CrossOver Mac is a system application that allows you to run Windows applications under Mac OSX without installing the Windows OS. It is -not- an emulator, but is based on WINE the Linux Open Source project. Unfortunately for some Mac users, it -does not- work on PPC Macs, only Mac Intels.
There’s a list of known compatible applications on their website, and a link to the beta test forum. It sounds like they’ve made some progress since I last tried WINE over a year ago. I’ll probably give it a try this weekend. Would be useful to be able to run some of my favorite Windoze utilities under OS X.
Advantages are:
a) you don’t have to reboot to run a Windows app
b) it can share files on the same HD partition
c) it doesn’t require a copy of Windows OS.
The biggest disadvantage is (besides that it only runs on Intel systems) is that not all Windows software will run. I experimented a fair bit with Wine a couple years ago (which is the same technology). There’s something “defiantly independent” about being able to run Windows applications without having to buy Windows. Some applications ran as well (using Wine and Linux) as they did under Windows, some ran even better than under Windows, some had problems and some didn’t run at all.
There are a couple game dev utilities I would love to be able to run (Ultimate Unwrap 3D for one) under OSX and CrossOver. There just isn’t a Mac equivalent to a lot of tools I use.
Does anything that actually uses 3D work with that (or with Wine for that matter)? I was under impression that it’s quite easy to virtualize the CPU, but try doing that for the video card (without falling back to software rendering)…
Sure, it maps Direct3D calls to OpenGL calls. CrossOver/WINE isn’t virtualization, it’s a re-implementation of Windows APIs. Parallels does use virtualization, and you’re right, you can’t virtualize the graphics card, so Parallels doesn’t have hardware 3D.
(BTW, nobody could seriously consider rebooting all the time in a production environment, so Boot Camp is useless for a lot of things unless you’re really desperate.)
I happen to have a spare copy of WinXP.