How to open/ run .exe files with Leopard?

[HowardNeedsHelp]

Hello,
I want to download and run an app that is an .exe file. I don't know how to open it or get it to run on Mac OS Leopard.

Help Please.

Howard

[Case]

e.g. Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac

[edDV]

You would need to run Windows via Bootcamp or virtual (VMWare, Paralllels, etc.)

[HowardNeedsHelp]

Is it possible to convert a exe to a .dmg that I can open in Mac OS X?

[edDV]

no

If you can get the source code, you could modify and re-compile for OSX.

There is a Wine project for OSX but I've never heard of this working well.
http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX

[16mmJunkie]

The only time it would help to do that would be if the .exe file was a self expanding Zip archive. And then only if the contents were even usable on a Mac.

.exe files are a Windows executable. A program in other words. Unless you're running Windows in an emulator such as Parallels or Virtual PC, they won't do you a bit of good.

If you could even find a program to decompile (reverse engineer) an .exe file and recompile for the Mac OS, it would be illegal to do so most of the time. Pretty much any commercial software forbids such action.

Also, quite a bit of .exe files you may download are installer programs for Windows. So it would produce yet more .dll, .exe and other Windows-centric files.

[rumplestiltskin]

...and if you're picking up these exe's as downloads from the web, you're probably visiting nasty sites that are trying to infect your computer.