Crossover (WINE for OSX) beta released

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Level 2

471 points

Crossover (WINE for OSX) beta released

Oh my... Just in case some of you don't know CodeWeavers (www.codeweavers.com) has just releaed their first beta of CrossOver for Mac. It allows running windows programs without installing windows. I have to say for a first beta it looks pretty good. I've tried Visio, Office, IE 6 and a few others and they all work pretty well, no glitches so far and NO need to gobble up 12+ gig with a Windows install.
Its a great port of WINE which is a windows emulator without windows codebase. The preorder price is $39.95 which I think is a pretty good bargain.

This won't take the place of BootCamp or Parallels but if there are just a couple of programs you need, even some games, this is a great option. Some of th egames run pretty well too, which is quite surprising.

At any rate, I've been waiting on this for weeks and its finally out, definitely worth checking out folks.

Cheers,
Peter

1.83G MBP, 17" iMac & G5 Dual, Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Aug 31, 2006 4:35 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Aug 31, 2006 5:02 PM in response to PeterWor

It would be really useful if you could provide some comparable benchmarks so we can see what sort of speed differences to expect among the three alternatives - Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and Crossover. Will also be especially useful when VMWare is able to demo their virtualization software for the Intel Macs.

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Answer 2

PeterWor Author

Level 2

471 points

Aug 31, 2006 6:20 PM in response to Kappy

Kappy,
I'll try and post some benchmarks but frankly so far my experience has been pretty impressive. I tossed out BootCamp awhile ago so I can only bench against Parallels.
Quake and HalfLife run at whopping frame rates, much faster than I ever expected closer to BC since they run horribly in Parallels.
Office runs at near native speed as far as I can see, a slight startup delay (I assume this is the object code translation). I'm going to install Photoshop and I'll use that to grab some benchmarks since most other stuff happens quickly enough that 'timing" it is unreliable.
Granted this won't replace BC or PD but it has its appeal. Gamers wil probably like it since it even supports DirectX (although currently a litttle flaky with anything after DX9). I'm not really a gamer so I only installed Quake & HL to test it out but like I said the frame rates were impressive.

Cheers,
Peter

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Aug 31, 2006 7:38 PM in response to PeterWor

Good info, Peter.

Before the Intel Macs all there was was VPC. Now, a virtual shopping center of choices. It will be difficult to make a choice especially when one really only needs one (at a time.)

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