ExtremeTech has published an opinion-based article discussing how Electronic Arts plans on "porting" the numerous Triple-A titles they plan on releasing this summer and fall. Unmentioned to the WWDC attendees,
TRANSGAMING's "cider" software to run windows games on macs.
Some background on CIDER:
"Cider is a sophisticated portability engine that
allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs without any modi.cations
to the original game source code. Cider works by directly loading a
Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an
optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are .wrapped. with the Cider
engine and they simply run on the Mac. This means developers have only
one code base to maintain while enjoying the .exibility of targeting
multiple platforms and, therefore, multiple revenue streams. Cider
powered games use the same copy protection, lobbies, game matching and
connectivity as the original Windows game. All this means less effort
and lower costs. Cider is targeted to game developers and publishers."
So, while Electronic Arts will be releasing a flurry of titles for the mac and filling a major void, they are not native ports and (more than likely) wont achieve similar or better performance than that of its WINDOWS based counter-parts.
Check out Jim Lynch's article over at
ExtremeTech: Did Apple Lie to Mac Gamers?
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Wednesday, June 13, 2007