Windows-Mac porting made easy...

There’s no denying that most games are available for Windows PCs long before they come to the Mac platform, though a recent initiative could change this. TransGaming, a developer of software portability products for the electronic entertainment industry, has announced a collaboration with Nvidia, which makes graphics processor technologies, to bring “top tier video games” to Mactels using TransGaming’s Cider portability engine in conjunction with Nvidia’s CgFX graphics system. Cider is a portability engine allowing Windows games to run on Intel-based Macs without any modifications to the original source code. The software works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-based Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are wrapped up in the Cider engine to work on the Mac, using the OpenGL API to map Windows Direct3D calls. With Cider, porting becomes a thing of the past since the technology allows a Windows game to run on an Intel Mac without any significant development effort. Cider loads the game directly into memory and executes the code which means it is running directly in Apple's Mac OS X. The game simply relies on Cider's implementation of the Win32 and DirectX APIs instead of those found in Windows. With most modern games using shaders extensively, Cider converts all the DirectX shaders used by the game into the equivalent OpenGL shaders, which in turn rely on the quality of Apple's OpenGL drivers for their performance. In the end, the game play experience is equivalent to the Windows version and, most importantly, the Mac user is given a "Mac experience" and doesn't need to worry about installing any separate technology or Windows.