Some commercial software is delivered for OS X this way - I know The Sims 3 game that my wife likes to play on her MacBook Pro is actually the Windows version of the game running under the Wine emulator. The free WineBottler and the paid-for CrossOver Mac from CodeWeavers. It sits between the Windows application and OS X and makes the application think it's running on Windows by translating all the Windows calls its making to OS X calls. It's a bit like a virtual machine but doesn't require the Windows OS. Wine is a translation layer for Windows applications. If your Mac is older, doesn't have much RAM, the VM approach can drag down your system a bit but most, if not all, new Macs can handle VM hosting duties without much of any issue.The Windows OS installation will take up a lot of space on your hard drive, plus the Windows application space.You have to buy a copy of the Windows operating system.You get a bunch of neat things with virtual machines including the ability to pause applications mid-run and snapshot the state of your virtual machine.Decent support in the commercial offerings at least for graphics acceleration so you can run some graphics intensive programs.
#HOW TO RUN EXE ON MAC WITHOUT WINDOWS FULL#
You have VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop in the commercial space to chose from when it comes to virtualization software. They all come with pros and cons Run a Virtual Machine