CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I want to be able to understand Crossover a bit better so if any can answer my questions, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

1. Technically speaking, shouldn't any game made to install through Cross Over Pro run normally? A game is basically an application. But, I have found it does not work as such, why is that?

2. Does using presets when install games makes any difference in performance?

CrossOver Pro and CrossOver Games have different versions of Wine within them. With the 9.1 versions of each, both are based on Wine 1.2, but even then we tweak Wine for the two products' specific purposes, so they aren't identical.

Having both products be based on the same release of Wine is actually the exception, historically. They have different release schedules and we pick a release of Wine that we feel is most promising for the product's purpose and then stabilize it during a period of testing. We may selectively pull in changes made to Wine during this testing and stabilization period if we expect them to improve the behavior for the targeted segment (games vs. productivity apps), but we don't pull in everything indiscriminately. That's why it's a period of stabilization.

So there's almost never an exact correspondence between a release of CrossOver and a particular release of Wine. CrossOver always is based on a release of Wine, plus some specific changes selectively pulled in, plus our hacks and tweaks designed to make the product work better for its targeted segment of apps.

As for your second question: yes, following CrossOver's built-in installation profiles for games can result in greater performance. Those profiles often set up registry settings to activate tweaks and hacks for the game in question. Sometimes the profiles even edit the game's .ini or .cfg file, to make it work better with CrossOver. You could generally achieve the same thing by making the same changes manually, so it's not magic; it's just convenient.

CrossOver Pro may not have the same tweaks and hacks available in its codebase to be enabled. So, even if you made the registry changes, they wouldn't have any effect because the relevant code to make use of them just isn't present in that product. (The same works in reverse. Productivity apps sometimes involve hacks and tweaks which aren't available in CrossOver Games.)