Steam on Mac

Brando · 15 Sep 2009 at 10:54

How do people cope with Steam on a mac? I had a bootcamp XP partition but got fedup with it! Crossfire hates my mouse and looks a little rough around the edges.

Anyone have any better solutions? I saw the steam app running in someones doc but google turns 0 up on it

.

Thanks,

Olly

Xenoxide · 15 Sep 2009 at 11:27

I have a 15" MBP, I don't use Crossfire or anything else like that. I just have a Windows partition installed that I boot into to do my gaming. Everything works perfectly.

Brando · 15 Sep 2009 at 11:34

Not a fan of using bootcamp, I found it annoying having to boot into the different partion and am wondering about Native solutions really.

I hope Open CL forces Valve to pull their fingers out and update everything / bring out a steam client for mac! There must be a large number of users they are missing out on??

mr.sly · 15 Sep 2009 at 11:52

Brando said:
Not a fan of using bootcamp, I found it annoying having to boot into the different partion and am wondering about Native solutions really.

I hope Open CL forces Valve to pull their fingers out and update everything / bring out a steam client for mac! There must be a large number of users they are missing out on??

There's not much point when all the games are Direct X.

Xenoxide · 15 Sep 2009 at 12:33

Brando said:
I hope Open CL forces Valve to pull their fingers out and update everything / bring out a steam client for mac! There must be a large number of users they are missing out on??

Nah not really. 8% market share, the vast majority of those buying a Mac do so to do their work on. Everybody knows that if you want to game, you run Windows. As a result, those who are interested in gaming have a PC.

If you're dead set on virtualisation though, try Parallels. I hear it's pretty good.

pingwing · 15 Sep 2009 at 13:42

Yeah theres a quote out there from valve where they talk to people who want to do it for mac and lay down all the plans, then nothing ever happens after that. Chicken and egg type problem really...

Parallels and VMware are supposed to be the best osx based solutions, but bootcamp is just so much simpler to get away with (and if you use vista or win 7 its pretty quick to switch between the two)

Feek · 15 Sep 2009 at 13:43

Virtualising games is a waste of time, it's not even worth thinking about.

Vonhelmet · 15 Sep 2009 at 13:58

Feek said:
Virtualising games is a waste of time, it's not even worth thinking about.

Indeed. The performance will be abysmal. I have a Mac Mini (GMA950, admittedly) and tried running Deus Ex in a VM. The performance was hideous.

Brando · 15 Sep 2009 at 14:39

Yeah VMing is not an option, I have vmware (for work and giggles) and it's crap. Crossfire was ok but nothing compared to bootcamp.

Windows 7 on bootcamp isn't a bad idea, may go with that as I have the RC release. It boots soo much faster than XP and would therefored be less of a faff for when I wanted to game. Also has a smaller install footprint as I don't want to loose too much space on my MBP.

Come on Apple, apply some pressure damn it!

Fillado · 15 Sep 2009 at 17:04

Kikizo: People keep asking you about a potential Macintosh version, and your stance is that this is a strictly Windows project...?

Gabe: Well, we tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to... well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms.

Apple NEVER planned for the iPod Touch to be a gaming device. EVER. It was just a consequence of the App Store and the hardware that made people write games for it. Then Apple realised that was a good thing and what they are now marketing it as. Equally Apple won't do anything for gaming on the Mac until they realise they can make money from it somehow.

TheVoice · 15 Sep 2009 at 17:30

Fillado said:
Apple NEVER planned for the iPod Touch to be a gaming device. EVER. It was just a consequence of the App Store and the hardware that made people write games for it. Then Apple realised that was a good thing and what they are now marketing it as. Equally Apple won't do anything for gaming on the Mac until they realise they can make money from it somehow.

Unless they release their own version of Steam (or the App Store) for games, I guess they've got no reason to bother.

mr.sly · 15 Sep 2009 at 17:37

They'll only do it when Steve Jobs has finally left because he doesn't like games. Probably do eBooks as well after he's gone because he said people don't read anymore so there's no point in eBooks.

iraiguana · 16 Sep 2009 at 21:12

I have run CS source on cross over on my MBP and it runs ok. I would not recommend trying any more demanding games as it can suffer quite rapidly when things get heavy.

If I really want to game then I will use bootcamp and my xp install.