Quote Originally Posted by Sebazy View Post
And I assume you blamed Nintendo when Bleem couldn't run Ocarina of time correctly right?

In honesty, this client should either be free or native. Expecting people to pay £40 for a lazy wrapper job based on free open source software? That's just greedy =(
Bleem was the PSX emulator, that only worked on Windows 98 and no future version of Windows. The appeal of it was to run pirated games. Duh. That's what every PC "console emulator" purpose is.

WINE is not a hardware emulator, it's a wrapper over over the Win32 API, DirectX, etc. Somethings just can not be translated and are thus kludged together in software... typically inefficient code paths that assume things that just aren't true. The number one assumption, threading. Most Windows games, including DirectX9 games are programmed as if there was only one CPU core. WINE is developed against the pthread library. The pthread library is a "standard Unix" type of Posix Thread library. But the underlying way they are implemented can vary substantially.

A similar effort was made for the Glide API on Windows back when the first N64 emulator came out... YES that awful emulator that ran N64 games extremely well only worked with 3DFX cards, everyone else had to deal with a Glide-to-DirectX or Glide-to-OpenGL wrapper, that did, yes, the exact same thing we're talking about in this thread. Running a non-native application on another platform, with an additional graphics-hardware translation layer thrown on top.

Now more to the point, if SE simply ported the PS4 version to the Mac, we'd be having a different discussion entirely. But I'll give SE the benefit of the doubt and they were likely mislead by the middleware provider that it could be done. It was probably to gauge interest in how many people want the MacOS X version, and likely may result in a native port at some point, closer to how WoW got a native port after... I don't know how long. It predates the Intel transition in 2006 though. But oh gawd look at all the issues the MacOS X WoW client has.