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Transgaming Technologies and Mac Developers 141

Posted by samzenpus from the faster-games dept.
ZerocarboN writes "With such current Mac publishers as Aspyr and MacSoft typically spending months to bring games to the Mac, Mr. State said: "We imagine that they are re-evaluating their business models. Our technology does revolutionize how games are brought to the Mac, which we believe will result in a paradigm shift in the Mac game publishing landscape." He added that TransGaming has no plans to license Cider to other companies, but "we are always open to discussion.""
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Transgaming Technologies and Mac Developers More

Transgaming Technologies and Mac Developers

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  • First to post (Score:3, Funny)

    by luketheduke ( 945392 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @08:56PM (#15877834)
    All we need is DNF!!!
    • No we need good gaming hardware first and the Mac pro costs way too much for most gamers. The iMac does work with people want to have there own monitor and the mini gma 950 sucks with games. Apple needs a min-rage Mac with a video card in slot to fit in the gap form the low end Macs to the Mac pro.
      • I agree. I am a potential convert. But there is no decent mid range mac.I want to use/choose my own monitor so the only macs for that are the Mac Mini (too underpowered) and the Mac Pro (huge overkill).

        I want one graphics card slot. Room for 2 3.5" HDs. I don't need a whole card cage for a variety of cards. I just need a vid slot.

        A Mac Midi...

  • Warning! (Score:5, Funny)

    by 0racle ( 667029 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @08:56PM (#15877835)
    result in a paradigm shift
    Nonsensical statements ahead.
    • On the contrary, all you have to do is implement the next generation of leverage by using a synergistic polychronistic time system to wield the golden hammer in order to...

      Oh, I give up!
      • On the contrary, all you have to do is implement the next generation of leverage by using a synergistic polychronistic time system to wield the golden hammer in order to...

        But if we did that the main reactor could lose containment! I tell you, we're better off with reversing the main deflector's polarity and running a level five diagnosis.
    • It's a paradigm shift, but not a radical paradigm shift. As such, it only scores 7.5 on my buzzword-o-meter.

  • Great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by rhesuspieces00 ( 804354 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @08:57PM (#15877839) Homepage
    Duke Nukem Forever is coming to the Mac!

  • Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @09:01PM (#15877855)

    There's also Crossover Mac [codeweavers.com] coming, from Codeweavers. Not only is this better because the user can buy it instead of waiting on game makers to port stuff, but it's also better because unlike Transgaming, Codeweavers contributes back to WINE.

    Of course, there's also vanilla DarWINE [opendarwin.org], but I haven't had any success with it on my Intel iMac yet.

    • it's also better because unlike Transgaming, Codeweavers contributes back to WINE.

      This must be some metric of "better" that I, as a software consumer, am unfamiliar. I've heard of better performance, better user experience, better return on investment... but "better because some developer I don't know helps out some other developer I don't know" does not trump the others in my book. As long as everyone's following the rules and licenses they acquired their code under, which they are, this really won't be
      • As long as everyone's following the rules and licenses they acquired their code under, which they are, this really won't be an issue to Mac consumers.

        I know that you're trolling, but for the benefit of those who don't know what we're talking about I'll explain.

        The difference is that when one product was acquired under a license that allows them to make a proprietary fork of the project and not contribute back to the community and another product makes contributions back to the parent, the latter project is
        • No, he's not trolling, he's making a valid point. In general, there's NOTHING that I'm aware of in open source / free software licenses that requires that you "contribute" any changes back to the original project. In fact, as I recall there's been quite a bit of criticism of companies that have semi-open licenses that require that changes be passed back to and vetted by the originator. If a company takes open source, modifies it, uses it, and redistributes it, they are following both the letter AND the s

      • Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @10:39PM (#15878170)
        if sharing with WINE makes Codeweavers a technically better product, then your point may be valid

        I'll wager that that's exactly the case.

        More importantly, however, paying Codeweavers gets me a better bang-for-my-buck, because the work it funds will improve WINE for my Linux box as well. In contrast, buying a "Cider-ported" game won't do me any good when using WINE because Transgaming forked WINE before it became GPL. Whether they're complying with the legal requirements or not, they're still assholes for closing it and I refuse to support them because of that.

