Beginner's Guide to PC Gaming

Mac Gaming

Mac gaming can be a little different depending on what games you are trying to run. There are plenty of games you can natively play on a Mac, but not as many as Windows. There is a way to play Windows games on a Mac, however. You will need an application called WINE. WINE is a virtual environment written very similar to Windows. It can run Windows games and plenty of other Windows applications. There are multiple ways to run a game using WINE, but I'm only going to cover one. Install WINE. Download or put in the disc for your game. If the game does not need to be installed, just right click on the game file. This is often the name of the game, or something similar with a .exe extension. For example, "This Is A Game.exe". After right clicking the game file, click "Open with WINE". Now the game will start up. If the game does need to be installed, right click the installer and click "Open with WINE". Go through the installation process, just like you would on Windows, except change the installation path to something you can remember. I like to create a folder with the name of the game on my desktop. Then, change the default path to "Z:/Users/YourUserNameHere/Desktop/This Is A Game". The quotes are necessary if the path goes into any folder with spaces in the name. If there are no folders with spaces in the names, the quotes are not necessary, bit I recommend using quotes all the time as if you don't, you may forget to add them when you need to in the future, and then wonder why it didn't work. After the game is finished installing, open the folder titled This Is A Game, and look for the game file. It may be in a sub folder (a folder within another folder). Right click the game file, and click "Open with WINE". WINE has worked flawlessly for most games I have tried, but not every game is compatible with WINE. If you plan on purchasing a game to specifically run using WINE, before spending you're money, I recommend searching on Google to see if the game is compatible. Many people will tell you their experiences with games they've run. You may even find a way to make a game compatible which would otherwise not be compatible. When using WINE, you have to go by your Mac's specifications. If a certain game requires 8 GB of RAM for Windows, that's also how much it requires to run with WINE. So if you only have 4 GB of RAM, you can't run that game even though you're not running it on Windows.