Wineskin is AWESOME! Has anybody visited paulthetall.com?

[Am Yisrael Chai!]

I have known about Wine for a long time. I have even done quite a bit of reading and research about it; however, I never got around to actually trying it out to run a windows program on any of my Macs. Well, I have now tried it out and things have gotten amazingly good in the world of Wine for Macs. Of particular utility is Wineskin ( http://wineskin.doh123.com/ ), which is an open source effort to allow windows apps to be installed in a wrapper that has a self supporting Wine environment for application execution. In practice what Wineskin allows you to do is port windows programs to OS X very easily and have them run at native speeds while having them appear as regular double clickable Mac apps to a lay user. Better yet, the Wineskin wrappers can be shared once they are perfected. The result is that people in the Mac community have now cracked open the monopoly Windows had on certain software apps. A great example of this is what Paul the Tall has done over at his website www.paulthetall.com. His website, unlike the winehq AppDB ( http://appdb.winehq.org/ ) that only tracks portability of windows apps, actually shares functional and complete Wineskin wrappers. All you have to do is supply the app for installation. His site also has great videos that illustrate the install process for every Wineskin wrapper he posts. His site concerns itself with games. A few games that are open source have been posted by him as an already filled Wineskin wrapper as well. I have tried out one of his wrappers myself. I was able to get Stronghold Legends up and running very quickly with full net multiplayer capability on my Mini (much to the chagrin of my wife). It ran at full native speeds at full 1080p resolution with no hiccups whatsoever. This is a game that will never be ported to OS X by any major Mac game company out there.

Some people have expressed concern that Wineskin will discourage game developers from creating native Mac games; however, I think the effect will be quite different. I believe Wineskin and Wine in general have gotten so good that they are going to dissuade the reticence certain types had when considering switching to a Mac. If the platform is no longer a concern and they can still run their legacy games on a Mac easily via Wineskin, then they will be more likely to purchase a Mac instead of getting yet another PC. It also eliminates the M$ tax you face if you are considering bootcamp as an solution to the legacy app problem. Wineskin is better, cheaper, and more convenient than bootcamp. Ultimately the trend is that more people will own Mac hardware and developers will have more of an incentive to develop Mac apps due to the increased number of Mac users out there.

Anyway, this is my public big thumbs up to Wineskin and Paul the Tall.
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Proud Cube owner. Oh, I also own a 2011 2.7ghz i7 Mac Mini.

[Fox]

Thanks for your post, Am Yisrael Chail. I knew there was a Wineskin for Linux but hadn't realized that there is a Mac version.
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Mini 1: 2.3 ghz Core i5; 8 gb RAM, Corsair 240gb SSD, 500 gb Seagate XT
Mini 2: 2.26 ghz Core 2 duo, 8 gb RAM, 500 gb Seagate
Also a Cube, 13" MacBook Air, 20" 2.66 ghz iMac & 11.6" Acer 1810TZ running Ubuntu, Mint & openSuse