Star Trek D-A-C coming to M-A-C

If by Windows emulation, you don't mean Windows emulation, and you actually mean Boot Camp, then yes, you're correct.

Just guessing, but does this program/layer merely redirect certain calls to their Mac counter parts? Like redirecting any Direct X calls to use the Mac variant instead?

I remember that's how they got Halo 2 working in XP, by redirecting the DX10 calls to ones that would work properly in XP.

Halo 2 working on XP was easily done because it arbitrarily required DirectX 10 but didn't use any of it.

It is a compatibility layer in the sense that it re-implements DirectX to just forward to other system libraries. Direct3D calls for example are handled, then passed to the OpenGL library as OpenGL calls.

The compatibility layer introduces a small performance hit, but not really much. In this case, the conversion is done by taking the source code of the game, and implementing the compatibility at compile-time, so the calls aren't necessarily always converted at run-time. It would be essentially a program that runs on OSX.

The use of Cider/etc for porting games is a lazy way of doing it instead of re-writing the rendering and input for each platform manually(which would result in a major performance boost), though it does save on development costs.

From a development standpoint, then, wouldn't it be far smarter for companies to write their routines in OpenGL and then when compiling for Win/OSX, have the wrappers there convert the calls to DirectX/Core Graphics? Or am I missing some critical bit of information about how DX and OpenGL work?

crap, that was for Heston. bah....