Well, the replacement hard drive arrived about a week later than expected, but on the bright side… they (accidentally, I’m sure) sent me two drives, one to my current residence in Davis, and another to my home address. I have a pretty good idea of how this came about, but I won’t go into it now… I think I’ve already said too much. Ehehehe.
Anyway, since I had to do a clean installation of OS X, I figured I might as well exercise some foresight and set up a separate partition for Boot Camp, in order to run some games (since Parallels doesn’t yet support Direct3D). I only find out after I’ve spent days setting up all my stuff that the Boot Camp installer won’t work on volumes with more than one partition. At all. Argh.
I decided I’d rather live without GTA2 on my MacBook than go through the trouble of reformatting and reinstalling everything yet again. Little did I know there existed a third option, in addition to dual-boot (Boot Camp) and virtualization (Parallels)…
Enter CrossOver. Essentially Wine with some compatibility patches and a friendlier UI, CrossOver allows you to run Windows applications from within Mac OS X itself. It’s still in beta, and application support is obviously incomprehensive, but… GTA2 works. There are some minor glitches (the machine gun sound effect doesn’t repeat, for example), but it’s still highly playable. And it’s vastly more convenient than having to boot into another OS. Between CrossOver and Parallels, I think I have all my bases covered.
Go grab the free 60-day beta while you still can.
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