CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I've discovered this morning that I can play some games that are already on my Bootcamp/External HD Windows partition simply by opening their folder in Finder and running the exe, I haven't installed them in CrossOver Games. Am I supposed to be able to do this?

Presumably then it doesn't matter to CrossOver where the games are installed (so long as they're on a Windows partition), it'll act as a wrapper to allow me to run them. I know the intention is to run games on a Mac itself, but this seems like a nice little added extra if you already have games installed under Windows elsewhere.

If the games are on a windows partition then there's really no reason for CrossOver to be on your system. I think the only way this is possible is because you probably created a FAT32 partition that allows for the mac side to access the files on the windows side. When I originally installed a Windows Partition this way I found Windows to be extremely unstable and crash a lot.

The idea of Crossover is to run windows applications without needing to buy windows. Sure I suppose it's a nice little extra, but I see no practicality in this (unless your in an environment with all windows and you can access the windows files with a windows app running under crossover on your mac...)

Oh absolutely! I don't need CrossOver since I already have Windows, but I completely support the Wine/CrossOver project simply because it will eventually mean I can bypass Windows completely. I stumbled on the above method by accident, but at least it saves me rebooting, and presumably the games that run will use the native hardware.

Yes, i've got Windows on a FAT32 partition so I can have one-way access from the Mac, useful for getting to documents but not much else. I haven't found Windows to be extremely unstable, but it does suffer from all the usual blue screens of death and random errors I got on my last PC. No problems with the Mac side at all in the three years i've had it. touch wood

Thanks for your thoughts.

Daniel Mclaughlan wrote:

I've discovered this morning that I can play some games that are
already on my Bootcamp/External HD Windows partition simply by
opening their folder in Finder and running the exe, I haven't
installed them in CrossOver Games. Am I supposed to be able to do
this?

No, you've broken the known universe <grin>....seriously though, some games will and
some won't -- a lot depends on what registry values (if any) the exe might be looking
for. Many games are happily self-contained within $game_installdir and so provided that
is intact (and crossover/wine can access the filesystem they live on), and there's no
other dependencies they were expecting to find (as present in the bootcamp windows install),
such programs will run oblivious to the fact of whether it's windows or crossover calling them...

Daniel Mclaughlan wrote:

Presumably then it doesn't matter to CrossOver where the games are
installed (so long as they're on a Windows partition), it'll act as
a wrapper to allow me to run them. I know the intention is to run
games on a Mac itself, but this seems like a nice little added extra
if you already have games installed under Windows elsewhere.

As explained above, this 'wrapper' context is coincidental - I note you say 'some games'.
Tried running all your bootcamp installed windows games like this? I'd be surprised if
they all work, for reasons touched on above. A 'true' wrapper context here would need to
set $WINEPREFIX to be your bootcamp partition, and it would have to use the windows registry
therein to pick up all that might be installed in the bootcamp windows installation.

In the end, you've found some more reasons not to use bootcamp... 😉

Cheers!

Okay, thanks for clearing that up Don.

Yeah, they didn't all work, so it's not a method i'll be using regularly. The more I can get working on the Mac side the better so i'll keep trying them out in CrossOver.

Thank you both.