A probably very silly question

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Hi all, I'm not sure if this has been asked before, and it probably hasn't, but I recently purchased a Mac Book Pro, and I know most people who would invest in one wouldn't really ask about this but, I'm not most people.



So - My question is, does anyone know why a game would not work on this computer? You see, I thought it might have been the drive, but when I tested out a DVD, it worked fine. And then I thought the game might not be working properly (lots of sound skipping) because of the CD/Game. But when I tried it on another OS X computer, it worked fine.



Considering this computer is new and I haven't installed many programs on it yet, I don't see why it would work on the other Macintosh and not this one.



If you have any info that might be useful, please mention it



Thanks,

Cristelle

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    If the other Mac had a PowerPC chip in it, then that's why.



    Your MacBook Pro has an Intel Core Duo chip in it, and I'll bet the game won't run in Rosetta, the emulation layer that lets the Intel chip run the PowerPC applications. Some apps just won't, or won't well. \
  • Reply 2 of 4
    powerdocpowerdoc Posts: 8,123member
    Now if you boot under windows, you will be able to do PC games
  • Reply 3 of 4
    I see now, thanks for the info, i'm not very familiar with the actual hardware part of the Mac
  • Reply 4 of 4
    Until recently, Macs came with chips that were not made by Intel, called the PowerPC. Though very good in their own right, they were very different from Intel chips, and required different programming.



    The newer models use Intel chips, which as suggested above use different programming. Though many software comapnies have or are in the process of changing to the new prgramming format, many applications still will not run directly on the machines. So, Apple created a program calle Rosetta which translates the apps on the fly to allow them to run on the new machines.



    However, Rosetta is not perfect and does not have the power to translate everything (CPU intensive games, Photshop, etc.) so that they run smoothly or at all on the new machines.



    The maker of the game you are playing will, hopefully for you, come out with a Universal Binary version soon. UBs can run natively on oth older and newer Macs.



    http://www.apple.com/universal/
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