Tag Archive for 'CodeWeavers'

DirectX 10 for Mac?

By Alex McLarty on March 10, 2009 in News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Jeremy White, CEO of CodeWeavers, creators of CrossOver for Mac (a commerical implementation of WINE), had this to say about the misty future of their flagship product:

We’ve just shipped a lot of those ‘under the hood’ improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We’re really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10.

I actually think I’m the only one who gets excited about under the hood improvements. Mainly because it means stuff runs faster and is more stable, especially games. Not sure how DirectX 10 games will run under CrossOver for Mac though. Classics like Max Payne, Deus Ex, Half Life 2, all run wonderfully under CrossOver for Mac, but more modern games can prove a problem.

DirectX 10 is Microsoft’s latest iteration of their proprietary graphics API. DirectX 10 has many improvements over DirectX 9, one of them being that it can only run on Vista. What, that’s a feature! Trust me.

But seriously, DirectX 10 is supposed to bring all sorts of new improvements to rendering, lighting, and so on, meaning things will look more realistic and shinier. Did I mention it only runs on Vista?

World of Goo

By Alex McLarty on October 12, 2008 in News and Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .
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World of Goo has been causing a bit of storm recently. It’s a cross between Enigmo (get the balls in a bucket) and an upward building Lemmings, with a bit of Tim Burton mysterio-weirdness thrown in. If you’re throughly confused by that horrendous description, take a look here. It’s very clever, very nice looking and completely unique.

I was a little bit impatient and decided to give World of Goo a download. The good news is that it works perfectly via CrossOver for Mac. Score!

I’ll save a review for when the Mac version is released, but if you just can’t wait to explore to goo filled lands full of bizarre balancing acts and gravity defying towers, grab yourself a copy when it’s released tomorrow and play away!

Google & Wine: now even better!

By Alex McLarty on October 9, 2008 in News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Wine, the open source implementation of the Microsoft API, has been improved indirectly by Google to run some select applications, including Photoshop CS2.

While this isn’t particularly interesting news for games at this moment in time, if there is greater corporate interest in improving these open source technologies, you could in theory see a variety of Windows games have improved performance and compatibility on any system that Wine supports.

 

In January 2006, Google contracted with CodeWeavers to improve Wine to run Picasa version 2.2 properly. Some of the changes fix bugs in Wine; others implement previously unimplemented features. This effort resulted in 225 patches committed to winehq between 1 January and 18 April 2006. See the list below, or download the exact Wine source tarball used for Picasa 2.2 (14 MB).

We also asked a few interns (Benjamin Arai, Dan Hipschman, James Hawkins, and Thomas Kho), to improve a few areas of wine (e.g. oleaut32, widl, msi, and riched20). Together they committed about 300 patches to the winehq git tree.

We also contracted with Codeweavers to improve Wine so it could run Photoshop CS2 properly. As a result, about 200 patches were committed to winehq, and as of wine-0.9.54, Photoshop CS2 is quite usable.

Games are different kettle of fish to things like Picasa and CS2, but we can dream, right?

CodeWeavers also maintain CrossOver for Mac (which is also based on Wine), a way to run Windows games straight from within Mac OS X. Any improvements to Wine will hopefully be of benefit to CrossOver.