Computer users often hate having to have a CD or DVD in their drive to run a game. To circumvent this, images are often burned to hard drives or cracks used. Cracks are rapidly found for Windows, but it can be an extreme chore to find them for Macs.
EA use a product called Cider to power many of their Mac games. Cider basically adds a wrapper around the original PC game, and translates it on-the-fly to Mac. The recent release of ‘The Sims 3′, for example, works on OS X and Windows due to Cider.
Cider is likely to become more wide-spread. It saves game developers from having to develop ports, allows Mac and PC games to be released at the same time and ultimately little extra work must be put in to reach a larger market.
But Cider also allows certain Windows cracks to be implemented on Macs.
On OS X, Applications are actually just packages. If you have The Sims 3, for example, and go to the App and right click on ‘Show Package Contents’, and then choose ‘transgaming’, you will see a Windows folder structure. In there, all the files you’d expect to see are there. Basically, there’s a ‘The Sims 3.app>Contents>Resources>transgaming>c_drive>program files>Electronic Arts>The Sims 3′ folder.
The benefit of there being a hidden Windows folder structure in these apps are simple. If there’s a No-CD crack where you just have to replace a .exe, you find that .exe inside the Package and replace it. And then it works just like it does under Windows.
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this does not work for sims 3. sims 3 has the sims3.exe AND the wrapper patched, so it is basically impossible for a no cd crack for sims 3 mac… ur idea does not work
Actually you’re completely wrong eric, PC Sims 3 cracks work great on the mac.
what am i doing wrong if it doesn’t work????
okay, so I’m on a mac, and I go to my applications, find the sims 3 folder, BUT IT WONT LET ME RIGHT CLICK ON IT!? :/
this is incredibly frustrating and I just want to get the game running..
Awesome! It worked perfectly for The Sims 3. I haven’t been able to play this on my MacBook because I keep leaving the CD at home. This really helped!
I’m trying to make a crack work for harry potter and the order of the phoenix on my mac, using the same process you’ve outlined here. (i’ve got the .exe crack downloaded and have found the transgaming folder with the original .exe file to replace.) but for some reason it won’t allow me to modify the package contents so i can’t replace it. is there any way to make the disc editable?
Hi Joe, and thanks for this. I can’t figure out what to replace the .exe file with…I’m missing something! Thanks for any help!!
Hi! I have another problem and im curious if you maybe could help me with it. I played the sims 3 a view times already on my macbook pro 15” and it always worked fine but for the last 2 months my mac keeps pushing out the dvd. And i dont have a clue what might be wrong with it. He spits every dvd out from the sims 3. When i try to load another game whats not from ea it works fine! I reinstalled the sims and im trying to instal it again but my mac still doesnt see the dvd.
Hi, thank you for the suggestion. I was wondering if anyone else has experienced the following problem:
I’ve replaced the .exe file for the no-cd crack in the transgaming folder on my Macbook, but the game continues to ask for a disk when I try to play.