Why Don T Games Work On Mac

I see a lot of applications talked about on MakeUseOf that say they are for the iPhone and iPad that I would like to use. When I click on the link of the app, it takes me to the app that says it is for iPad and iPhone.

I have a brand new Mac desktop I bought in August of this year and I would like some of these apps. Would they work on my iMac or not. If not, why don’t they make these apps for the iMac to?

For example Ugly Meter and Am I Ugly are 2 apps I would love to try, but they say they are good for iPhone and iPad. What about making them for iMac to?

Gaming on mac with bootcamp. Jul 20, 2019  There are three methods you can use to play Windows game on a Mac: WINE, Boot Camp, and virtualization. If you want to play Windows games with as little trouble as possible, then Boot Camp is the best choice. Virtual machines can work well for older games but lack the performance necessary to play modern titles. On the positive side for Mac game publishers, Boot Camp lowers a serious barrier to entry for people who might have considered buy a Mac but were put off by the selection of games. Boot Camp is a utility that comes with your Mac and lets you switch between macOS and Windows. Download your copy of Windows 10, then let Boot Camp Assistant walk you through the installation steps. Get started with Boot Camp.

Please answer this question since it has been bothering me for a long time.

Some computer games never appear on the Mac. Sometimes the game makers don’t think the limited Mac market is worth it. Other games depend so much on Windows-specific technologies that it’s not feasible to port them without major reengineering. Dec 07, 2014  I had to click on the Steam link thinking they finally made it multi-platform. Turns out it's still Windows only. I'm not a big gamer anymore like I used to partly because I sold my Xbox for my new rMBP, but I still wonder why these game dev still skip over Mac almost on.

    • Most apps for your iPad can not be played on your Mac. Check to see what the app is made for. If it says for iPad and iPhone but does not say Mac, it probably won't work on the Mac. That is why I started this thread to begin with.

  1. It's an interesting point, but I think the truth is that there simply isn't a demand for those kind of worthless time-waster apps on the Mac OS like there is on a mobile platform. Or rather, we already have Flash for that. Chances are that your 'ugly meter' or whatevr already has a flash version online somewhere, so use that. Most of those crappy useless apps are just ports of flash stuff anyway.

    To be honest, I'm gad the Mac app store isn't full of crap. The merging of iOS and OSX is not neccessarily a good thing, despite Apple's efforts to push things in that direction.

    • I would not want the Mac app store full of crap either but would still like the choice to use apps that I find interesting on my Mac should I choose to. To have the choice would be good.

  2. iPhones and iPads are extremely popular, so more developers develop apps for those devices than for Macs, which are quite popular in the US and Europe but not much elsewhere. Plus, the operating system on a Mac is Mac OS X, which is entirely different from iOS on the iPhone and iPad. To bring an iPhone app to Mac, a developer has to rewrite his app and make it compatible with OS X, and many developers don't have the resources or time to do that.

    I'd suggest that you use your iDevices for using the casual and fun apps, and your Mac for work purposes or watching videos, etc.

    • I like your answer but I have no iDevices. I only have a Mac and feel it would be a shame to get an iPhone or iPad just to run certain applications. Your answer though, does though make sense and it helps me to understand why the majority of apps are for the iPhone and iPad and not the Mac.

      Thank you for your answer.

  3. I'm afraid you are in the wrong place for your question..

    [Unless there are developers around here..] We can neither change nor answer why most iOS Apps are solely available for iOS and not for Mac OS X.

    You should better contact each individual developer and tell them that you'd like to see their Apps on your Mac OS X device.

    • Thank you fort your answer.

      I thought someone here would know the reason why, or you never know, there might be a developer who looks at this site and might see my question. At least I now know that there are simulators that will allow you to use iPhone and iPad apps on a Mac. I did not know that before.

      • Well, I'm afraid this won't help you much either..

        In order to run iOS Apps within the Xcode Simulator you need their 'Source Code' (the original Xcode Project files).

        I doubt any developer is willing to give them out.

  4. well you need itunes to download and then to sync to ipad or iphone, and use them on the device.

    Normally they are written for ipad/iphone.

    if you want to run iphone or ipad applications on Mac you need a simulator
    [BROKEN LINK REMOVED]

    Pieceable Viewer
    http://www.redmondpie.com/run-iphone-apps-from-any-web-browser-on-pc-mac-using-pieceable-viewer/

    • Thank you for your answer. This is the 1st time I've ever heard of simulators where you can run iPad and iPhone apps on the iMac.

      Very interesting.

      • there are other simulators like for running palm games, windows mobile, symbian..i know that works on Windows OS

The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows .. or do you?

There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.

GeForce Now

PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.

For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!

The Wine Project

The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.

Why Don T Games Work On Mac

Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.

As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.

You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.

Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.

CrossOver Mac

CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.

CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.

My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.

Boxer

If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.

With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.

Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.

Some final thoughts

Why Don T Games Work On Mac Download

In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.

Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive. Best games mac app store free.

How do you play your Windows games on Mac?

Let us know in the comment below!

Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.

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