It seems like only last month we were talking about what needed to be done to spur the Mac gaming market, and here, suddenly, comes a new player. TransGaming has developed a system called Cider that allows game developers to move Windows games onto Intel Macs with ease. Essentially,Cider reroutes DirectX subsystems to the OS X systems that handle the same thing.
Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel Mac system and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. TransGaming’s Cider implements common multimedia Windows APIs such as Direct3D, DirectInput, DirectSound and many others by mapping them to Mac equivalents. This allows games to run with equivalent game play and performance but without the typical brute force porting effort typically required to bring games to Mac.Cider is intended for Mac developers, though as Macworld's resident gaming guru, Peter Cohen, has explained, many of the porting companies have already done legwork in creating DirectX replacements on Mac. Thus it remains to be seen what kind of effect Cider will have on the Mac gaming community, both developers and consumers. With XP only a reboot away on Intel Macs, Cider's performance will have to be pretty impressive. And, at the same time, Cider only works with Intel-based Macs, meaning that the hordes of existing PowerPC users will be left out in the cold. TransGaming claims to have signed agreements with “top tier” publishers to bring “triple A” titles to the Mac, so we'll have to wait and see exactly what this might entail.
[Thanks, Tuncer]
