Sunday 15 April 2007

CrossOver Review

Cxlogo Mac

Last week I posted about running Windows on the Mac OS X. The problem with both methods (Parallels and Boot Camp) is that they both require a Windows Licence, which is usually quite expensive. Enter Crossover.

Crossover is a program that allows users to run Windows programs on Mac WITHOUT having Windows running at the same time, meaning no Windows licence required. What Crossover does, is emulate the Windows environment, which makes the program think it's running on Windows. For more information check out the official site.

The main advantage of Crossover is that it runs directly with Mac OS X, which means it's not as resource hungry as Parallels and as inconvenient as Boot Camp.

The main disadvantage is that it doesn't really support a lot of programs, and those that do work are usually slightly buggy.

Shot Mac Cxsetup Thumb

Crossover boasts about being able to run Steam and more so, Counter-Strike. I've tested it myself and while it does run, there are a few minor problems.
1) It takes a very long time to actually get started. In the time it took to launch Steam, I was half contemplating if I should even bother playing the game anymore.
2) The bugs. When I ran the game, the mouse wouldn't click where it was, instead it would click a few cm above. This meant that I would need to click below what I wanted to click in order to select it. Getting into the game was ok, except once I was in, my HUD missing a few things. More specifically, health and ammo. For some reason, these weren't being shown, and if you play CS even a little but, you'll know that you want to know how much ammo you have left or how long you have before you die.

At the moment, I wouldn't really recommend Crossover too much, as it has a few problems doing what I wanted it to do. But for those of you who are ambitious and don't want to purchase a Windows licence, you might want to look into Crossover. http://www.codeweavers.com/products/

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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