Thursday 27 March 2008

CrossOver Games for OS/X

In one of my many alternate guises, I happen to be a Mac user. So it's with interest that I see that Codeweavers have released CrossOver Games, a games dedicated version of CrossOver Office. I already use CrossOver Office for game playing on the Mac - you'd have difficulty levering me away from my Team Fortress 2 fix at the moment. But CrossOver Games is built on a newer and shinier Wine version, in which 3d graphics support has improved significantly.

So far, I've just downloaded and installed Steam, which seems... steamier. The interface is a lot snappier and the CrossOver games downloader included lots of fonts, which appears to fix the many steam font issues. There's still refresh problems on the interface and the Macbook CPU fan starts spinning as soon as it launches, but I can handle that.

I'm going to have to transfer all my Steam backups around to save on download bandwidth which takes a little fiddling. There's a suggestion on the comments section of the blog post announcing the release as to how to avoid this, but I can't see an easy Mac equivalent and I don't want to break things. I imagine it's just a process of linking more folders than the Linux equivalent, due to the different OS/X directory layout.

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