CodeWeavers – Beta Center – CrossOver Mac — Personally I think this is a hopeless task similar to WINE. It will be interesting to read the feedback. Nobody ever gets this right.
Welcome to the CrossOver Mac Beta center. We are providing a free time limited beta version of CrossOver Mac to anyone that is willing to test CrossOver.
CrossOver Mac will be the very best way to run your Windows applications on your Intel based Mac. It will let you install and run Windows programs as though they were native, all without having to buy or run a copy of Windows itself.
This beta version will give you a taste of the promise of CrossOver, but should be considered an early test release – we intend to make substantial further improvements before we ship a production version.
If you’re not interested in experimental software, you should skip this and wait for notice of the production release.
found by Rick Salsman
codeweavers is pretty good for supported apps, but wine itself is pretty useless if you have better things to do than configure scripts and send bug reports
No DirectX support (yet) = no games = no use to me 🙂
But, it does look like it has some potential.
I have trouble remembering any product that has successfully done anything like this, except for maybe the windows 3.1 emulator in windows NT. That thing had issues.
My use of Wine has left me feeling it is a curiosity. Wine is really only useful if a developer wants to port a windows application to linux, the few projects I have seen like that work pretty good. but… As a general use sort of API translator, it is still wanting.
Starcraft works good!
‘ ‘ Wine is really only useful if a developer wants to port a windows application to linux ‘ ‘
What were the other uses again?
Reading discussion at the crossover beta forum, today — it is more useful than just jumping to conclusions — seems like two potentials:
1. 80% of respondents are gamers looking to move Windows games over to OS X and the MacIntel platform. No surprise.
2. The other 20% had a pretty interesting discussion about using this to bring the whole $$$ niche of architects back to the Mac fold. They’d love to move AutoCAD and related over to OS X.
I know from personal experience that a big chunk of architectural firms keep a couple of honking PC’s around for AutoCAD — and do everything else they enjoy on Macs. This could be an interesting niche.
Crossover developers btw are the wine developers — according to what they say at the forum.
What’s important about all this is that folks are getting serious about finding ways to run the few Windoze apps they really need — on OS X/MacIntel. I’m in the same boat as many, e.g.,I ‘d rather run those very few in an API translator than via loading XP, etc. on board even with parallels or boot camp.
#4
to run, unmodified windows applications under Linux without the need to buy an Windows installation.
I have now installed 4 “unsupported” applications. Firefox w/ flash plugin (just for fun), Novell Groupwise, and Integrade Pro (both of these are must-have apps). I’m a teacher stuck in a Windows world and Parallels has been doing the job. I have to say, everything is running under crossover perfectly. I’m amazed.
I have now installed three “unsupported” applications. Firefox w/ flash plugin (just for fun), Novell Groupwise, and Integrade Pro (both of these are must-have apps). I’m a teacher stuck in a Windows world and Parallels has been doing the job. I have to say, everything is running under crossover perfectly. I’m amazed.
What??? Run games through Wine just because you dont want to run windows?
Bwhahahahaha…
Ok, now OSX fanaticism is just being stubborn…
Also, I cant recall any offices anywhere that have one or two PC’s yet to get rid of that Wine is going to magically solve all their windows to mac porting needs. Wait a sec, I can’t recall any businesses that have ego’s like that. They all run whatever computers the need for the software they need.
They did this pretty well with Win3.1 in OS/2 2.0 (It was called something like Windows on Windows (WOW) – may be wrong about that).
I remember it working pretty well although I also remember, “What’s the point? If I’m running Windows apps I may as well be running Windows?”
I think the people who really do run (or need to run) multi-OS apps are few and far between and in those cases those really need it to run on one machine are even harder to find.
Ultimately, outside of the ‘it’s neat you can do that’ (and it is). It’s kind of dumb to do it (not really practical). I don’t think there’s much of a market for this.
