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In part 4 of our ongoing series on playing video games on the Mac, we take a look at PC games and ways to get them running on OS X.
Install and run Windows on your Mac
Negatives
Requires buying a copy of Windows
Requires rebooting your machine
Emulation
Run Windows in a virtual machine on your Mac
Positives
No rebooting required, Windows apps can run alongside OS X
Negatives
Emulation means your machine is running 2 operating systems at once so performance takes a hit
Requires buying a copy of Windows
Free Virtual Machine Software
Premium Virtual Machine Software
Flavors of Wine and Cider
Wine is a free open source program to run Windows apps on unix-like systems like Linux and OS X without requiring a copy of Windows. There are various applications that based on it that work in different ways
Apps based on Wine
Bundles Windows apps into Mac apps or runs exe files
Bundle Windows apps into Mac apps – lots of features for handling advanced games
Bundles Windows apps into Mac apps – used by developers for same day releases on both platforms
Commercial application that installs and manages various Wine bottles. Has a community that rates ports on functionality and makes it easy to install supported software with CrossTie
More info and links to 3rd party apps
More on Porting Games
Play games on any system over the internet