Need help with Wine

[Dansen]

Right now I have mac, and there is a plethora of free to play windows games that look great. I really want to play them but I cant afford to buy a windows OS for bootcamp, so I am considering downloading wine. The problem is Im not to sure what it is exactly and what are its pros and cons. Will it negatively impact my mac? Will the games run alright on it? etc. So if anybody on the escapist can give me advice and a run through on how to use the program, that would be awesome.

 

[thesilentman]

Right now I have mac, and there is a plethora of free to play windows games that look great. I really want to play them but I cant afford to buy a windows OS for bootcamp, so I am considering downloading wine. The problem is Im not to sure what it is exactly and what are its pros and cons. Will it negatively impact my mac? Will the games run alright on it? etc. So if anybody on the escapist can give me advice and a run through on how to use the program, that would be awesome.

Get ready to futz around in Wine a TON. It's going to be painful. It's going to be hard. It's going to take some time. But it is worth it in the end. It isn't like pure Windows, but it's something, and an awesome something at that. Drop in on us at the Escapist Linux Users Group [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Escapist-Linux-Users] for more help. As much I'd like to be here and do my best, I'm no expert on using Wine. But I hope that it works for you, and hope I get it working too.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

WINE will cause no damage to a mac, although you will often need to tweak in order to get things working as the mileage in WINE varies greatly depending on the game. Though a general rule is that older games will work better than newer games. Basically the biggest con for WINE is that it is far from a perfect solution for this reason.

You should check out WINEHQ which will list many games and apps that have been tested on their performance in WINE, as well provide some info on some extra tweaks you may need.

You can also give Crossover a go which is also made by the guys who made WINE.

 

[Andrew_C]

If you are going to be using Wine an invaluable script, on Linux at least, is Winetricks http://code.google.com/p/winetricks/ . The GUI probably won't work on OSX, but the command line version should work OK.