        I also don't like Transgaming's business model, both for Cider and Cedega. I don't like Cider because I'd basically be re-buying most of the same technology for every Cider-ported game, and I don't like Cedega because it's a subscription (i.e., also re-buying it over and over again).

    • Hey wow there's an insight! I can pay CodeWeavers to run most software that's already available on the MAC OS natively without emulation! Absolutely FANTASTIC!

      http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/ [codeweavers.com]

      What Applications Will it Run?

      We intend for it to run all the applications that our current CrossOver Office product runs, with some new additions in the Microsoft 2003 version products. We also hope to offer support for a limited number of games.

      List of apps [codeweavers.com].

      Please mod the parent down ...

      • However Office for the Mac is not the same as Office for Windows. Some things simply don't work on the Mac version. Some things are slower. (I don't know how Wine does speakwise - so I don't know if that'll be a factor) So if you need absolute compatibility and don't want to run it under parallels, then Wine would be a nice choice. Minus what I understand to be problems of cutting and pasting anything other than text.

  • bootcamp (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @09:05PM (#15877866)
    i think boot camp revolutionized the way games are brought to the mac.
    • Not really. It didn't bring them to the Mac. It doesn't help the average consumer. Until virtualized hardware allows for Windows UNDER OS X to run DirectX based games, it's not a consumer solution. Boot Camp, while technically neat, is a geek tool.
      • It's a bit more than a geek tool I would say, with how easy mac makes it to use! All you need is someone who understands "buy a copy of windows, run bootcamp tool, put in windows cd. install windows (anyone can do this nowadays), burn drivers, voila"

        The trickiest part is actually installing windows, but seriously, anyone who wants to and is willing to drop the cash on windows can do it if they know so much as how to click through an automatic installer. Now, whether a non-geek apple user will -want- to d
    • 2.2. Does Windows emulate a full computer?

      No, as the name says, Windows Is Not a (CPU) Emulator. Windows just provides the Windows API. This means that you will need an x86-compatible processor to run an x86 Windows application, for instance from Intel. The advantage is that, unlike solutions that rely on CPU emulation, Windows runs applications at full speed. Sometimes a program run under Windows will be slower than when run on a copy of OS X, but this is more due to the fact that Apple has heavily optim

    • Bootcamp is pointless and stupid, I've done the whole dual boot thing (in fact, am doing so now), and you always end up using one OS 99% of the time, and figuring ways around the programs you're unable to run on your OS of choice.

      You're much better off using one of the virtual machine programs, or, better yet, something like wine. Wine is good in that you don't have to buy Windows to run windows things, and the programs run as programs and not within the virtual machine window. Generally interactions betwee
  • Pshht. Why would you want to play Windows games on a Mac? Added stability, you say? Well let me tell you something, mister. I'm running XP here, and it's the most stable OS I've ever!@^&AF3@%***NO CARRIER***
    • Ah man, a dig at Windows stability! That's clever! No really, that's pure genius! You know, because of problems MS has had with stability. And what a setup! First you start off from the point of view that there's no point in playing Windows games on a Mac. But then -- and this is the genius -- you use your supposed diatribe to launch the actual punchline: A "NO CARRIER" signal, indicating a disconnected dialup connection, presumably due to some sort of malfunction under Windows -- the very platform w

  • Not Good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spykemail ( 983593 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @09:16PM (#15877895) Homepage
    Honestly I take the opposite perspective on Cider - I think it's going to be horrible for the Mac gaming community. Now, as Apple's market share grows, instead of publishers beginning to consider making native versions (not crappy ports) of their games we're going to see everyone using technologies like Cider that reduce performance instead. I guess it's fine for older games but its advantage in terms of development time is offset by the fact that the latest games won't have "good enough" performance.

    • Re:Not Good (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DeathPenguin ( 449875 ) *
      I don't see why you're worried about "crappy ports." Anyone seeking to make a profit off of a games in any operating system, including MacOS or GNU/Linux, is going to need to keep their level of quality up no matter if they use Transgaming technologies or do a native port.

      At least now MacOS users will have a few extra titles made available that would otherwise remain out of reach.

