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Mac OsX and Parallels

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
Hi,

I was wondering, I have the latest version of Parallels, it came with the new laptop, the only reason I would have to splurge on Windows would be to play this game, would it be worth it? Does anyone know of any issues with playing Star Trek Online through Parallels? I really would appreciate any advice and suggestions.
Post edited by Unknown User on

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  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Read the "Unofficial STO" thread, it works just fine for me!
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    I use Boot Camp on my MacBook because I didn't want to buy anything extra. If you have trouble with Parallels, you could always try going that way as well. It works rather well, even if it makes my beautiful MacBook into a horrible, self-hating computer of the night.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    DudeMcMann wrote: »
    Read the "Unofficial STO" thread, it works just fine for me!
    the thread link is in my signature
    I use Boot Camp on my MacBook because I didn't want to buy anything extra. If you have trouble with Parallels, you could always try going that way as well. It works rather well, even if it makes my beautiful MacBook into a horrible, self-hating computer of the night.
    Bootcamp install of WIndows will run it,... if you don't mine losing access to OSX, and having to buy and run Windows to play...

    The Unofficial Mac Port, and the custom unsupported build of Crossover 8.2 that can run it... both run it decently... no Windows needed, no reboots needed...
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    I've not been able to get STO to work with Parallels 5. It gets about 40-50% of the way through the loading screen and then freezes.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    I turned my speakers up and can hear some sort of windows sound FX at 45% of the loading screen, and it just hangs forever on ATARI.

    I'm running the latest Parallels 5, with x64 Windows 7. I might try installing on Windows XP
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Ran in window mode and was able to see the Fatal Error popup.

    Fatal Error: Direct3D driver returned error code (D3DERR_INVALIDCALL) while creating a texture (DSDERR_INVALIDCALL while creating 3D texture size 1 x 1 x 1 (1 mips, D3DFMT_A8L8), 3.23 GB memory available).

    Technical Details: D3DERR_INVALIDCALL while creating 3D texture size 1 x 1 x 1 (1mips, D2DFMT_A8L8), 3.23 GB memory available
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Hi,

    I was wondering, I have the latest version of Parallels, it came with the new laptop, the only reason I would have to splurge on Windows would be to play this game, would it be worth it? Does anyone know of any issues with playing Star Trek Online through Parallels? I really would appreciate any advice and suggestions.

    There are two ways you can play STO on a mac(intel mac that is)

    Bootcamp: You basically are creating a hard drive partition specifically for a windows install. Congrats, your mac is now a gaming pc.

    The unofficial, unsupported mac client: I haven't tested this one, so quite frankly, i have no idea how well it works.

    To make this very clear, you CAN NOT use a virtualization product(Parallels or other) to emulate windows and play games. You're essentially running windows as an app within OSX.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    To be more precise, there are actually two Wine options (both of which work fine): doh's Wineskin and a special build of Crossover Games that Codeweavers released.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    To echo Coderanger's comments, Wineskin (linked by doh123) is FREE and works. Codeweavers make a $30 Crossover Games software (that can run more than STO easily) and works. I have used both and my only comment is that there are a few minor (not game breaking in any way) issues on the Wineskin option that made it worth $15 (got it on sale) for me to buy the Crossover Games option. You can test both for FREE, the Codeweavers one will time out after 7 days, after which you need to pay.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    To make this very clear, you CAN NOT use a virtualization product(Parallels or other) to emulate windows and play games. You're essentially running windows as an app within OSX.

    While it's true that Parallels doesn't yet run STO (because of the gfx card emulation isn't on STO's supported list) it's *not* true to say that you *can not* use a virtualization product to emulate windows and play games.

    You very definitely can play City of Heroes in Parallels, for example, and I have also played several others.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Better question, why the bloody **** would you? Parallels actually uses Wine to do its 3D translation too (or at least it is based on Wine code originally), so all you get is a slower version of the same thing :-P
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Which is why i still say d3d isn't supported. It's not native. It's emulated.
    It's silly and I shake my head at linux users daily as well.

    Bootcamp was invented for a reason.
    Use it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    coderanger wrote:
    Better question, why the bloody **** would you? Parallels actually uses Wine to do its 3D translation too (or at least it is based on Wine code originally), so all you get is a slower version of the same thing :-P

    Only one reason I can think of: it runs some things Wine does not. It may have been based on Wine (I don't know, but most pc emulators/virtualizers these days are) but it works at a considerably lower level now.

    As one of the authors of the SoftWindows PC emulators back in the early 90's, I'm a little biased too :-)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    powrslave wrote: »
    Which is why i still say d3d isn't supported. It's not native. It's emulated.
    It's silly and I shake my head at linux users daily as well.

    Bootcamp was invented for a reason.
    Use it.

    We've been through this before, though: sometimes, it's not convenient to reboot your machine and run Bootcamp. Sometimes, it's far better for us to use a tool like Wine (especially when it works pretty well).
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    On one hand you have wine users.

    on the other you have people building i7 extremes with 3 way SLI cards...

    to each his own...

    versatility vs performance I suppose
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    powrslave wrote: »
    On one hand you have wine users.

    on the other you have people building i7 extremes with 3 way SLI cards...

    to each his own...

    versatility vs performance I suppose

    With STO, there isn't any performance difference using Wine compared to Bootcamp on the same machine.

    Even if there were a difference, as you say, versatility counts for a lot.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    coderanger wrote:
    Parallels actually uses Wine to do its 3D translation too (or at least it is based on Wine code originally)

    Specifically, it's wined3d (the directx -> opengl translation layer from wine) but none of the rest of it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    To make this very clear, you CAN NOT use a virtualization product(Parallels or other) to emulate windows and play games. You're essentially running windows as an app within OSX.

    That's nonsense. I played Dragons Age Origins, and Aion both using Parallels 5. They ran great, fast, and rarely crashed. Unfortunately I have an apple RAID card installed and the damned Bootcamp doesn't have compatible drivers for it. And I'm definitely not going to install some random users MAC port. So I'm just TRIBBLE out of luck for now.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    coderanger wrote:
    Better question, why the bloody **** would you? Parallels actually uses Wine to do its 3D translation too (or at least it is based on Wine code originally), so all you get is a slower version of the same thing :-P

    Lol. A dev got censored :D
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    Brayla wrote:
    Lol. A dev got censored :D
    Nah, those are actual *s ;-)
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited March 2010
    I love people buying Crossover.

    Yes, the Crossover version that can run STO does run it slightly better in some ways to the Wineskin based one i made.... especially when it comes to windowing and fullscreen support, because Codeweavers has a really good X server built in customized to work good on OSX with Wine, and Wineskin uses Xquartz which totally sucks for Wine gaming.... using Open Source Wine will never be as good on a Mac until Xquartz has all the features needed.

    if you want totally free, you can use my version, but I have no problems with people buying Crossover to play, as Codeweavers helps make Wine great.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    I actually got it to work with this system configuration. I did how ever disable graphics switching on the mac side before attempting this so that I could use the 1GB of VRAM. The graphics ran smooth, the load up time was long, I suspect that it was because this was the first time I ran in a virtual machine (btw, the virtual machine is using the Windows partition I created for Boot Camp). One major issue I did find is that the mouse was incredibly over-sensitive. I did lower the sensitivity in the game but it didn't help much. If you move at a normal pace, it would jump erratically all over the place and at a fast pace. If you move slowly, it would still jump but only a little bit and at the direction you want. This glitch is a problem if you were in an intense space/ground fight. So, other than that mouse problem, everything ran smoothly for me.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    My Mac is running OS X 10.7.1 (Lion)
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