Other similar products that come to mind:
IBM PC on Amiga (the daughter board inside)
IBM PC on Mac (I think this existed – I may be dreaming here – daughter board)
Apple II on IBM PC (or was it the other way around – maybe this is the one I’m dreaming about – daughter board).
Win3.1 on OS/2
Mach Micro Kernel (all the personalities just ran on top of one kernel)
WINE (Windows on Linux)
None of these, outside of the hobbiest who just thought it was neat to do, were ever a success.
Brad,
Those daughterboard applications where what I would call emulators. Wine Is Not an Emulator. It is an API converter. It tries to map windows API calls into linux API calls, or in this case OSX api calls. It works pretty good on trivial application that use a basic set of API calls, like notepad. However It totally pukes on anything making activeX calls (AFAIK), which is most software nowdays. However, looking at this page on the company website http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/truth_in_advertising/the_real_dirt/ It is the same old WINE that I remember. It has been in this sort of state for years and years now.
The last couple of years Wine has had a focus on running games, and porting DirectX applications. The use of it on Mac is attempting to address this phenomona:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2B-ekl_cEWk
But yah, by all means, spend $60 on an application so you dont have to shell out the $100 on XP home and admit defeat.
Jeez. From reading these comments you would think that a lot of people’s paychecks depend on windows software NEVER working on any platform except windows.
There is only one reason why porting Win32/activeX/directX apps to other platforms is so difficult: Microsoft wants it that way. And who can blame them? I just don’t understand why people who should be OS agnostic seem so unenthusiastic about the idea of cross-platform compatability.
There’s nothing magic about anything MS does, even if you ignore the little fact that 99% of what they put out has significant problems that seem to be unaddressed year after year. (Why does IE seem to have a mind of its own about what size new windows should be, for instance, requiring a registry hack to fix sometimes?)
Interesting comment on Macintouch:
http://www.macintouch.com/
Ishan Bhattacharya shared his experience with the new Crossover Mac:
I just installed Crossover on a MacBook with 2 GB RAM and then installed Office Professional Edition 2003 (the full edition). It is absolutely amazing to see that all components of the Windows version of Office seem to work-and work well. However, I was not able to get Crossover to accept the downloaded update to Microsoft Office (Windows) from Microsoft’s website and apply it to the installed Windows software.
Nevertheless, this is an amazing achievement. I was able to print, set up Microsoft Outlook, play with my Excel spreadsheets that were in Windows format, add fonts from my Macintosh to Word Office without problems. I did notice that wineloader used a great deal of CPU (~50%) which ramped up the fans quite a bit. For USD30, this is well worth it. No more rebooting, and you don’t need to buy Windows XP to use Windows applications. Hell hath truly frozen over. 🙂
Interesting that it can run the software, but not update it… 🙂
#13
M$ explicitly prohibits it !
They said in some note to the press that windows update and genuine advantage will detect the environment and if it is on some kind of “virtual” windows, it will not upgrade…
Google for the note
xrayspec
The only reason I know about WINE is I have used it, many times. So knowing that, do still think I am a hopeless winblows fanboie?
Also your are right, there is nothing magical that happens in the 40 million lines of code that is windows xp. That should be a trivial project to duplicate /snark.
As to the major problems in in windows, could you elaborate? I have been using windows for years. I havent experienced a BSOD in probably 5-6 years now that wasn’t related to a crashed hard disk or a faulty motherboard. As of the Windows 2003 Server I have a hard time deciding if a server should be windows or linux. Usually if the money is there, it goes to windows. How is the OSX server thing coming along? Cleared up that very major issue with threads yet?
Windows is not that bad, scratch that, Windows is a pretty darn good operating system. Yes it has had its fair share of problems, but nothing even remotely close to the OSX fanboie (or even your average slashdot poster) hyperbole.
As to the guy that got office to run on his $2000+ dollar computer, here is a better option for non mac fanboies. (oh and it wont make the fan spin up either)
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?product_id=5086314
14 M$ explicitly prohibits it !
Imagine my surprise! 🙂