![]() Because of the high-end virtualization technology present in Intel processors and the excellent mutlitasking of 'Nix based operating systems, it's easy to play a game at three quarter size and do work around the edges. Games actually do something better in Crossover Games than most do in normal Windows – they can run as a windowed mode instead of full-screen. Half-Life 2 runs beautifully on the Macbook, as does Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. This can be quite misleading when you think nothing is happening but the system as a whole is behaving quite sluggishly. Loads are considerably increased compared to an equivalent Windows installation, and there's not really any good indicator that it's doing much at all. ![]() The one thing that you will definitely notice is a bit of a load time for the executable to begin its magic. ![]() I noticed no slowdown compared to playing on my full desktop which sports much more admirable specifications. All of the games ran with no issues out of the same bottle, and actually every one of them performed very well. Supported gamesI fired up my copies of Half Life 2: Episode 2, Guild Wars, Call of Duty 2, Prey and Team Fortress 2. As a mid-range laptop, it should give you an idea of what you could expect from anything that isn't an Intel-integrated system that's running Linux or OSX. The test system is as follows:Īs you can see, I'm not running Apple's top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. What I can offer is an honest opinion from an avid gamer about whether things are running slowly. Is it measuring the actual output, or the output it thinks it is giving because of the middleware? Things like FRAPS (at least to my knowledge) don't really work, and it's hard to trust the in-game rates because it's not a sure thing that the report is accurate. See, there's very little actual method to test frame rates inside of the games. Unfortunately, this is partially where the pavement of an objective review starts to change to the dirt road of a subjective observation. Simply click on the "Programs" menu in your menu bar and you'll be greeted with a list of all available programs in all existing bottles. If you absolutely must run one of the applications on Crossover's Gold list it's certainly much cheaper than the rather steep combo of a Windows licence and one of the big two VM packages, but don't expect to rely on it for anything system-critical.Playing gamesPlaying games in Crossover Games is oddly intuitive. Its interface is equal parts ingenious and awkward. Heck, we couldn't even get it to install IE7 without it falling over, and that was listed in its small selection of supported apps.Ĭrossover is flaky. We hope CodeWeavers is thankful to the open source advocates who put Wine together in the first place.īut throughout running Crossover we were aware that we weren't getting the full Windows experience. It's logically fantastic, and the OS agnostic ethos behind it is flawless. We're not suggesting that Crossover's sharp emulation of Windows' components isn't a remarkable achievement. Whatever you might do with Crossover can be done just as well with something else. You might as well use a service like IE Netrender to test your pages, while Flip4Mac is a much more elegant way to add WMV compatibility to OS X. Legacy versions of Media Player are also supported, which is a cheeky way of playing WMV video.īut alternatives to these things already exist. Internet Explorer is there, for instance, which makes testing web designs with the world's most popular browser relatively straightforward. This number does cover many of the applications that make it most useful. There's a short list of programs – 700 or so – that CodeWeavers rates as Gold, and even this designation merely signifies that the application mostly runs as expected. Crossover has had its detractors over the years, and for good reason here we are at version 9, and it's only just catching up with some of the more major Windows applications on the market.
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