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Because of access, modernity vs. obsolence of my equipment, and other factors I now use a Mac rather than my Win PC 95% of the time. However, I am hardly what one would call "skilled" with either. Here's my (probably) stupid question: if I want to take play some old PC games on one of my Macs, is there any other option to do so aside from buying a version of Windows and setting it up under a Boot Camp partition?

On Linux there's a software package called WINE which acts as an intermediate layer to simulate a Windows environment within it's little bubble and in effect fool a program into thinking that it's running in Windows. Even programs as complicated as the Office suite can be run in this fashion. I'm not aware off-hand of a similar utility on the Mac side. Even if there were such a Windows emulator, the performance obviously wouldn't be as great as running the program directly. There is the option of running Windows in a so-called "Virtual Machine" within Mac OS but that would cause an even larger performance penalty. In the particular example of a game, that game wouldn't have direct access to your Mac's video hardware running under such a condition.

Dual-booting would be the option to deliver the best performance for any Windows applications.

PS, that question isn't all that "stupid" really.

You're very kind. As it is, I'm using... *ahem* borrowed MacBooks so I don't even know if I have access to Boot Camp, much less a version of Windows. I'm not really worried about performance - I'm not much of a gamer, and was really only considering picking up a couple of older (c. 1998) games that I saw on the cheap or maybe SW: Battlefront.

OK, I did a bit of searching and found a Mac version of what I was talking about. CrossOver runs Windows programs in Mac OS (In a little sort of virtual box). For games that old it should be fine. It's paid software, but a fair bit less costly than buying a full version of Windows to either dual boot or install in a virtual machine.

Hmm. I have an Intel DuoCore, ergo I have Boot Camp... I might even have an old version of XP laying around somewhere. That emulator might be something to consider, though, because I'm slightly hesitant about installing a partition and a new OS on a machine that technically isn't mine.