      • Re:Not Good (Score:5, Insightful)

        by spykemail ( 983593 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @09:29PM (#15877939) Homepage
        What I'm saying is that Cider is a performance hit. It's great for ports, but it really can't be used for the latest and the greatest because you need native performance. I'm concerned that its existence will act like a cane that all game developers will lean on instead of deciding to actually make Mac native versions of their games (or even better, Mac only games).
        • Unlike Cedega, Cider is used by the developers and that means support. If it's slow or makes the game act weird on a Mac they have to fix it.

          I think it gives game developers a lower risk way of trying the Mac market. If the Mac ports are successful they may do a native ports next time.

          Besides, then the developers will have cool new Macs to play with and they may insist on doing a native port to play with all the new developer toys.
        • I'm concerned that its existence will act like a cane that all game developers will lean on instead of deciding to actually make Mac native versions of their games (or even better, Mac only games).

          If it means multiplayer games-- particularly FPS's-- can come to the Mac at the same time as their Windows counterparts I'm all for Cider. In the past most ports were months if not years late. Nothing like learning a new game when everyone else had a year to learn all the tricks.

          Often there were also compatibil

        • Re:Not Good (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by alienw ( 585907 )
          Considering that most Macs are either laptops or iMacs (both with relatively slow Intel graphics chips), I don't think the slight performance hit is going to be substantial. You won't be playing anything that demands a fast videocard, anyway. And hey, spending 50% more resources to get an extra 2% of the market is not exactly a great idea.

        • Re:Not Good (Score:4, Insightful)

          by gutnor ( 872759 ) on Thursday August 10, 2006 @06:44AM (#15879278)
          We are not talking about a platform that used to be a leader in gaming and is slowly sliding into oblivion. This is not the final nail on the coffin like it would have been for Amiga or Atari back in the days.

          There is no gaming scene for Mac. Don't lure yourself, people that want to play games or think game s are even midly important on their home computer already have Windows somewhere. People buying Mac have given up gaming.
          Anything that could drive down the cost of development of game for Mac is welcome. Companies don't invest in costly cross platform development if they don't think they could get their money back. And considering what I just said, Mac market is not something appealing ( wasn't Steve Jobs saying that Mac is not and will never be a game platform or is that an urban legend ? ) With this techno, they can try the Mac market for cheap and if they make a few buck out of it, they may consider developing for Mac in the future.
          Also throwing more games to the market can only dynamise it, and maybe convince a number of current moderate gamer ( like me ) to switch to Mac ( why dual booting and pay for both Windows and Mac OS ?? )

          Note, I'm aware that WoW exists on Mac. But games like WoW are exclusive, it is very likely that because of the subscription involved, playing WoW means not playing anything else for years, so I think the WoW port effect is somehow limited for the Mac Game Market as a whole.

          • There is gaming scene, selection of quality games which works happily on G4 / G5 systems and people pay for them.

            This oportunist crap will result in NO GAMES CODED FOR OPENGL, OPENAL.

            Steve Jobs? That guy calls peoples machines purchased just 3 days ago "4x slow" "5x slow" by suggesting Intel is 5x faster than G5.

            Dell fanboy, he now suggests there are no games for Mac? Not surprised.

            Why doesn't he ask his jerk, elitist coders why they give NO CHOICE over OpenGL accuracy and speed? There goes your frame rate
        • There is no performance hit. It's a myth.

          On my Linux box, I run World of Warcraft WIN32 using Cedega, and get native (or better than native) performance. Wine, and hence Cedega, a Wine fork, or NOT emulation. They are binary API compatiblity layers. They are an implementation of WIN32 for Linux.

          It's a userspace app that runs WIN32 EXEs. That's all.

          There's no emulation. It's wicked fast, and there's minimal overhead. The only "real" overhead is that you're paging code to run more types of binaries than are a
      • Unless Transgaming makes some big steps up form Cedega, it's not on the level of native Windows. A notable absense would shaders newer than 1.4. That's all Cedega supports right now. Graphics cards are up to 3.0 and DirectX 10 will bring another update. So this mean that new games are forced to run in reduced detail (there are effects only possible in SM2 and 3) and at reduced speed (SM2/3 programs are faster in many cases). So you do get a "2nd best" kind of game experience.

        Developers may well decide that
        • Take a look at the Transgaming developer blog.

