Tuesday, June 2, 2009

DirectX 10 tweaked by CodeWeavers will bring Windows games and MS Office to Linux and Mac OS X

Desktop gaming equals to having a PC with Windows Vista on it. Speaking of DirectX 10 games we always mention what operating system is in use because DirectX 10 was originally created for Vista. New Widows 7 from Microsoft will come out with DirectX 11 which will be available also for Vista but it never will for XP. Microsoft inner platform compatibility of DirectX 10 is one big theme to speak about, especially since Alky Project has presented a backported version that runs on XP. However even more boundaries are going to be overstepped soon, the cross-platform ones.

Jeremy White from CodeWeavers says they are working on a cross-platform project that will bring Windows games to Mac OS X and Linux. All this is done of course by pecking at DirectX 10's very insides. They have done this before with DirectX 9 rather successfully and that puts a short doubt at J. White's words. What he says is hard to believe, but we will see soon if his promise about the final version of CrossOver project appears by the end of the year. At the moment there already are stable builds. Trial version of CrossOver Games 7.2.0 can be found on the Web and in a few months there will be CrossOver Linux 8.0 and CrossOver Mac 8.0. They will add support for Microsoft Office, Photoshop CS3, Internet Explorer 7 and more. This is a huge leap forward for Jeremy White as for founder of CodeWavers, but how will Apple and Microsoft stack up with the fact that they are sort of no longer in different camps?

No comments:

Post a Comment