AAM: Getting Parallels to Run Games
Happy Monday all!
We’re going to arrange Ask Apple Matters slightly different this week so stay focused for the next 30 seconds whilst I explain. Every weekend I normally browse through the forums looking for some hot topics regarding user problems, picking one that stands out the most. From there I write out a list of all the answers submitted to that question and publish it in this article. This week, however, I’m going to pick out my favorite answer to a particular thread and splash it all over this page. Sound good?
Haye321 recently loaded a copy of Parallels Desktop, a virtual PC emulator allowing you to run other operating systems within your chief operating system (such as Windows XP), onto his MacBook Pro. The main reason for wanting to do this was simply to play a collection of Windows games on his Macintosh. Sound simple? Well of course it does but unfortunately it wasn’t going to be quite as simple as that.
Long time Apple Matters reader Frozencold gave some perfectly good answers this week, but due to the depth of the post and explanation involved, I’m going to list Buzz Bumble with the winning answer!
Before I sign off for another week, don’t forget that if you have any Mac problems working your brain cells a little too much, feel free to drop by our dedicated forums to leave a question. To help yourself further, make sure you offer as much detail about your problem as possible so others can give you a quick and accurate reply.
See you next Monday!
Question Of The Week
Getting Parallels to Run Games
Question by: Haye321
I have recently loaded Parallels Desktop onto my Mac Book Pro and my original idea was to run all of my games that I have for PC on my Mac. Unfortunately this did not work because after I loaded the first game (Half Life 2) it loaded fine but when I tried to run the game it would not even open up. Can anyone help me?
Answer by: Buzz Bumble
Parallels Desktop doesn’t support the 3D graphics cards… yet. They are planning on supporting them in some future version ... BUT Parallels Desktop (and the other alternative like WINE) is running under Mac OS X, so there will always be an overhead that will slow the games down to some degree, although not as bad as when using an emulator like VirtualPC on the PowerPC Macs.
If you want to play Windows games, then the only real solution is to use Boot Camp and then boot your Intel Mac into a full version of Windows itself to play the games, or buy a separate Windows PC of course.
Even better would be for Mac games developers to still make Mac versions. I’m still putting off buying the new Lego Star Wars game hoping that they’ll announce the Mac version - there already is a Mac version of the first one.
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Comments
There is another answer to this question.
Crossover Office by Codeweavers (here: Codeweavers.com) offers abstraction for much of DirectX, and is only getting better. You’ll get speed on par with native built Mac games, without 1. paying for a Windows license 2. Having to dedicate the space to a whole windows install and dealing with the vulnerabilities it introduces or 3. Having to reboot.
I think Crossover is definitely the way to go, with all kinds of virtualization.. Before I heard about Codeweavers I’d envisioned a multi-OS future in which every software OS ran as a set of libraries invoked by a core hardware OS.. and these libraries could either be licensed originals, or third party clones.. as is done with Crossover.
“You’ll get speed on par with native built Mac games”
I’ll believe that when I see some Quake/Unreal/Doom benchmarks.
Not that I’m knocking Codeweavers—I’m sure they do great work… but doing native-call translation from something like DirectX to OpenGL is a *huge* task.
Unfortunately, going native is usually the only way to achieve “close to native speeds”... which of course means a Windows license.
Hopefully, more companies will see the value in native ports to the Macintosh, and clearly we’re getting some ports more quickly (Call of Duty 2 comes to mind) but often we still miss out (SW Battlefront II, Battlefield 2, Half Life 2)
I just grabbed the demo for the a relatively new fps I’ve been hearing my pc-gamer friends complaining about requirements for (Prey), installed it under crossover beta 2, and played through the first 20 minutes on my poor 1st gen intel mini, who’s only upgrade is going to 1gb of memory. (Oh, The sacrifices we make for science)
I had it use the default graphics settings across the board, and it was smooth and quite pretty. Noteworthy, this is an _entirely_ unsupported game for crossover and it works fine. This is a pure DirectX 9 game, btw.
Now, this is an entirely subjective test, no FPS recorded and no testing under Boot Camp (I won’t sully my mac with a windows install) to compare, the test was mainly if an off the site/shelf current game would be playable, and if others go as nicely as this did, we’re in for better days.