, and in the case of games staying with the DirectX API.
Vista, if indeed it is any good for gaming, appears to try and kill off OpenGL altogether, judging from the various reviews and how badly OpenGL performs on it.

[Stealth]

I think it will work better than Cedega, and now Transgaming has gotten a little bigger niche in the market. I've heard that this is probably why the support in Cedega has been so poor in the past releases, and that they will probably stop supporting Cedega (Linux) all together...

[patrick295767]

As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator": Wine does not emulate the Intel x86 processor.

http://www.winehq.com/site/myths

And, then C I D E R, what could it be ?

[NyTE]

This is just a guess but since the cider games according to Transgmaing work on cedega,maybe the cider under cedega games will actually work like they do on Native windows? Idk but just a guess..

Plus im the cider fact,people have to actually test the quality of how the game works,unlike cedega.