EA and the native Mac versions that aren't

EA and the native Mac versions that aren’t

To be fair, I don’t think Bing Gordon actually used the word ‘native’. However, it was fairly misleading to imply that EA was doing any kind of porting, or in fact any development work at all on making their games run on the Mac.

If we can take AppleInsider’s word on this, EA is using Cider, which is based on Cedega, which is based on Wine: the open-source reverse-engineered Windows API implementation project that is known for its somewhat less-than-perfect results. Additionally, as EA plans to keep writing exclusively for Microsoft APIs and Intel chips, this means that these titles will not run at all on PowerPC Macs , which are still a significant portion of the installed base.

It’s not so much that they’re doing this that gets me, as it is the fact that they’re not being upfront about it.

Someone joked that EA’s Mac solution would be ‘get an Intel Mac, and boot into Windows’. They weren’t far off.