Blizzard has announced that they will not release StarCraft in Apple’s new Universal standard. This means that StarCraft has to be run through a conversion program on the new Intel Macs. It has been announced that this will not hamper game play, after testing this I can do nothing but confirm it.
Apple has had their line of Macs with Intel chips available for a couple of months now. On the Intel Macs, software that is not re-released under the new Universal standard, i.e. work on both PowerPC and Intel Macs, run through a conversion program called Rosetta. StarCraft, will not be updated to the Universal standard, so the new Macs will have to run StarCraft through Rosetta.
Rosetta is fast, very fast. It does not slow down the computer in any noticeable way. The only exception that I have heard about is certain games. I have been lucky enough to play around with a friend's new Intel Mac Mini. I installed StarCraft. The game works just as excellently as on my G5 PowerPC Mac. There are absolutely no problems with Rosetta.
There is however two slight inconveniences that you might run into. The first is if you are using an older StarCraft installation CD. You will need to download a new OS X installer from Blizzard’s support page. All new CDs ship with this installer.
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The second inconvenience is linked to the first. There is no such installer for StarEdit, therefore it does not work on the Intel Macs.
Conclusion: StarCraft works perfectly on the Intel Macs; if you have troubles installing you need to download a new installer. StarEdit does not work.
Quite a few readers may be out of tune with the Apple scene and not understand most of this article. Apple recently started shipping new computers with Intel processors instead of their old PowerPC processors made by IBM. It is somewhat of a revolution for Macs, for example it potentially allows Windows XP to be installed, which was not previously possible.
Links
Blizzard Support - Support page for Intel Macs
