Half-Life 2 Forum

im trying to run the original HL2. (not portal, ep1, or ep2) Im runing the latest version of crossover on a macbook pro, with 2gb of ram and a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with 256MB GDDR3 SDRAM; dual display and video mirroring capabilities; DVI and VGA outputs (DVI-to-VGA adapter included). steam says updating game when i open, does the whole valve on the guys head thing, gets to the main menu loading and freezes! anyone know what the problem is.

by the way, it runs portl, episode 2 and episode 1 fine.

Try adding "-novid -console -window" to your launch options for the game. This is on the Steam gui, click on the game, then click Properties.

that got me to the menu, but when it got to the cinematice with the G-Man speaking, it froze. and on a side note, how do you get "call of duty 2" to install and run throught crossover?

Something sounds corrupt since you mention that other HL2 engine games run fine. You might want to re-install HL2. This does not sound like an issue with CrossOver, but a bug in HL2 or Steam itself.

You can buy CoD2 from Steam, that is the only version we currently support. The CD version is not officially supported since copy protection does not work with CrossOver.

Thomas, for Macs with Nvidia graphics, it is necessary to set the Shader detail to Low in the video settings of Source-engine games like Half-Life 2. The use of "-console" in the launch options is useful because it allows you to get to the point where you can set your video settings. Without -console, the game can lock up right at the point of showing you the main game menu, because the rendering of the animated background triggers the problem with the shaders.

Once you set Shader detail to Low, you may remove -console if you prefer.

Can you give more specific details as to exactly where -console is and what exactly we're to change? I don't code so this sounds Greek to me...
thanks

-console is a game setting in Steam. Right click on your game in Steam, press properties, and click on the "set launch options" button.

I was having almost the same issue, except that it was HL2: Episode Two that was freezing up at the initial loading screen. I took the advice of putting "-novid -window -console" in and it loaded the game up in windowed mode. Then I could see what the problem was. My ZoneAlarm was at one of the little popups that asks if it's ok for the program to access the internet. But I couldn't see it before because the game would load in full screen mode and not display the ZoneAlarm popup. Once I gave ZoneAlarm permission to let HL2:ET access the internet things were fine and I had no more problems. I was getting very frustrated because I was not able to Alt-Tab or even Ctrl-Alt-Delete my way out of the loading screen and I had to reboot my whole computer! Hope this helps!

When I try to open Half Life 2 It will load a black screen then a white screen then show the loading screen in the top left corner of my screen then quit out. I have tried all the launch options people have listed. It has worked fine in the past but it just suddenly stopped working. I have looked at all the threads and none seam able to fix my problem.

Caleb, which version of CrossOver Games are you using? We just released version 7.1, so please make sure to test with that.

Also, which OS and GPU are you using?

I am not able to get past the loading screen either. I did do the suggestion that somebody mentioned with windowed mode, that got the main menu to load up but say this in the console box:
"Platform Error: module version ('serverbrowser.dll, VGuiModuleServerBrowser001) invalid, not loading". When I go to play the game, it stops loading towards the end of the loading progress bar. Anybody know what to do?

Matt wrote:

I am not able to get past the loading screen either. I did do the
suggestion that somebody mentioned with windowed mode, that got the
main menu to load up but say this in the console box:
"Platform Error: module version ('serverbrowser.dll,
VGuiModuleServerBrowser001) invalid, not loading". When I go to play
the game, it stops loading towards the end of the loading progress
bar. Anybody know what to do?

I'm in the same situation. But I don't know about the platform error. with -console it lets me change options and settings which is better than before which would load it and then just close out back to steam - mygames. When I try to load a level it loads and then closes out. I dunno why this is an issue b/c Episode 1 works no problems, loads and I can play it, but not HL2. Counterstrike Source and Portal play well too without any launch options. Something is making HL2 trip out, can't figure it out

edit figured it out. used dxlevel 81, and this did the trick! along w/ low shadow I noticed

Aluminum Macbook 2.0 4GB ram nvidia 9400m

Matt wrote:

"Platform Error: module version ('serverbrowser.dll,
VGuiModuleServerBrowser001) invalid, not loading"

In the Steam interface, in the Properties dialog for Half-Life 2, have it verify the integrity of the local files. The above error sounds like you have a corrupt install of Half-Life 2.