If you’re like me and own a Mac and enjoy playing games, you probably get ridiculed a far bit for owning a mac “This new awesome game isn’t available for you”, “pft, that game was soo 2007, we don’t care anymore”. I admit, some developers release schedule for games on OSX is abit slow. It has improved though since Apple started using Intel Processors back in 2005. This year, Apple released OSX 10.7 (Lion) and have now completely dropped support for PPC based apps. I didn’t realize how many PPC based apps I had until after I installed Lion (Install wizard only said Dropbox wasn’t compatible and removed it… so I re-installed it and it works just fine). Among the few games I had installed which was no longer playable was Diablo 2.

Sorry Cows, no more fighting on OS X Lion.

I’m still a Diablo 2 player. It’s a great game to play with friends over a weekend, an evening, or just time to waste in general, It was almost enough for me to roll back to Snow Leopard, but I decided to start taking up a project to make the Windows version of Diablo 2 work over WineX, thus making it compatible but using some Windows API’s to provide a wrapper. EA Games licensed the same technology from Transgaming Inc (called Cider) for most of the games they have provided for OSX. Thankfully though, I didn’t have to do much work because there was already an answer.

PlayOnMac. A free download for OSX which provides you with all the tools to make your applications compatible. PlayOnMac has a simple to use gui which enables you to “Install” your game into a wrapper. Once done you can run the game as normal. You also have the option to install Windows libraries such as DirectX, DotNet, etc.

An answer for Mac Gamers. No more need for bootcamp!

Of course the game may not be 100%. Age of Empires 2 for example has no text on the main menu, and Diablo 2′s screen is not quiet centre (the bar at the bottom of the screen is missing about 25%, but you can still use the functions) but the game is playable just fine.

PlayOnMac also has a library of pre-tested apps you can choose from to install including Fallout: New Vages, and Call of Duty: Black Ops! A full list of compatibility is available online here: http://www.playonmac.com/repository/. I had also installed Anachronox onto my Mac as my desktop had problems with missions (Google “Lucko Coldwolf bug”) and couldn’t progress through the game. PlayOnMac made it work just fine.

Choose from a selection of pre-configured setups, or install your own! Results may vary.

PlayOnMac don’t just provide Mac users the opportunity to use windows software, they also have made the same application for Linux users, PlayOnLinux. I have not had the chance to use the Linux version of this application but I would imagine it works just the same.

I’m not going to go into detail on how to use this application, it’s very straight forward to use and the community is very much alive. It’s worth checking this app out.

 

PlayOnMac Homepage: http://www.playonmac.com/
PlayOnLinux Homepage: http://www.playonlinux.com/

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