City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

All-New Guide to running CoH/CoV on a Mac

AOL_Eats_Babies

By AOL_Eats_Babies,
Posted on: 2007-11-04 10:20 in Player Guides

 

Posted

i havent read it all
but does anyone have any experience playing on the gmx 3100 or whatever?
it seemed to have decent fps for wow... but coh seems to make $4k machines play like $400 machines sometimes

 

Posted

i'm on a Mac Mini with Dual Core Intel processors. should i also use the -renderthread 1, and what exactly does that do?

thanks for all your hard work, btw. =) Macs + CoX = awesome. =)

 

Posted

-renderthread 1 should be helpful on any multi-core CPU. It tells the game to send rule calculations to one core and graphics rendering to the other.

 

Posted

I think -renderthread 1 is on by default now on machines that support it.

 

Posted

Just as a note, I have a Mac Mini Core Duo 1.66 with the integrated Intel GMA950 video card and CoH runs quite well in middle settings. Never had a problem (but you'd better go to advanced and turn off shadows, the Intel chip doesn't like them).

 

Posted

This just in: If you're using one of the new Macbooks (not Macbook Pro) with the Intel X3100 video, the driver for Windows XP doesn't support CoH. You'll have to install Vista instead.

Also, if you need to upgrade RAM in any Apple model, there's a very good guide at ifixit.com , telling you how step by step.

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Posted

Rather than start a new thread most of the info should already be here.


The setup: I run CoX on the windows side of my mac using boot camp beta and windows XP pro SP2. Its a 2007 IMac with 2.13 processor and 1gig ram, ATI x1600 graphics card.

The Problem: The game runs great until all of a sudden it crashes and my Mac reboots itself. It resets itself usually within about 5 minutes of running with a team, but I can run solo for a couple hours without experiancing problems most of the time.

I run Cox in windowed mode but it happens the same in full screen.

Does anybody have a solution or suggestion. Please ask if you need more info to help me.

Thanks.

 

Posted

Hi, does anyone have any experience using (or trying to run) CoH/CoX using Parallels? Would it work at all?

 

Posted

I don't think it would work - Parallels lacks the 3D graphics functionality that CoX requires to run. Even if you could get it to work it'd probably run very poorly, and I don't think it would be worth the time.

To the poster above the previous one:

It might have something to do with your fan speed. I'm not sure how to change that (a program called SMCFanControl comes to mind though).

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Posted

I heart my new iMac and it runs with CoX way better than my PC.

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Posted

No, the rebooting Mac problem isn't fan related. It's a graphic setting that I fixed once before, but I've reformatted my boot camp partition and now it's happening again.

Basically what SEEMS to happen is your graphic card gets overloaded, the machine studders/locks up, then you reboot. When I fixed it what would happen is my graphics would lock up for about 2 seconds, then catch up. So there is some problem there that the setting fixes. I'm pretty sure either this thread or BillZBubbas thread had the key to what setting I changed, but for the love of god I can't remember what it was.

I'm experimenting now.

 

Posted

Still haven't found out what the setting was. It's an ATI thing.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Hi, does anyone have any experience using (or trying to run) CoH/CoX using Parallels? Would it work at all?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes. I run coh on my macbook using parallels. I had an old copy of windows 2k and used that as my base OS. Its late and I have to remember what I had to do to get it running, but it took some minor tweaking. All command line stuff. I did have it posted somewhere on the forums but cant find it. It may have been deleted though. I'll try to find it if I can.

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Posted

Hey just used this guide to get COH/V up and running on my macbook.

Question on keys: on the Macbook keyboard, what takes the place of the Insert / Home / Page Up/ Page Down / End keys? My camera controls (far, near, spin) were all attached to those on my XP box.

Also - using the macbook trackpad is there any way to approxmiate the "camera look" you can do by right-clicking and moving the mouse?

Any other missing keys I should know about?

Thx.

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Posted

if you don't want to go through all of the trouble of installing boot camp and windows you can download and install Crossover Games from Codeweavers and while not with out it's problems it does work very well, this is a great option as it works in tiger 10.4 and leopard 10.5, if the only reason you are flipping to windows is for COX than this will save you some space on your hard drive.

