The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows ... or do you?
Anyway I picked up the 14 day free trial of this game and I like it. I'd like to update to a full version but square enix's accounts are really bad. There's like 20 versions on their store. Is it worth it to get the full PC version with all expansions? If I get it on steam can I download it for either Mac or PC so I can play from different.
There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.
GeForce Now
PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.
For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!
The Wine Project
The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.
Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.
As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.
You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.
Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.
CrossOver Mac
CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.
CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.
My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.
Boxer
If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.
With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.
Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.
Some final thoughts
In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.
Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
How do you play your Windows games on Mac?
Let us know in the comment below!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
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Concepts everywhereAnother day, another iPhone 12 Pro concept. How much would you pay?
If reports are accurate we might be waiting a little while longer than normal for iPhone 12 Pro. But would you care if it looked like this?
The various technical issues that have plagued the Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV have caused publisher Square Enix to pull the game from sale and offer refunds.
In a post over on the Square Enix forums, Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida apologised for the game's poor performance on Mac, citing 'insufficient communication of system requirements,' and a 'premature release,' with the game going on sale before all its bugs were fixed.
'While the development and operations teams, as well as our entire company, were involved in this mistake, it was I who ultimately made the decision to release the Mac version under these circumstances and therefore bear sole responsibility, and I sincerely apologise to you all,' wrote Yoshida.
'Although our development and QA teams tested the client on Mac hardware, because of our last minute efforts to improve performance and the possibility that system requirements might change,' continued Yoshida. 'However, in the chaos leading up to the multi-platform launch of our expansion, we released incorrect requirements, which were not updated prior to the Mac version’s official release...Had we provided accurate information beforehand, I know many of you would not have purchased the Mac version.'
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As for exactly why the Mac version has suffered from development problems, Yoshida goes on to explain in the post that FFXIV uses middleware developed by TransGaming to convert DirectX API calls into OpenGL calls that work on Mac systems. This conversion, coupled with OpenGL's comparatively poor performance compared to DirectX, is what Yoshida says caused so many problems.
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'As an MMORPG, FFXIV has to display many complex objects at once, and as such it is unavoidably demanding on systems,' wrote Yoshida. 'If FFXIV were to be developed in native OpenGL for Mac OS, it is expected that there would be a performance gap of approximately 30 percent compared the DirectX version...a low-spec Windows PC may run the game adequately, but a Mac system with equivalent hardware may suffer from greatly reduced frame rates, further exacerbating the performance gap.'
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As for why Square Enix chose to use a middleware solution, rather than have native OpenGL support on Mac hardware, Yoshida cited 'development costs,' saying that 'very few games are sold for Mac systems, and the prevailing opinion is that the majority of Mac users aren’t interested in games.'
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While the Mac version of FFXIV has been especially buggy, it hasn't had the best track record on PC either. When it was first released back in 2010, the game took a hammering in reviews thanks to a large number of bugs, structural problems, quest restrictions, and bad interface design. FFXIV's also not the first high-profile game to be pulled of late, with Warner forced to withdraw the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight following a string of issues.
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Square Enix did manage to the turn the PC version of FFXIV around, though. The publisher offered extended free trials while working on a fix that later became the Realm Reborn version of the game. Since then, FFXIV has gone on to be a huge success. As of July 2015, the game has reached five million subscribers.