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.

It is obvious that game developers cannot give credit to warez groups even if their cracks are the perfect solution and that’s probably the reason why no credit was given.

It’s nevertheless highly hypocritical to ban forum members at the official Ubisoft forum for posting links to no-cd cracks while using one of those to fix a game.

I like no-cd cracks because they simplify the gaming experience. I do not have to pick and load a CD or DVD every time I want to play a game and it also saves me from hassles with copy protections.

You can read up on the story at Torrentfreak, Slashdot and the official Ubisoft forum. Props that they have not deleted the topic but only locked it.