          They've currently implemented much of SM 2.0. Adapating to OpenGL 2.0 has allowed them to speed up development substantially, particularly with OpenGL 2.0 being well supported by ATI and Nvidia. SM 3.0 should be along some time after that; before GLSL there was a lot more going on in reinterpresting shaders, but the direction that OpenGL is going has really helped them out.

          AFAIK, most games that pick between SM 2.0 and 3.0 don't experience significant visual deg
    • The entire point of WINE/Cider is to make ports unneccasary, to run the software natively under an alternate OS, because it is running on the same hardware for which it was compiled.

      It is not an emulator. You only need to emulate when you are translating the intsruction set of one chip to a chip with a different instruction set.

      Does software under Cider take a performance hit? Yes, sometimes. Sometimes it won't even run at all. This isn't because of an emulation layer, it is because Cider is incomplete.

      KFG

      • Re:Not Good (Score:3, Informative)

        by Time Doctor ( 79352 )
        You have an interesting definition of emulation. From wikipedia:
        A software emulator allows computer programs to run on a platform (computer architecture and/or operating system) other than the one for which they were originally written.

        Note the part about "operating system" emulation. Just like Gnu's Not Unix, Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are just names, Wine most certainly is an Emulator, and Gnu's Not Unix when they can't pay for the name, but it sure is Unix otherwise.
        • Wine most certainly is an Emulator


          Wine is as much an emulator as Firefox is a Mosaic Emulator.
        • WINE is not an emulator. It is an implementation of the Windows API. As kfg said in a reply to your post, that makes WINE simply a different, and unfortunately incomplete, version of Windows.

          Blizzard releases it's games nowadays for both Windows and Mac simultaneously (e.g. WoW). Does that make the Mac WoW client an emulation of the Windows one? No, it's a different implementation of the same thing.
          • Your comparison to World of Warcraft is ridiculous. Wine most certainly emulates windows' api and running environment. World of Warcraft runs natively on the macintosh, without using any sort of windows emulation, or wine, or any such thing. Call it a pretendulator [timedoctor.org] if you want, it doesn't change the fact that it isn't native. Just like my icculus.org/quake3 [icculus.org] project runs on windows, mac, linux, solaris, and more, natively, without windows emulation.

            • Your comparison to World of Warcraft is ridiculous.

              Of course it is. It was just an extreme example meant to show that just because two peices of software targeted at two different platforms perform the same function that does not make one an emulator of the other.

              World of Warcraft runs natively on the macintosh, without using any sort of windows emulation, or wine, or any such thing.

              Indeed, and WINE is compiled as a native library for whatever platform it's running on. So when I play a game or use a p

              • If you must call WINE something to support an all-or-nothing attitude, call it a simulator. That's what it does - simulates Windows behavior so that programs written for Windows will work on another operating system.

                Even saying it's a simulator goes WAY too far.

                Wine = reimplementation of Win32. It's an "emulator" in the same way that Compaq's reverse engineered PC BIOS was an "emulator" for IBM's BIOS. It's a "simulator" the same way that an airplane "simulates" bird flight.

                Functionally, architecturally, an
            • What does "native" code mean?

              What does "emulated" code mean?

              Does Java count as emulated or native? Does .NET count as emulated or native? What about MONO code?

              I'm going to look on wikipedia:

              Native Code [wikipedia.org]

              Jump to: navigation, search

              In Computer Science, native code is machine code. However, in the context of an interpreted language, native code is the platform dependent implementation of language features and libraries.

              Hmmm... what's emulated code?

              I'd argue that emulation means one of three things:
              1. Just-in-tim [wikipedia.org]
    • I don't think the Mac gaming community can go any lower than it is now. Apple needs to reach critical mass before game developers will consider native versions. I think Apple is moving in that direction but until then we could use all the games we can get. So, this technology, which will probably be buggy as hell, might help us to reach that critical mass by attracting those users who are sitting on the fence.
    • I had similar thoughts, I'd personally rather software that was written for the Macintosh platform directly (especially since there are lots of great technologies in OS X that developers can use, where there is no straight forward comparison to windows.)

      Having an inbetween state, such as cider, no matter how efficient can lead to two problems. 1.) Developers not designing for the mac by default, instead only as an after thought. 2.) Slower performance on the same hardware.