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Posted

On a MacBook here, I just plug in a mouse, honestly....

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Posted

[ QUOTE ]
No, the rebooting Mac problem isn't fan related. It's a graphic setting that I fixed once before, but I've reformatted my boot camp partition and now it's happening again.

Basically what SEEMS to happen is your graphic card gets overloaded, the machine studders/locks up, then you reboot. When I fixed it what would happen is my graphics would lock up for about 2 seconds, then catch up. So there is some problem there that the setting fixes. I'm pretty sure either this thread or BillZBubbas thread had the key to what setting I changed, but for the love of god I can't remember what it was.

I'm experimenting now.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's the problem I'm still having as well, despite trying the above GMA drivers. The only thing that's solved the problem is running it on minimum, which kind of sucks, but it's definitely better than nothing!

 

Posted

For some reason shaders is turned off for me, but my friend's laptop (a dell) with the same graphics, less cpu and less memory, has the shader option available.

Any ideas?

Should I install Intel's driver instead of Apples?

-ASYLUM- (nsfw)
St. Lucifer: lvl 50 D3 Defender
Satanicus: lvl 38 E2 Blaster
Diabolus The Dark: lvl 36 SS/DA Brute
Old Man Death: lvl 33 TH/DM Mastermind
Misses Claus: lvl 33 Ice Controller

 

Posted

On a whim I tried putting it on minimum, but then the character models at High and the slider at 75%. It was able to handle it, so I'm guessing it's all the particle effects that freeze everything up. It's definitely not that pretty on my MacBook, but it's still nice.

My fiance is saving up for one of the new MacBook Pros. They have the better video card like mine, which means our wireless network runs at 300mps. It has a supported 512mb NVidia card, and 2gb of RAM. Man, games must look so awesome on that thing. For nearly $3K, though, it damn well better.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]

Breaking news:

If you're using a Macbook or Mac Mini with the Intel GMA video chipset you're better off using Windows XP with this Intel GMA driver.

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_r...mp;submit=Go%21

[/ QUOTE ]

better than Leopard drivers? also, this doesn't seem to support GMA950.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
On a whim I tried putting it on minimum, but then the character models at High and the slider at 75%. It was able to handle it, so I'm guessing it's all the particle effects that freeze everything up. It's definitely not that pretty on my MacBook, but it's still nice.

[/ QUOTE ]

Correction: as long as I keep the max particles down, I can run everything else at High. That must be what eats my RAM and forces a lock-up. If yours is locking up, too, try lowering the max particle count. Even at 1K it still looks fine, and there's a big difference between the lowest (100?) and just 1K particles. Obviously something like 25K+ looks better, but it's still totally playable.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
if you don't want to go through all of the trouble of installing boot camp and windows you can download and install Crossover Games from Codeweavers and while not with out it's problems it does work very well, this is a great option as it works in tiger 10.4 and leopard 10.5, if the only reason you are flipping to windows is for COX than this will save you some space on your hard drive.

[/ QUOTE ]

This actually works now? I might have to try it again. How does the performance compare to bootcamp or parallels.

For those curious about parallels, it does work. I can boot my macbook bootcamp partition with parallels and run CoH, but the performance is noticeable lower. If you just want to get on for a short time, or you need access to your mac applications while you play it's a decent solution. I tend to reboot though, especially for long sessions.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
if you don't want to go through all of the trouble of installing boot camp and windows you can download and install Crossover Games from Codeweavers and while not with out it's problems it does work very well, this is a great option as it works in tiger 10.4 and leopard 10.5, if the only reason you are flipping to windows is for COX than this will save you some space on your hard drive.

[/ QUOTE ]

This actually works now? I might have to try it again. How does the performance compare to bootcamp or parallels.


[/ QUOTE ]

I'm wondering this too.

I wonder if CrossOver Games for Mac will work better than running CoX under Vista on my 1st gen MacBook due to the 2GB RAM limit of the hardware and Vista's memory-hungry behavior.

Here is a page of screenshots created by people running CoX on CrossOver Games.
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibi...9;screenshot=1