Mac Gaming News - New Mac Tool Could Bring Many More PC Games To The Mac

by , 10:30 AM EDT, April 17th, 2002

Macworld UK has an exclusive report on a new technology that could have an enormous impact on Mac game publishing and development. A company called Coderus has released a product called MacDX, which the company says allows game developers to port their Windows games to the Mac without having to directly port the DirectX code.

DirectX is the name of the APIs developed by Microsoft for game developers to directly access PC hardware in Windows. DirectX has never been ported to the Mac, and Mac game developers and porters have to turn that DirectX code into something that is Mac OS compatible when they bring Mac games to market. With MacDX, that step would not be necessary. From the Macworld UK article:

Mark Thomas, CEO and technical director of Coderus, told Macworld: "Approximately 70 per cent of the developmental time it takes to bring a game to the Mac OS relates to DirectX." Thomas believes that the porting process, which usually takes six months or more, can now be turned around in days.

A developer-level solution, MacDX furnishes an application with DirectX- interfaces and functionality, so the product runs as it would on a Windows PC. Thomas explains: "The MacDX interface provides a development path to the Mac OS platform, which gets the most out of your existing development investment with minimum development-time required."

This means that games developers will need to invest less time and money porting games to the Mac, and could increase the likelihood of Mac and PC games enjoying simultaneous release.

"I wanted to bring games over to the Macintosh", said Thomas, who has been a developer on multiple platforms since 1985. "I do a lot of development, and see a great deal of re-invention of the wheel – which I consider wasted resources."

There is additional information in the Macworld UK article, and we encourage you to read it. We turn to the Coderus Web site for more information on MacDX:

The MacDX (Direct-X Interface for MacOS) allows you to bring your product to the MacOS platform without the need to redevelop your product. As the Direct-X interface is one of the most popular interfaces with a vast amount of information and published documentation, why spend resources on bringing your product to MacOS when your team can be developing new features or that next killer product.

After you have compiled your product source with your favourite MacOS development environment, then just link in the MacDX, and now you have your MacOS version. The MacDX interface takes away all those worries about which version of the MacOS Operating System and machine should direct your product at, then don’t worry as the interface takes advantage of all the features of a particular MacOS Operating system version and machine. The interface is finely tuned to take advantage of whatever the user's machines and Operating System.

You can join in the discussion on this development in our forums.

The Mac Observer Spin:

If this technology actually works, and by that we mean that it works without a significant performance hit due to whatever emulation layers lie in between the game and the hardware, then this could mean big things to the Mac gaming market. As the Macworld UK article suggests, simultaneous releases if Mac and Windows titles could become the norm, and not the rare exception due to the ease of the "porting" process. We are looking deeper into this development.

Macworld UK Article