Running Windows Applications On A Mac Without Windows CrossOver 14.1.3 Review

Running Windows applications on Linux and Mac systems has come a long way. I remember doing virtual machines, like QEMU, and VirtualBox, running a guest in Vista or XP, and while it does run as expected, the overhead costs of running a whole operating system in a VM environment can be big (I still do use these programs, particularly VBox for development purposes).

Around 2004-2007ish, I’ve was doing some application testings for a little program named WINE (I also have a friend, Tom Wickline, of Wine Reviews, who incidentally was the indirect reason why I created this blog in the first place (we did a review of PlayOnLinux in the past together, and it was so much fun, that I created this blog out of a whim). No, WINE is not a alcoholic drink, but instead it is rather a program that emulates different Windows APIs in linux and mac systems. It was also a challenge to compile for beginners too (I do not compile in mainstream linux OSes in the past but rather in smaller hobbyist type Linuxes like Alinux/PeanutLinux or PCLinuxOS). Real life happened though, so I had to give up this hobby.

The advantage of running WINE over Virtual Machine solutions is no overhead costs and the application runs at particularly native speeds. The disadvantage of running WINE is that not all programs run (Windows has a lot of APIs under the hood, and WINE doesn’t implement all of them).

In this particular article, I am running CrossOver 14.1.3 for Mac, on an early 2011 MacBook Pro (8,1) with 4GB of RAM and Intel HD 3000 Graphics (384MB Shared Memory Display).

Also for this particular experiment, I am installing a CodeWeavers supported application (Microsoft Office 2007), and two unsupported, but community supported applications (Mass Effect, and Tomb Raider 2013)

Before We Start
Before we start, let us see the levels of compatibility in these programs according to WINE compatibility levels:

Bronze – programs can install and run, with fundamental functionalities intact. However, the applications running have enough bugs that CodeWeavers advises running them with caution (save early and often).

Silver – programs can install and run well enough to be usable. There are however bugs that are found to let the program run flawlessly.

Gold – programs can install and run as you would expect if you are running Windows.

A further level of support for CodeWeavers is officially supported. That means if your application is in the list of officially supported applications, CodeWeavers is dedicated to bring up the level of compatibility higher (for example, supported bronze applications is expected to be brought up to silver level applications of CodeWeaver in future versions of CrossOver).

Microsoft Office (Officially Supported, Bronze)
Microsoft Office is an Office Suite of Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation Software, among others. It is basically the proprietary equivalent of LibreOffice/OpenOffice. As such, CrossOver supports Microsoft Office officially.

Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.

 

 
Full Review

Limited number of FREE CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac and Linux licenses available

I have ten CodeWeavers CrossOver licenses available, five for CrossOver Mac and five for CrossOver Linux to give away to web sites or individuals who are interested in writing a review of CrossOver Mac or Linux. The license are valued at $59.95 each and are good for a one year subscription.

What's needed :

1. A website to host your review
2. A Linux or Mac computer
3. Windows Games or Applications, you can look at the compatibility center for known software that works.

What will you receive for your review :

1. A full copy of CrossOver Mac or Linux
2. Back links from this and other sites.. Think SEO
3. Your review posted on winehq.org Facebook and other social sites e,g Google+ , Twitter etc etc with back links to your review.

How can you contact me about doing a review :

You can leave a comment here, please include a link to your website, don't worry all comments here are moderated and won't be made public or go to Facebook and send me a message. Not the ( Contact Us ) but a Message.

I would like to have a Spanish, Russian, Hindi, German, French and English or other major language Chinese or Italian etc etc :) review to broaden the overall reader base. This will not only make it easier for you to write the review in your native language but for your local readers to better understand the review.

Keep in mind license and reviews will be accepted on a first come first serve basis, I'm not trying to get the greatest reviews but more importantly truly honest and unbiased reviews.

CodeWeavers Experiments with Oculus Support for Mac and Linux

CodeWeavers CrossOver now has support for the Oculus Rift!

Well, our internal testing builds do, anyway. Here at CodeWeavers, we're excited about what virtual reality can bring to gaming and other computing applications. The Oculus Rift is currently the largest VR (Virtual Reality) headset available for purchase, so we've decided to integrate support for it into CrossOver.

Once we've released support in our public builds, playing Windows Oculus games with CrossOver on your Rift will be just as easy as with any native Mac OSX or Linux Oculus application. Integration between your Windows Oculus application and your hardware should be seamless. We've been "testing" ;) with a DK2 here in the office, and it's been an impressive experience.

Caveats? There's a couple. This is an experimental feature in CrossOver, and some games access the Rift hardware in a way that Wine doesn't yet support. We hope to have this repaired soon, but some particular applications may fail to detect the Rift hardware.

More worryingly, Oculus has decided to drop support for Linux and OSX. While our Oculus integration works for now, it does depend on your having a Linux or Mac OSX SDK, which is no longer supported by Oculus. Depending on changes to future Windows Oculus SDK versions, we could fail to support games built against those new SDKs.

But don't lose hope! It would be difficult, but we could build support for the Windows Oculus SDK in CrossOver. That's right: CrossOver could become the only way to use the Oculus Rift on Mac OSX and Linux. But this is all hypothetical. It depends on what Oculus decides to do for their Linux and Mac users.

If you've got a Rift and are interested in trying out our support, contact our Caron at caron@codeweavers.com and ask for a nightly build. If you want more information about our solution for Oculus, contact our sales team at sales@codeweavers.com. We'd love to have your support and feedback.

We're also interested in building support for other VR headsets. As soon as some other headsets come on the market, like Valve and HTC's Vive headset or Microsoft's HoloLens, we'll be thinking about adding support so you can have the freedom to use your Windows VR games and applications on Linux and OSX.

