Spore, Cider and Mac gaming underground

One of the most hyped up releases of this fall, as definitely Spore, a game where you played evolution and evolved the species from a few cells up to the whole galaxy. The exciting thing about it, was also that it wasn’t only a PC release, but that Maxis released also a Mac version.

[Can't.Stand.Another.Day.Without.You?] — Image by Zenat El3ain via Flickr

People tried it out, decided that it didn’t live up to the hype, and moved on to the other games. A typical life of a computer game.

Yet in case of spore, something more stayed behing – latest release of Cider technology, a portability engine that allows game developers to port their PC games using Wine-fork technologies to run on OS X. They say it so nicely with their buzzwords:

TransGaming‘s Cider™ Portability Engine is a proprietary technology that allows PC games to be enabled on Apple’s Intel Macs without the traditionally expensive and arduous need to redevelop a game from the ground-up. Cider acts as a “wrapper” around the PC game dynamically translating PC API calls to the Mac OS X operating system. As such, games can be enabled with Cider in a matter of days to weeks as opposed to the typical man years that traditional development takes. Source

Sadly, not all PC publishers decide to use Cider to port their games over. That’s why the Mac underground community decided to take the matter in their own hands. If you know where to look, you can already get ports of most popular PC games, running on Mac (together with CD check removal and similar annoying little features).

I’m not comfortable, with linking to any of the warez communities, but if you happen to be visiting one and see a description – “Cider Port” – this means that someone took Cider tech and applied it to this game. It has also annoying side effect that it requires OS X 10.5 and Intel chipset.

kreidebergsee lueneburg — Image by manfred-hartmann via Flickr

There’s also a positive aspect of this. If someone made it work with Cider, there’s a high chance that you can run it on Linux, using Wine or Cedega.

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