CodeWeavers, makers of utilities that bridge the software chasm between Windows and the Mac, has released major updates for two of its flagship products: CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Games.
Unlike other Windows-on-Mac solutions like Apple’s Boot Camp or virtualization products Parallels and VMware, CodeWeavers takes the unique approach of removing Windows from the equation altogether. CrossOverMac and CrossOver Games harness open source projects to allow users to run a growing number of Windows applications and games, respectively, on a Mac without Windows.
CrossOver 9.1 includes a number of improvements to various aspects of installing and managing Office 2003, Office 2007, and Quicken 2010. CrossOver Games 9.1 gained support for a number of new games including StarCraft II, Star Trek Online, Alien Swarm, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. A number of regressions for games like FlatOut 2 and Stranded 2 that appeared in CrossOver Games 9.0 were also fixed.
One of the most significant changes in both of these major version 9.1 updates is the integration of Wine 1.2, the primary open source project that allows CodeWeavers’ products to run some Windows apps and games to run on other OSes like Mac OS X and Linux (CodeWeavers also sponsors and contributes a number of changes to the Wine project).
An announcement on the Wine project site claims that version 1.2 is the result of two years of development effort, encapsulating more than 23,000 changes, the most significant of which is support for 64-bit apps. The release notes for Wine 1.2 are indeed quite extensive, so be sure to peruse them if you can parse them.
CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Games 9.1 are both free updates to owners of version 9.0. They both cost $40, and while CrossOver Mac supports Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard, CrossOver Games requires at least Leopard or later.
CrossOver Mac 9
CrossOver Games 9