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Forums > Home› Star Trek Online General Discussion

Running STO in Parallels on a Mac?

devencombsdevencombs Member Posts: 225 Arc User
edited July 2023 in Star Trek Online General Discussion
Ever since this game launched I have been running STO with Bootcamp on a Mac with an Intel chip. Unfortunately, Apple is no longer producing computers with Intel chips. The new M1 chips do not support Bootcamp. I know that Parallels is an option for running a Windows environment on a Mac. I tried Parallels several years ago and the gameplay was pretty choppy. Does anyone know if the gameplay is better these days? Will STO work with Parallels in 2022?
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on

Comments

  • devencombsdevencombs Member Posts: 225 Arc User
    After doing a bit of research, it appears that Crossover is a better environment for STO on an M1 Mac. Can anyone here confirm? I'm afraid I'll need to replace my Intel Mac with an M1 Mac soon.
  • nixie50nixie50 Member Posts: 1,347 Arc User
    Sadly, MacOS support was discontinued years ago. I think you are going to have to experiment. or hopefully a mac user will chime in, but i do know that parallels is VERY picky. identical laptops with different versions of Parallels wou or would not run a .net based program the company was using. and we are not talking version 2 to 4, more like 4.3 to 4.4 (version numbers just an example)
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    We Need BERETS in the tailor
  • devencombsdevencombs Member Posts: 225 Arc User
    Yeah, Mac support was never supported and then was unceremoniously dropped. If they can't support do Mac support then fine, but the way they managed Mac support (i.e. not at all) and then just dropped it was kind of a TRIBBLE move. Still makes me upset.

    The good news is I found a solution. Apple is still making Mac Minis with an Intel chip, so I've got one of those coming with a much larger hard drive.
  • husanakxhusanakx Member Posts: 1,608 Arc User
    edited May 2022
    Crossover is a commercialized wine installer. From what I understand with M1 macs... you could sort of get STO to work before Cryptic required DX 11, but since it won't.
    The issue is related to Vulcan and OpenGL. (DX 10 had a sort of passable DX->ogl layer) Apple has never supported Vulcan... Wine has moved to Valves DXVK DirectX->Vulcan layer which means Linux is running 95% of windows games these days perfectly. Apple not so much. Its too bad Apple wouldn't support Vulcan properly, if they did they would benefit from all the work done on Linux gaming.
  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc
    phoenixc#0738
         Member Posts: 5,879 Arc User
    edited May 2022
    Of course, if Vulkan gets too close then Microsoft will undoubtedly bring out a "revolutionary new" DX or whatever that will break backwards compatibility to shake Vulkan off of market share Microsoft considers theirs alone. They have a well-established track record of that kind of thing, even post lawsuit (though they are a little more circumspect nowadays and do not discuss tricks like that via email or text anymore).

    Eventually, the Vulkan team will have to convince gaming companies that supporting Vulkan natively will attract more players than staying exclusively DX, enough so to make the effort of supporting both (or even just Vulkan) worthwhile. And it already has a performance advantage on older machines over DX (and it is slowly catching up on newer hardware too), which could be an important factor in coming days as the price of new chips is coming down slower than expected, and by the time it does drop to pre-shortage norms a new round of videocards and other products could send it climbing again.

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