About Andrew Eikum
Andrew has been a Wine developer at CodeWeavers since 2009. He works on all parts of Wine, but specifically supports Wine's audio. He's also a developer on many of CodeWeavers's software ports.

 

About CodeWeavers
Founded in 1996 as a general software consultancy, CodeWeavers focuses on the development of Wine – the core technology found in all of its CrossOver products. The company's goal is to bring expanded market opportunities for Windows software developers by making it easier, faster and more painless to port Windows software to Mac OS and Linux. CodeWeavers is recognized as a leader in open-source Windows porting technology, and maintains development offices in Minnesota, the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world. The company is privately held.

Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.

 

CodeWeavers CrossOver 14.1.3 has been released

I am delighted to announce that CodeWeavers has just released CrossOver 14.1.3 for both Mac OS X and Linux.  CrossOver 14.1.3 has important bug fixes for both Mac and Linux users.

Mac customers with active support entitlements will be upgraded to CrossOver 14.1.3 the next time they launch CrossOver.  Linux users can download the latest version from http://www.codeweavers.com/.

Change Log For CrossOver Mac and Linux :

14.1.3 CrossOver - May 18, 2015

• Mac OS X:
  • Fixed graphics problems with character models in the game Banished on certain Mac hardware.
• Linux:
  • Updated the version of the gnutls library we use for compatibility with newer Debian and Ubuntu distributions. This will fix connection issues in Diablo III as well as other possible problems.
 

Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.

 

Oculus Rift to drop support for Mac and Linux but their is still CodeWeavers to fill the gap

Oculus announced today that they will be dropping support for their Virtual Reality Oculus Rift platform on Mac and Linux due to the need to focus solely on the Windows platform for the foreseeable future. Here is the post from the Oculus site giving hardware specifications and the demise of Mac and Linux support.

Powering the Rift

About Atman Binstock:

Atman is Chief Architect at Oculus and technical director of the Rift. Before joining, he was one of the lead engineers and driving forces behind Valve’s VR project, creating the ‘VR Room’ demo that garnered so much excitement at Steam Dev Days. Prior to Valve, Atman led several projects at top companies in the industry including RAD, DICE, and Intel.

 Given the challenges around VR graphics performance, the Rift will have a recommended specification to ensure that developers can optimize for a known hardware configuration, which ensures a better player experience of comfortable sustained presence. The recommended PC specification is an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290, Intel i5-4590, and 8GB RAM. This configuration will be held for the lifetime of the Rift and should drop in price over time.


The Rift is specifically designed to deliver comfortable, sustained presence – a “conversion on contact” experience that can instantly transform the way people think about virtual reality. As a VR device, the Rift will be capable of delivering comfortable presence for nearly everyone. However, this requires the entire system working well.

Today, that system’s specification is largely driven by the requirements of VR graphics. To start with, VR lets you see graphics like never before. Good stereo VR with positional tracking directly drives your perceptual system in a way that a flat monitor can’t. As a consequence, rendering techniques and quality matter more than ever before, as things that are imperceivable on a traditional monitor suddenly make all the difference when experienced in VR. Therefore, VR increases the value of GPU performance.

At the same time, there are three key VR graphics challenges to note: raw rendering costs, real-time performance, and latency.

On the raw rendering costs: a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.

Traditionally, PC 3D graphics has had soft real-time requirements, where maintaining 30-60 FPS has been adequate. VR turns graphics into more of a hard real-time problem, as each missed frame is visible. Continuously missing framerate is a jarring, uncomfortable experience. As a result, GPU headroom becomes critical in absorbing unexpected system or content performance potholes.

Finally, we know that minimizing motion-to-photon latency is key to a great VR experience. However, the last few decades of GPU advancements have been built around systems with deep pipelining to achieve maximum throughput at the cost of increased latency; not exactly what we want for VR. Today, minimizing latency comes at the cost of some GPU performance.

Taking all of this into account, our recommended hardware specification is designed to help developers tackle these challenges and ship great content to all Rift users. This is the hardware that we recommend for the full Rift experience:

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM

The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration by default. We believe this “it just works” experience will be fundamental to VR’s success, given that an underperforming system will fail to deliver comfortable presence.

The recommended spec will stay constant over the lifetime of the Rift. As the equivalent-performance hardware becomes less expensive, more users will have systems capable of the full Rift experience. Developers, in turn, can rely on Rift users having these modern machines, allowing them to optimize their game for a known target, simplifying development.

Apart from the recommended spec, the Rift will require:

• Windows 7 SP1 or newer
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture

The last bullet point is tricky: many discrete GPU laptops have their external video output connected to the integrated GPU and drive the external output via hardware and software mechanisms that can’t support the Rift. Since this isn’t something that can be determined by reading the specs of a laptop, we are working on how to identify the right systems. Note that almost no current laptops have the GPU performance for the recommended spec, though upcoming mobile GPUs may be able to support this level of performance.

Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.

In the future, successful consumer VR will likely drive changes in GPUs, OSs, drivers, 3D engines, and apps, ultimately enabling much more efficient low-latency VR performance. It’s an exciting time for VR graphics, and I’m looking forward to seeing this evolution.

Last week I posted about CodeWeavers en-pending support for Oculus Rift on Mac and Linux see the original post here. So with this lasted announcement from Oculus it looks as tho CodeWeavers is going to be the only game in town to support Rift VR on Mac and Linux for the foreseeable future.
 

 Run Microsoft Windows Applications and Games on Mac, Linux or ChromeOS save up to 20% off  CodeWeavers CrossOver+ today.