Deus Ex and SDK on mac

[-HDD21-]

Hello guys! I have recently got a mac, I have not been active in the past months, had to sort a lot of things out financially and started in college!
I am posting this for the best advice on running Deus Ex on mac (mountain lion). If it can be run natively, even better but i doubt that! If not, what is the best way to emulate windows on mac os? I would be willing to get a cheapo windows machine for the purpose of playing some of my older games if need be if Mac OS would struggle! I have emulated DX on linux before, but searching for emulation for mac (and a good one) has proved difficult.

I hope someone can point me in the right direction
Best wishes to all
: - )

[Dae]

Welcome to the Mac world

Unfortunately Deus Ex can't be run natively on modern Macs, because the Mac version of Deus Ex was made for PowerPC processors and Apple dropped them in 2005 in favor of Intel processors with x86 architecture.

You have several options.

1. Create a partition (or install 2nd drive if your Mac allows that) for Windows and play it from there. Mac users often call this "Bootcamp". This is the best variant in terms of performance, also hassle-free. Downside: everytime you want to play a game, you have to shutdown OS X and boot Windows — this may take 2-3 minutes.
   
2. Use virtualization software (Parallels Desktop is the market leader, VMWare Fusion is catching up, VirtualBox is a free solution) and run Windows in a virtual machine. Downside: perhaps poor performance in games.
   
3. Use Crossover — this is a commercial and easy-to-use Wine port, which means that it emulates Windows environment for a specific program (although the word 'emulate' is not exactly correct in this context). The official website says that Crossover is not compatible with Deus Ex, but user discussions say otherwise. Downside: random bugs, crashes. Performance should be fine.
   
4. Use Wine for free. Perhaps with Wine Bottler. Downside: same as above + more difficult installation.

Options 1 and 2 can be combined: you can create a Bootcamp partition to boot from and at the same time, when you want to, run Windows in a virtual machine from it. This is also what I use.

If you don't understand what is a virtual machine: to put it really simple it's like running Windows in a window in OS X (of course you can 'maximize' the window anytime and work in fullscreen and noone would ever notice that you're actually running OS X with Windows on top of it).

[Dae]

the Mac version of Deus Ex was made for PowerPC processors and Apple dropped them in 2005

I wasn't entirely accurate here.

Actually the native Mac version of Deus Ex was made for Mac OS 9 (1999). It's successor, Mac OS X (introduced in 2001) is a direct descendant of a completely different unix-based operating system called NeXTSTEP, and therefore is incompatible with all software made for Mac OS 9. To permit smooth transition Apple created "Classic environment", an emulator which allowed to run Mac OS 9 ("Classic") software (including Deus Ex) in Mac OS X, but they dropped support for it in 2005 because of the transition to Intel x86 processors.