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Has anyone tried to get STEAM running on a MBP/MAC?

MAC

Stop that. It's "Mac" unless you're talking about a MAC address, and Steam's not an acronym either.

Back on topic, I've gotten it to work in Ubuntu with a recent official WINE. Red Orchestra works mostly OK, except that it won't keep the mouse pointer inside the window & so it's not really playable.

Damn someones crabby today.

Before Gandhi got his panties in a bunch over something retarded, he had the Steam client and Source Engine stuff working under the Crossover trial. That's the only solution I can think of that circumvents needing a Windows license.

I was half-afraid that'd be the case, just thought I'd toss it out there since a 60-day trial is free, and since tanker has a more game-worthy GPU than the X3100 or GMA950 from the Macbooks/minis. Then again the cost between a copy of Vista Home Basic and Crossover is just abotu $0.

Thanks for the info PerfectCr. I have a unused Vista ultimate license at my disposal. (Got it at work from our M$ vendors, nice little perk).

Question though how many GB did you set the "vista" partition?

Vista by itself uses 10GB, I'd think you'd want a minimum of 25GB (for Vista, swap, whatever else it wants, and enough free space that it doesn't whine constantly when it gets below 10% free) + the amount you need for Steam.

I use a venerable and otherwise unused XP32 for my Boot Camp needs, when I can be bothered with it.

Crossover running Source slow has everything to do with Crossover not using 3D acceleration in most configs.

You can hack around a bit and enable proper 3D in Crossover, or you can compile/run vanilla Wine, both will run Steam/Source nicely.

Steam is actually a godsend for multi-OS peoples. Several games that I have will run fine via Steam (no CD checks), but will fail when using the original media. Using cracked executables greatly increases the chances of something breaking in a difficult-to-reproduce manner.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Vista by itself uses 10GB, I'd think you'd want a minimum of 25GB (for Vista, swap, whatever else it wants, and enough free space that it doesn't whine constantly when it gets below 10% free) + the amount you need for Steam.

And suddenly my 250GB HD on my new MBP is looking small.

Yeah thats what I resorted to, is to boot camp and run Steam. I just wish it would run natively in OS X

tanker27 wrote:

I just wish it would run natively in OS X

With most of the games being directX-based, performance with emulated DX graphics would probably be pretty bad, especially compared to running native-to-the-hardware by booting into Windows.

The OpenGL one's probably would be ok.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

tanker27 wrote:

I just wish it would run natively in OS X

With most of the games being directX-based, performance with emulated DX graphics would probably be pretty bad, especially compared to running native-to-the-hardware by booting into Windows.

You can at least try it now -- VMWare Fusion 2 supports Shader Model 2.0.

OpenGL, for some reason, not so much.

SNM wrote:

OpenGL, for some reason, not so much.

Can't it run native in OSX and linux?

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Can't it run native in OSX and linux?

Most likely because it's originally a Windows program, VMWare also needs to translate the OpenGL function calls from the Windows API based OpenGL. Unlike Java, which is compiled into byte-code when it is compiled (an intermediate machine language, so to speak), C/C++ (which most games are written with) based OpenGL is compiled into whatever binary format the compiler is set to. If it's the Windows API, then those OpenGL calls are trying to find some dll file in the Windows directory and interface with it, something that OSX isn't going to have.

mortifiedPenguin wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Can't it run native in OSX and linux?

Most likely because it's originally a Windows program, VMWare also needs to translate the OpenGL function calls from the Windows API based OpenGL. Unlike Java, which is compiled into byte-code when it is compiled (an intermediate machine language, so to speak), C/C++ (which most games are written with) based OpenGL is compiled into whatever binary format the compiler is set to. If it's the Windows API, then those OpenGL calls are trying to find some dll file in the Windows directory and interface with it, something that OSX isn't going to have.

Gotcha. I've never done any graphics programming, so I have no idea how it calls stuff. Thanks for the information.

My brother used Steam with crosseover games 7 and it worked perfectly on his MBP. In fact, it wasn't slow at all.

Adi

I am running TF2 under Vista Ultimate x86 via Boot Camp on my 2.33 MBP. The X1600 does a decent job of pushing the pixels at 1440x900.