Saturday, November 26, 2011

From the TechKommando Files: Crossing Over . . .

No, this is not about death and dying. Or dead and dying computers.

It's about a third way to run Windows software on Macs.

Yes, three. Seasoned Mac heads know all about Boot Camp and virtual machine software. The third way is using a compatibility layer at the Darwin (Unix) level: Crossover Games.

Basically, Crossover does two things: It makes it easy to install Windows programs and it take program calls from Windows software and direct them to the part of Mac OS X that handles the call. The app runs natively, and yet Windows is never installed. No VM  emulation slowdown, no dual booting a la boot camp. NO Windows license.

I got Crossover originally to run the wonderful family MMO Wizard101. A quick perusal of the list of supported apps made me smile: Warhammer 40k Dawn of War (best RTS I've ever played), RIFT (a MMO that is giving WoW a run for its money), X-Com and Hero Lab. The latter is tabletop RPG character design software that beats the living hell out of PCGen.

Awesome stuff.


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