MAC download?

scottishhound

So i have a friend who wants to play neverwinter, but only has a mac, is there a way someone can suggest to easily download the game for mac since the developers seem to neglect half their audience by not supporting mac to begin with. they have wine,winebottle, and wine wrapper if that helps

angrysprite

Star Trek Online only just released an OSX client. As of right now there is no OSX client for Neverwinter. This means you need to run MS Windows on your Mac, which it's fully capable of doing (often with superior performance than most cheap-o PCs).

There are three options to do this:

BOOTCAMP.
Bootcamp comes with every Mac and allows the hard disk to be partitioned: one part OSX, the other part x86, where you can install and run MS Windows on it (any version from XP through 8 - hint: Neverwinter runs excellently on XP and 7, not so great on Vista and 8 in my experience). This will require a copy of MS Windows to install. Also it means you have to restart the Mac and choose which to boot into: OSX or the other partition (in our example: MS Windows) - meaning it's one or the other, never both simultaneously.

Virtual Machine (Parallels is probably the best, but there are others). This allows you to have a virtual hard disk drive and actually run MS Windows simultaneously inside OSX (some windows on your Mac desktop are actually Windows apps, along side the standard OSX apps). However, virtual machines run slower than the native option you get with bootcamp.

Others will proclaim using WINE, which is a x86 Emulator for Xenix/Unix/Linux systems (which OSX is a Unix variant) - it's also a virtual machine but not as easy to use or as graceful as Parallels and Fusion and such. The performance is also not quite as up-to-par with Parallels, but WINE is a free open-source solution and you can't argue with free.

The fourth and least friendly option: buy a cheap-o PC. It's what I do. I do ALL my computing (including Neverwinter Gateway and *everything*) on my Mac OSX. I have a PC that does nothing but play Star Trek Online, Champions Online and Neverwinter. Full stop. Since most PCs are cheap HAMSTER, hardware-wise, they are inexpensive. You can probably get away with a $250 PC and a KVM switch and away you go.

(KVM: Keyboard, Video, Mouse - a switch that allows you to use only one of each to control and interact with both computers).

I hope this helps.
We WANT YOU and all your friends in Neverwinter!

setherio

There's a port made via WINE that runs quite well. I use it myself on occasion. There are some glitches that occur (seems to have a problem when trying to "copy" text for example). But for most part, haven't had any issues with it.

http://portingteam.com/files/file/7839-neverwinter-online-dungeons-dragons/

kattefjaes

When playing games on a Mac (not "MAC", that has a completely unrelated meaning in computing, by the way), I find that it's better to just suck it down and go the bootcamp route, as you get better framerates on the same hardware.

Sometimes this is due to "ports" running on middleware, rather than being proper ports, but mostly it's because the Mac's OpenGL performance is pretty lame, partly due to being somewhat behind the times, but partly because often you waste resources on a desktop context, even when running a game full screen.

MacOS is not the best choice for gaming due to poor support and indifferent 3D performance. Finish what you're doing, and use Bootcamp, boot into 'doze. Obviously, my Macs would also not be my first choice for running games, either, but sometimes they're all that's available, so it's nice to have options.

..also, "half their audience"? Please.