Video of 3D Game/Acceleration on VMWare Fusion

There is a YouTube video making the rounds, purporting to show VMWare Fusion running a 3D Accelerated/Direct-X based game in Windows, running under Mac OS X, and doing it fairly smoothly.

Fake or real? Looks real, but considering that VMWare Fusion shares a codebase with the VMWare Workstation (for Windows), it seems like even if it was a Windows-based machine with various changes to make it look like Mac OS X, it still is pretty clearly running under VMWare, which means that at some point it would end up in Mac OS X.

It doesn’t look like it’s a new game, but it’s still impressive.

Macworld UK Article: CrossOver lets Windows apps run on OS X, sans Windows

Macworld UK has an excellent write-up about CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac, and how it relates to Parallels Desktop and Apple’s Boot Camp.

CodeWeavers has announced plans to release CrossOver Mac this summer. The $60 software will allow Intel Mac users to run Windows applications – including some games – without having to buy or install Windows itself.

Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop both provide this capability for Intel Mac owners already. Boot Camp, software from Apple currently available in beta form, makes users reboot their Macs and run Windows. Parallels Desktop iis a ‘virtualisation’ utility that enables the Windows operating system and Windows applications to run in Mac OS X, within another window (or, alternately, in full screen mode).

CrossOver Mac will take this one step further – it eschews what CodeWeavers chief operating officer Jon Parshall calls the “box within a box approach”.

“What you see running is an application sitting in your Dock or your Applications folder,” Parshall said.

Both Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop work because the new Macs utilise the same microprocessor that’s found in Windows-compatible computer, and CrossOver Mac employs the same basic principle. This wasn’t possible before January, when Macs depended solely on PowerPC-based microprocessors made by IBM and Freescale. The presence of an Intel processor inside the Mac forges a close enough resemblance to get Windows and Windows applications to work.

Full article.