World of Warcraft runs natively on both Macintosh and Windows platforms. Boxed copies of the game use a hybrid CD to install the game, eliminating the need for separate Mac and Windows retail products. The game allows all users to play together, regardless of their operating system. Although there is no official version for any other platform, support for World of Warcraft is present in Windows API implementations Wine and Cedega, allowing the game to be played under Linux and FreeBSD.

 

Patch 1.9.3 added native support for Intel-powered Macs, making World of Warcraft a Universal application (as defined by Apple). As a result of this, the minimum supported Mac OS X version has been changed to 10.3.9; World of Warcraft version 1.9.3 and later will not launch on older versions of Mac OS X.

 

Due to the fact that new content is constantly being added to the game official system requirements often change. In version 1.12.0 the requirements for Windows were increased from requiring 256 MB to 512 MB of RAM. Official Windows 98 technical support was dropped, even though the game continued to run fine until version 2.2.3. After version 2.2.3, the official patches to version 2.3.0 failed on operating systems earlier than Windows 2000. By knowledgeably using an old update executable with new patch data, Windows 98 and Windows ME users could update from 2.2.3 using one of the released patches. Once successfully upgraded, the new version of the game then worked with Windows ME, although version 2.3.0 did not work with Windows 98 Second Edition unless applying updates to the operating system, including an unofficial third party's operating system modifications.