CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I've owned Crossover for Mac since version 7. I paid for an upgrade to version 8. Every application I have wanted to run on it fails. Tax software ... fail. Accounting software ... fail. Dungeons & Dragons Character Builder ... fail.

It seems the only "supported" software are applications that either have a native Mac version or have a Mac equivalent. Microsoft Office? Photoshop? Quicken? Why would a Mac user bother running these through Crossover when there are native Mac versions or equivalent software available?

I currently rely solely on Sun's free Virtual Box for running Windows applications on my Mac, since Crossover seems to be impotent to run anything useful.

Do the developers have any plans to make this software worth it's space on my hard drive?

There are clearly multiple issues here.
First off let me say -- I have two Macs both running Snow Leopard (10.6.2 and both with Crossover Games 8.1.3 installed.
One works fine and the other doesn't work for squat.

On my iMac [iMac6,1 Core 2 Duo [2.16GHz - 3 GB 667] OS X 10.6.2] CXG runs Lord of the Rings On-line, an unsupported game -- runs like a champ. I've been running it now for ?2+? years with the CXG 6, then 7, now 8. I can also run Turbine's DDO with no issues. And Wizards of the Coast Character Builder. [I've been playing D&D since it WAS D&D, and now play AD&D.] All work as well as they do on the Windows XP P4 system in the Den.

My other system, technically a more powerful one, [MacBook Pro4.1 Core 2 Duo [2.5GHz - 4GB 667] OS X 10.6.2] simply will not run any of the above since I upgraded that system from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and CXG from 7.x to 8.1 in October. Prior to the Snow Leopard upgrade, they all worked on the MacBook Pro also.

So go figure. I suppose I should try to run a supported game and then lean on Codeweavers to figure out why it won't work. I have some free time tonight and tomorrow, so I'll try some more trouble shooting and let you know.

We realize that the set of supported applications is very limited, and thus CrossOver isn't useful for many people because they need other applications than the ones we support.

We are working on adding support for more applications, and also making unsupported applications work better. With games however this is a very unfortunate situation, because there are no games out there everyone wants, like we have MS Office and Photoshop in the productivity app category. Ok, not everyone needs them, but with 6-7 different apps you have a reasonable coverage). With games, there are thousands of games, and everyone wants a different game.

Additionally 3D drivers tend to be buggy and/or lack features we'd need, so it's not good enough to support the games, but we have to support every combination of game platform graphics card. Like you say, LOTRO runs on one machine but not the other. We spend a lot of time trying to keep the old games working on new mac drivers(although OSX drivers are getting better, and we don't have to say "no, there's no way this game can run" any more).

If the mac that's not working has an ATI card, try cxgames 8.1.4 - we put a workaround for a snow leopard regression into 8.1.3, but it had some bugs, so 8.1.4 should work better.

I use both Crossover and Parallels 5. The biggest advantage CO has over virtualization is you don't need a Windows OS. Some may not consider this a big deal (ie: you already have a copy of Win, or have no problem going w/ the tsk tsk route to aquire), but for others, having to spend an additional $150ish for Windows and/or $75ish for VMWare/Parallels (some people also prefer support and a box over open source) just isn't worth it.

If you do some research ahead of time and know that your particular piece of software is compatible, CO can't be beat. Otherwise, go with VM.

Two different methods of attacking the same problem. CO doesn't seem to be ideal for you, unfortunately that's just how it is.

(re: why would a Mac user bother... speaking from experience, in some workplace environments you may have a choice of what machine you want but not necessarily have the software you need (seems flawed, I know). CO/VM is a good way of managing.)

Can you run sopcast on a Mac in Virtual box?