Crossover Games for Mac

Of course, since DirectX is exclusively Windows-based, it's left Mac and Linux users out in the cold for quite some time. Releases lag by months if not years before a Mac port is created, and that's if one is ever even seen. Updates are rare and bugs linger for ages. Sure, there are some great games coded natively for OSX or Linux, but most commercial titles are just not there.

Codeweavers sells its software commercially, which is based on very carefully tailored packages of Wine that it calls "Crossover." But rather than become a big company making money off an open project, Codeweavers exists as little more than a professional conduit the developers are some of the best and brightest of the Wine community for years, and so your money goes 100 percent back into the Wine community. Businesses and individuals that buy the company's /Crossover/ software are actually donating to the Wine project, and in return get support and assistance with getting their needed programs to run.

The company has had some great success with Crossover, enough so that it could begin devoting part of its resources to fund solidly game research. Wine as it stands right now has some problems with its ability to handle gaming, particularly in the DirectX API and the .NET 2.0 Framework you can bet that Microsoft isn't exactly chomping at the bit to help, either. So, with some actual funding in hand, Codeweavers began to work on the project that is now known as Crossover Games the product we'll be reviewing today.