      There is one up shot of all of this

      • Re:Not Good (Score:3, Interesting)

        by spykemail ( 983593 )
        Yeah, if they're not going to code natively for OS X why not just switch to Windows to run games? I know everyone says they don't want to install Windows on their Mac, but I'll have one installed either way for research purposes. I'm not going to go around buying Cider versions of games when I can buy the Windows version and get better performance on the same machine.

        As for the market share thing, you kids are living in the 1990s. Apple's sales are exploding, they've got a 12% market share in US labtops alo

    • Re:Not Good (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vhogemann ( 797994 )
      About performance,

      Games running under Wine on Linux usually have a better performance than running "native" on Windows. I don't know why it happens, pehaps the Wine folks just did a better implementation of the WindowsAPI, pehaps Linux just handles things better, or a combination of these... but Warcraft3 and HalfLife2, in my experience, runs much smoother under wine/cedega than on WindowsXP.

      So, I won't be surprized if games using this technology actually perform better on the Mac than on Windows.
      • I seriously doubt that the games will run better than they would if they were coded for OS X in the first place, but I'll keep my fingers crossed that they'll run faster than their Windows versions would under Windows on the same machine.
  • ...another layer of indirection. As if they didn't run slow enough on OS X already.

  • Cider (Score:5, Informative)

    by kevin_conaway ( 585204 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @09:26PM (#15877930) Homepage

    Since the summary didn't explain what Cider [transgaming.com] is:

    technology that promises to convert Windows games to Mac OS X on Intel processors without the need for the long porting process traditionally required to bring titles to the platform. The company said that it has already forged agreements "with a number of the top tier video game publishers" to bring many of their titles to Intel-based Macs "in the next few months."
    • I think I'll wait to see it to believe it. If Cider is supposed to radically shorten port times, then we should be seeing ports come out pretty soon. And then all this speculation and rumor will be come to an end.

  • Intel Macs market size? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mbessey ( 304651 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @09:28PM (#15877936) Homepage Journal
    Okay, I understand that this guy's trying to sell the solution that his company produces. But it's pretty weird to say that these sorts of API translation technologies will be "the way" to bring games to the Mac when Intel-based Macs are a tiny minority of the total Macintosh user base.

    I understand it's a lot less effort for the game developer to utilize something like this technology rather than porting the game to native MacOS X. But to the extent that game publishers claim that the Mac market is "too small" to justify porting games, I can't see how a small fraction of that too-small market is going to look any better.

    I'm sure they'll claim that this is a zero-effort solution to supporting th Mac, and it's therefore 100% upside to add this in and get a few hundred sales to Intel-based Mac users. I'm sceptical that's really going to work out.

    -Mark

    • "... it's pretty weird to say that these sorts of API translation technologies will be "the way" to bring games to the Mac when Intel-based Macs are a tiny minority of the total Macintosh user base."

      I've been told by those who do market research into such things that the overwhelming majority of game sales are transacted with people who have purchased a new system within the last 12 months. Assuming this is true (and it seems to be) then the relevant segment of the market for Mac OS X hosted game softw

      • "... it's pretty weird to say that these sorts of API translation technologies will be "the way" to bring games to the Mac when Intel-based Macs are a tiny minority of the total Macintosh user base."

        I've been told by those who do market research into such things that the overwhelming majority of game sales are transacted with people who have purchased a new system within the last 12 months. Assuming this is true (and it seems to be) then the relevant segment of the market for Mac OS X hosted game softwar

      • I did think about the "early adopter==gamer" thing, but I wasn't sure whether that translated to the Mac market. It's certainly true that in the PC world, "serious" gamers are constantly updating their machines, so there's obviously a strong correlation between hardware purchases and game purchases. Among the Macintosh users I know, the rate of upgrades is considerably slower, and there really aren't any of the crazy gamer types that drive the PC hardware business (at least there aren't yet).

        Do you happen t
        • I was specifically referring to the Mac market and to expensive official market research paid for by somebody else, not to anecdotal evidence. If you have a real need something better than anecdotal information (like a published report or something) you might be able to find something with Google, but unfortunately I can't help. The market research results were not provided to me under NDA, but were also not published (so far as I know) so I can't drop a URL on you. Sorry.
          • Oh, okay. It wasn't clear to me from the original message whether the information was Mac-market specific. That's interesting. Maybe the Transgaming folks are on the right track, then. I'll still be bummed when Intel-only Mac games start appearing, though.

