Spore, Call of Duty 4 Confirmed for OSX 125
1up is reporting that, along with the big announcements from yesterday's MacWorld event, the welcome news trickles down that OSX will be getting some more games. The much-delayed Spore has been confirmed for the platform, as has the hit FPS title Call of Duty 4. "In Spore's case, the magic of cross-platform portability is achieved through the use of a special software layer supplied by Toronto-based TransGaming Technologies. This software is capable of interpreting hardware calls to Windows DirectX into Mac-capable instructions. Through use of this technology, Electronic Arts (and others) seem hopeful about bringing even more games to mac in the coming months."
Re:So that explains it! (Score:3, Informative)
I can understand not reading the article. But how about reading the summary? "In Spore's case, the magic of cross-platform portability is achieved through the use of a special software layer supplied by Toronto-based TransGaming Technologies." Spore wasn't coded at all for the Mac, so porting can hardly be blamed for the delay. They could have released it on Windows first and Mac later, like most games.
Re:Boot Camp (Score:5, Informative)
Virtualization limits speed. Last I checked, virtualization didn't give you access to the GPU. The guest OS recognizes a driver provided by the environment with limited capabilities. It's fine for web browsing and cross platform testing, but in now way would let you do any kind of gaming. The corollary to this is that TransGaming/Cider is actually virtualization as well. But in this case, it's specialized to the graphical calls and is designed to be fast and efficient for this one task, though never as efficient as something compiled to run natively.
As for Boot Camp, if I wanted to buy a computer and buy a copy of Windows to run on it, I wouldn't have bought a Mac...