Can XNA games run on mac?

Question

I was wondering if a game written in XNA could ever be able to run on Mac somehow (without having to run a virtual Windows). I've found some links to MonoXNA during my googling but I don't exactly understand how it works so I'm posing the question here.

Answer 1

The short answer: Yes, in theory, but don't expect perfection, at least not right off the bat. You'd probably have some work ahead of you to get a good experience.

MonoXNA is just an open-source reimplementation of the XNA framework. In theory, it ought to run on any sufficiently capable implementation of the .NET CLI (such as, obviously, Mono). Just launch the XNA binary with Mono, and it should work (again, in theory).

That said, it appears to be in a rather early stage of development, so I'm guessing you'd have an adventure ahead of you in getting complex games running in it. (Mono itself isn't trouble-free in this regard, either, and typically lags Microsoft's .NET somewhat, so you can't always assume your shiny new app using all the latest and greatest .NET stuff will work out of the box.)

The other major option is Wine or one of its derivatives, which can be used either by an end-user to launch a game packaged for Windows, or used directly by the developer of an application to create a (mostly-)transparent experience for a Mac (or Linux, for that matter) user. .NET stuff (including XNA) is known to work with Wine, but Wine is not perfect, and your mileage WILL vary (sometimes depending on the phase of the moon).