Left 4 Dead Demo via Crossover Games 7 and Steam
15/11/08 19:12
I managed to snag Crossover Pro and
Crossover Games via the lameduck promotion a few days ago with the
intention that I would try some more of my games on there now that
I have a none time-limited version.
The first thing that I decided to try was Steam because I’d heard and read a lot on the internet about people having success getting games running under OS X with Steam and also because at the end of the day, my ideal solution would allow me just to use OS X and remove the bootcamp partition.
I installed Steam via the menu option under Crossover and it went without a single hitch, the biggest problem that I had was remembering my password :)
Once it was installed, I tried the Left 4 Dead demo, this downloaded and installed again without any problems but once it was done there were some issues with the game itself. It launched but it didnt play the intro videos the first time through, just a blank black screen, after a while though it got to the main menu but none of the menu options were visible. Unlike some of the people in the forums, I didnt manage to get into the game without the menu, so I was forced to quit out (I used issh on my iphone to ssh into the mac and then via TOP, found the PID and killed the wine processes).
After some digging around on the Crossover forums, I came across the following solution, essentially you need to run regedit from Crossover and enable GLSL;
When I started the game again, then the intro videos played and the menu was visible. In fact from there everything worked, Steam threw up a warning when I launched the demo, informing me that the video drivers were out of date, which for the time being I ignored and when I went into the game itself the fps was so slow as to be painful, it was honestly unplayable. I tried going into the settings within the game itself and turning off music and toning down the graphics as well as the resolution (from 1440x900 to 1024x768) and although the fps increased, it still wasnt enough for the game to be playable and when I got into a firefight, the game crashed to the desktop.
Ive since tried some other things, such as running the game in windowed mode (apparently, according to the Crossover forums, this can sometimes help) but I havent had much success, so for the time being, it will still have to be bootcamp perhaps?
The first thing that I decided to try was Steam because I’d heard and read a lot on the internet about people having success getting games running under OS X with Steam and also because at the end of the day, my ideal solution would allow me just to use OS X and remove the bootcamp partition.
I installed Steam via the menu option under Crossover and it went without a single hitch, the biggest problem that I had was remembering my password :)
Once it was installed, I tried the Left 4 Dead demo, this downloaded and installed again without any problems but once it was done there were some issues with the game itself. It launched but it didnt play the intro videos the first time through, just a blank black screen, after a while though it got to the main menu but none of the menu options were visible. Unlike some of the people in the forums, I didnt manage to get into the game without the menu, so I was forced to quit out (I used issh on my iphone to ssh into the mac and then via TOP, found the PID and killed the wine processes).
After some digging around on the Crossover forums, I came across the following solution, essentially you need to run regedit from Crossover and enable GLSL;
change "HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D/useGLSL" to
"enabled" in regedit (that comes with crossover)When I started the game again, then the intro videos played and the menu was visible. In fact from there everything worked, Steam threw up a warning when I launched the demo, informing me that the video drivers were out of date, which for the time being I ignored and when I went into the game itself the fps was so slow as to be painful, it was honestly unplayable. I tried going into the settings within the game itself and turning off music and toning down the graphics as well as the resolution (from 1440x900 to 1024x768) and although the fps increased, it still wasnt enough for the game to be playable and when I got into a firefight, the game crashed to the desktop.
Ive since tried some other things, such as running the game in windowed mode (apparently, according to the Crossover forums, this can sometimes help) but I havent had much success, so for the time being, it will still have to be bootcamp perhaps?