Official GW and Mac thread

I have a mac OS X and a Guild Wars which is only avalible for windows, could anyone submit URLs with things that can help me make it active for macs.

You can't, it will not run on OSX, end of, sorry............


EDIT - IT DOES WHAT IT SAYS ON THE TIN only comaptible with microsoft windows......


DOUBLE EDIT - Emulators wont work neither will virtual pc installed on a mac

only thing you can try is emulators, but i don't thnik they can be discussed here

Why not?

Guild Wars works fine through VirtualPC on OS X, albeit a bit slow.

I've now installed a program for installing exe's onto macs. But I still don't know how to use it to install Guild Wars, it works on everything else exept guild wars!!

Thats exactly why, too slow, the lag is way too bad, yes I have a mac running VPC, waste of time and energy.

I believe that you stated that they "won't work" in your previous post.

It does work. Just pointing that out.

An emulator won't work...
for me .
Too much lag

Either change your OS to Windows XP
Or
You can use an emulator

Heh, now I'm curious. Do you remember what model Mac and what version of VirtualPC?

Back in my Power Mac 7200 days I got a few games working under VPC but it always emulated the video drivers into some generic garbage that kinda blew for gaming. Is it still doing this, or is it actually using the Windows drivers for the video card installed in the Mac? That'd be pretty sweet.

I assume that if you (1) had a dual-G5 with 2GB of RAM and (2) VPC used the Windows drivers for your video card you might be able to get GW into some sort of playable state.

If anyone is able to get this to work, I have quite a few Mac friends who have been suffering Guild Wars-envy since April...

The problem is that they'd probably spend much more getting their Mac to run GW then they'd spend on buying a brand new PC. That, and it'd be more or less crazy, unreliable, and unsupported.

Then again, for some Mac users, this isn't a problem.

Well, since GW is not multi-threaded (and VPC wouldn't change that) it would only use 1 processor. I don't know if it could somehow farm out the emulation and execution processes to separate threads or not. Anyway, if you've read much about the new Intel-based Macs it seems like the G5 is an inferior architecture for running most types of applications used by average home computer users. The G5 is based around a nice architecture but we've come to find that, while it's more adaptable than the old x86 Intel architectures, it just doesn't end up running many types of applications as fast. During early alpha testing of the new Macs the apple engineers were blown away by how much faster the Intel platform was. The G5 architecture is a more 'refined' design, but sometimes raw power rules all, and they just couldn't sqeeze enough power out of it. By the time you add in the additional overhead of emulation I don't think the most expensive of G5 systems will make GW playable. I could be wrong, but even if you could make it playable I doubt it will look very nice.

Right now if you want to play most of the up-to-date games you just have to have a PC.

I don't want to see this thread get closed, so I'm just going to suggest we don't start a Mac vs. PC debate. Besides, I'm hoping that someone like koneko will reply and/or post a screenshot of GW in VPC just to prove that it can be done.

Dex, you nailed me on the multithreading aspect. You're definintely right about GW not being able to take advantage of the dual cores, and while VPC might be multithreaded, that's not going to help GW.

On the other hand, the more work you can hand off directly to the video card, the less VPC actually has to do. I don't know if VPC is capable of that, though, so this whole thought might be moot.

To the OP (addone): How did you end up in this situation, anyway?

Nah. The whole Mac vs. PC debate is pointless and I avoid it like the plague. I guess I was maybe suggesting that the new Intel-based Macs might have a better chance at running GW well than the G5's.

Oh, hey, that's a really interesting point. Hopefully it'll make porting games to the Mac easier, too, and as a result there'll be more Mac games.

Porting current OS X apps was said to be stupidly easy. I have no idea if it'll make porting Windows apps easier, but of course there's also the possibility of dual-booting OS X and Windows on the same machine. That takes the whole "Macs can't run games" thing and throws it out the window.

And you know someone will figure out how to do it 30 seconds after release.

Anyway, I'd dig up my old copy of VPC and give GW a try, but it'd make my G3 cry. GW on an ATI Rage 128? Hahahahahahaha...

I don't think GW runs in OpenGL, which would most likely speed up the game in VirtualPC or similar emulators. D3D is a b**** to get to run in anything but Windows.

I'm gonna bump this, but I actually have a good reason.

With the release of the new Intel-based iMac and MacBook, you can now almost certainly run GW on a Mac. Windows XP runs fine on these guys as long as you set up a second partition (formatted NTFS, of course) for it and do a normal Windows install. These new Macs are using the ATI Radeon X1600, which should be more than enough for GW and, of course, has Windows drivers. You're going to want more than the standard 512MB RAM, though.

Here's a look at an early install of WinXP on these new guys showing that it can be done: http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0506intelmac.html

A note about that link: at that time (June '05, jeez) they were using some POS video card in the prototype, not the ATI card. So, disregard that little bit about the display being stuck at 800x600

So hey, this is pretty cool, I guess. Dual booting MacOS X and Windows XP on the same box? Actually being able to play games on a Mac now? Still a bit pricey, IMO.

Hi,
I'm posting here after having been confronted to the same problem.
I've got Parallels Desktop installed for educational purposes at home on Mac OS Tiger x86.
It seems ok to play Guild wars, thus a minimum amount of RAM is required for the virtual pc, i didn't mention I use Win XP SP2 as a virtual PC desktop.
I first began downloading the setup, then it connected to ArenaNet to download data ...etc. Now I'm having fun on GW on my Mac !! Hope this helps, anyway, NcSoft should make an effort to bring it natively for Mac User

schuss

Woah, thread necromancy is for the lose!

Not really. I have a Mac and would like updates on the ideas here if anyone has done something to get it to work on the new Intels nicely.

That, and its better than someone not searching and someone dropping in and saying "Use search!" In this case, someone did.