I am, for now, without any Windows based computers at home. This is due to a failing hard disk on my iMac and my utter laziness in buying something new and cheap from Dell (have you seen the spec of their cheap machines?) and not any real [Windows sucks/computers are too powerful/games rot the mind/have I missed any other common complaint] reason.
A while back I tried getting LOTRO to run on the Mac, but decided it was easier to just reboot into windows. Now I can't do that I installed Crossover Games and decided to start small with Guildwars as it's a couple of years older and so a bit easier to get running. I've tried with previous versions and been disappointed.
One thing that helped was my decision to install my games onto an external drive. This means that I just had to plug the drive into my laptop and my existing patched version of games are sitting there.
Crossover is an interesting product. You create something called a bottle, which is basically just a fake OS (no real OS needed, so no Windows license) and then you can install applications into it. Most games are very resilient and so I just opened up the guildwars exe into my newly created bottle and waited to see it all fail.
Only it worked. Almost perfectly. Sound, music and graphics and the speed was very playable. There's a few problems, I can't get the fullscreen mode to go to full resolution as the "did this work?" reset happens before it's finished, but windowed mode uses nearly the whole screen. There's also a problem where using the mouse to move the cursor drifts the view up if you hold it but if you just click, move the camera and then release that's almost OK. In the end I just controlled it using the keyboard for all movement and that was much better.
Crossover has a seven day trial, but they've got a customer in me I think so that I can play anywhere without needing bootcamp.
I also had a go at getting EveMon working on the Mac. There's a special build for Linux, but to run on the mac it needs turning into an .app package (trivial if you know what they are). It worked, ran and then let me enter my API details. This wouldn't let me paste text into the key textbox (um, it's 2billion characters long. That's painful) and then crashed when I told it to get my list of characters. I'll take my config from my windows install and use that one next, the characters are already set up.
Next up for crossover is LOTRO. People seem to have it working.
I should really get around to ordering a new PC. WAR is out soon as well and that'll not work straight away so I'll need a PC.
posted @ Thursday, July 31, 2008 11:17 AM