            Of course, by the time that actually happens, I'm quite likely going to have an Intel Mac anyway - they're awfully tempting.
    • Intel Macs aren't going to stay a tiny minority forever... its eventually going to be more or less the entire Mac market. There may be some benefit to the companies to be one of the first to embrace it as a platform.
      • If Apple is as successful with the Intel machines as they hope, the day when Intel-based Macs outnumber PowerPC Macs will no doubt arrive within a few years. However, there are still a lot of PowerPC Macs out there, and will be for some time. There are still Macs out there that aren't even running Mac OS X yet...

        I think the folks porting games to Mac OS X will still be around for a while.
    • Is Apple going to continue producing PowerPC systems, or are they slated for silicon heaven?
      • Is Apple going to continue producing PowerPC systems, or are they slated for silicon heaven?

        Earlier this week Apple updated the last last two PowerPC product families, upgradable tower and server, to Intel Xeons. The only PowerPC based systems on Apple's online store are old systems that were returned and are now in the refurbished section, "special limited time offers". It's over, PowerPC is officially history.
        • Yes, exactly. Why would software companies build new things for a dead platform?
          • Yes, exactly. Why would software companies build new things for a dead platform?

            Actually the marketing types have figured out that 90-something percent of software is sold within the first year of a machine's life. So while PowerPC based Macs may be running and useful (running the software they already have) for many more years they will be dead to developers (who want to sell software) in less than a year. Why less than? The towers are far less popular that iMacs, Minis, and notebooks. All of which hav

  • Former Mac Game Developer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @09:33PM (#15877952)
    I use to port games to the Mac. It was a lonely, miserable life. Thankfully those days are behind me.

    Apple is to the games market as Microsoft is to security - it is something each company just doesn't have a culture to ever have any competence in.

    Just look at Apple's pathetic game development page:

    http://developer.apple.com/games/ [apple.com]

    Some of the games I ported to the Mac only happened because I was a Mac user and wanted the game on my system. Companies greenlighted ports with the hope that Apple was getting their act together on the games front and my promises that Apple was changing their ways. But there were always big promises with each new cycle of Apple game evangelists followed by decline.

    I have a hard time imagining that outside of the usual token Blizzard games and a few others that native Mac gaming is probably dead - for good this time.

    Solutions like Transgaming will be bad enough to keep people playing games under Windows, and just good enough that the execs with the power to greenlight Mac ports will claim there is no point risking the expense.

    It is really sad to think back after all these years. Apple could have been a fantastic gaming platform. But their outright incompetence in shipping up to date and decently performing OpenGL drivers gave the absolutely fantastic PowerPC systems a bad reputation in the gaming world. And I will skip ragging on the Apple game employees I've worked with over the years.

    MMORPGs and piracy are really killing the PC game market - I think it has been in a steady decline for at least five years now. Most pc development houses I know are looking to consoles to save them. If there is any interest in other platforms it is Linux and not Apple that I see companies moving towards.

  • Because I am a Mac fanboy, if I were to write a game I'd write it on the Mac first, then port it to Linux which ought to be pretty easy, and then let some porting company produce the Windows port if they cared to.

  • Transgaming? There will be some very shocked guys (Score:4, Funny)

    by SensitiveMale ( 155605 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @10:06PM (#15878056)
    when they reach into the box and find a compact disc instead!
  • But their whole business model for the product depends on them licensing Cider so that people can develop games with it, I thought. Is he saying that they're not going to seek new customers?

    That might be a fair enough move at first, while they're still developing and stabilizing the technology. After all, if he already has the deepest pockets, he shouldn't be wasting his time (or rather, developers) for spare change (even if that measures in the millions). (I like parentheticals.)

  • doomed (Score:1, Insightful)

    by angrymilkman ( 957626 )
    Gaming for the PC and Mac market is doomed anyway in the near future, look at Mark Rein's talk at develop conference in brighton the pc market is dead with intel putting only low end graphic cards on their motherboards. Everybody's moving to laptops anyway and high end graphic cards are energy wasters. There is just no purpose developing photo realistic games for the top 5% of pc market that can run those games. Look at games like halflife2 and doom3 which costed millions to develop I wonder whether they ma
    • Why on earth are you comparing a laptop and a dedicated game playing console? Not hardly a fair comparison.

      my *7* year old desktop can play a lot of games ok, and if I got a simple video card upgrade, almost all.

