Spores

[unixronin]

C|Net reports EA is planning to release its upcoming game Spore simultaneously on the Mac and PC in 2008.  Their "secret weapon":  A virtualization "wrapper" from TransGaming Technologies.

According to David McCombe, director of technical design for EA's strategic platforms group, TransGaming's technology effectively creates a "wrapper" that goes around a piece of software developed for the PC, allowing it to run on a Mac.

"The technology wrapper goes around (the software), and traps the (code) calls native to the Windows environment, and converts them to the correct calls for Mac," McCombe said.  "It's not a complete code rewrite.  It's more wrapper technology with some customer work."

That means, for example, that when a piece of software, in this case, Spore, wants to do a graphics call to DirectX, TransGaming's software translates the call so that it looks instead to the Mac graphics library.

Yeah, if this is what it sounds like, STI's patents on that technology ought to be expiring right around now.  Assuming, of course, that TransGaming's technology is a "link against our libraries and get native code" solution, not a "run inside our wrapper and get a mini virtual machine" solution.

Comments

[tww1fa]

I'll bet dollars to donuts it's just a packaged version of Cedega.

[n5red.livejournal.com]

I'm done buying computer games until the publishers start supporting Linux.

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

It is, in fact, packaged Cider (Cedega for OS X).

My understanding is you get reduced performance and quality this way, simply because OpenGL doesn't support the same bells and whistles as DirectX. They have to simulate some stuff that's handled in-library or on-card in DirectX drivers/hardware, and some stuff they just can't do at all.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I figured that was going to turn out to be the case. When they said "from a user's standpoint, playing Spore on a Mac should be a seamless experience, with no noticeable differences from the PC version", I mentally added "except for speed".