      You could also be one of the many people that picked an enhanced video card for their laptop--ATI and Nvidia both make mobile chipsets.
    • I *completely* disagree. Yes, many people are going with laptops as their new computer purchases, but many of those people ALSO still own a desktop machine. The occasional person I run across who only has a laptop usually uses it for a specific business-related purpose (traveling salesperson for example, or insurance auditor), so they were never part of the audience for gaming to begin with.

      Just because Intel includes cheap, low-end video on their motherboards doesn't mean the majority of folks are "perfe
  • Having been a mac user my entire life, let me tell you that the only good mac developers are the independent developers (with Bungie leading the pack back in the day). If Aspyr goes belly-up, then I'll be happy - they bring nothing but incredibly bloated, expensive ports to the platform (and usually months...or years... behind schedule). The alternative cannot be worse. I'll continue to support original mac game developers, but porting houses blow and are run by incompetent and greedy people. Inside Mac
    • Inside Mac Games, an online publication, has such a love affair with Aspyr that I rarely read it anymore.

      OTOH, Inside Mac Games was where I found out about Escape Velocity Nova (which I bought) and the Mac port of Jets'n'Guns (which is next on my list).
  • I've got a great crossplatform porting technology to bring games to linux/mac. It's called OPENGL/SDL/OPENAL. And if developers would actually adhere to crossplatform code standards they could actually nail 3 markets at the same time. Heck it'll even cut down on your console port (ps3) supports opengl at leas tthe ES version afaik. I know someone at bioware and even he was saying they had to rewrite for opengl in the playstation port. companies that don't write for opengl in the first place are retarded.

  • please go away (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Thursday August 10, 2006 @03:42AM (#15878960) Homepage Journal
    Please go and destroy some other market, Mr. State. You already wiped out the Linux native games market with your stolen technology (when exactly are you going to give back to Wine as promised?) - I sincerely request you don't do the same to the Mac market.

    Besides, people have fallen for you once. I doubt they'll do it a second time. Your scam is over, no pick up your toys and get the hell out of here.
    • I'm sorry, but Transgaming is under NO OBLIGATION to give code back to the WINE project.

      "Wine is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."

      The LGPL (and the GPL), make no references to contributing patches to upstream, they only cover redistribution and the like. Nothing has been stolen, nothing has been wiped out. Yo
      • I'm sorry, but Transgaming is under NO OBLIGATION to give code back to the WINE project.

        I wasn't talking about obligation, I was talking about promises - they have promised to give back to the Wine project several times. They haven't. Why should I give more credit to any of their other promises, like that their product is any good?

  • not the silver bullet (Score:5, Informative)

    by oliderid ( 710055 ) on Thursday August 10, 2006 @04:02AM (#15879000) Journal
    Take a look at their support forum. And you will see the problem.
    It looks like transgaming needs to tweak its engine for every video games. When the game receives a patch, some of them stop to work and gamers have to wait another tweak from transgaming. It looks like a lot of users are frustrated.

    Transgaming may dramatically reduce the time you need to port a Windows based video game to Linux and MacOSX but it isn't such a clean way yet. They do not provide a 100% compatible DirectX 9.0 framework.

    • Just a little while back I cobbled together some extra hardware and setup a secondary machine for home. This machine is linux-only, but I actually tend to use it more than my primary (which is generally used for video dubbing and more power-intensive but less interactive tasks).

      I spend about a day trying to get "Warcraft III" - a game that previously worked without issues - on my fresh install of wine. The thing consistently segfaulted near the end of installation. Thinking it might be a scratched CD issu
  • http://www.linuxgames.com/ [linuxgames.com] has had this discussion many times with Linux as the subject. Does emulation kill ports and/or original games. I think Apple is in the position to take the PC game spotlight away from DirectX. The popularity of OS/X on x86 and the performance of Apple's machines will decide the battle.
  • did anyone else misread the title as "Transgendered Technologies and Mac"?
  • Congratulations on ruining all the chances you had of being taken seriously, Mr. State.

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