First, let me apologize for the n00b question. I am trying CXG to get LotRO on my Mac (10.6.8 on a recent iMac with 16GB RAM and a 2GB ATI Radeon HD6970M). I've installed it successfully and I can launch the game using PyLotRO. However, after the splash screen, I get a black screen with a game arrow, followed by a black screen with an Apple arrow, and then nothing. I've been looking on this website and seen frequent mentions of graphics settings, but many of them refer to things that appear to be in the game itself. The only thing I found outside the game is in the Wine Configuration control panel for the Bottle, and the relevant thing there is to turn off the vertex shader support, which I did. This did not fix the problem, however. Any pointers to relevant instructions would be greatly appreciated!

Update: in the meantime, I found instructions on how to set my VRAM and switch my graphics engine to OpenGL using regedit. Did both, still getting stuck at black screen at start-up (sob).

I am having the same problem, but with a more irritating part--I had been running the game perfectly for a week, then suddenly today I'm getting the exact same issue: black screen with just mouse pointer (mine stays in the LOTRO style) after the initial splash screen. Ironically, the only change I've made that I can think of is switching to the full paid version of codeweavers rather than running on the trial. Can anyone help? I'm using the new macbook air.
Thanks!

I've spent the day with Codeweavers and Apple. . . It appears that apple released a firmware update around sept 12 which i just installed. That (or the related thunderbolt and security update) is incompatible with CrossOver (or at the very least LOTRO). And since apple has a policy of making updates unrollbackable, it won't work until CrossOver/Pylotro releases an update. Joy.

David wrote:

I've spent the day with Codeweavers and Apple. . . It appears that
apple released a firmware update around sept 12 which i just
installed. That (or the related thunderbolt and security update) is
incompatible with CrossOver (or at the very least LOTRO). And since
apple has a policy of making updates unrollbackable, it won't work
until CrossOver/Pylotro releases an update. Joy.

Very interesting. Snow Leopard or Lion?
Obviously, it will be useful to know which models/os levels are effected for future queries.

As far as I can tell, I have only had one Apple update since Lion. I successfully installed that update. Although my 27 inch 2010 iMac does NOT have Thunderbolt. (Shows as no drivers loaded in the Profiler.)
I have not gotten any firmware updates for my machine.

27 inch iMac Intel (mid 2010) - 27 inch diagonal screen - Acquired 6/2011

Model iMac11,3
Processor 2.93 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024 MB
Display 27-inch (2560 x 1440)
Serial Number QP1110N6DNR
Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 (11B26)

Lets see, according to /library/receipts/InstallHistory.plist... I've only gotten one update from Apple since I upgraded to Lion: Security update 2011.005.lion on 9/10

By the way... the problem is with CrossOver Games/WINE. Once you get the splash screen, you are running the Turbine Client and PyLotRO is done.

As far as I can tell, I have the same problem on an 11" 2010 Macbook Air, making the one game I play unusable without rebooting into BootCamp. I hope that CodeWeavers posts something very clearly when this issue is resolved so I will know it's a good time to buy Crossover Games again!

(LotRO being the game, black screen after initial launch screen being the symptom)

After having CXG with LotRO running perfectly for months now I got a new MBP (2,4 Ghz i7, 8G ram, AMD Radeon HD 6770M w. 1024 MB and running Lion) this past week and migrated my old account and applications over using Migration Assistant and a new Time Machine Backup.

After that, LotRO has refused to run in CXG: Initial screen loads and then it goes black with just a LotRO-style mouse pointer showing.

I tried repairing permissions and reinstalling various components into the bottle but so far have had no other luck other than running the game though Boot Camp (Thank God for WinClone!).

My Console app tells me this when I try to run LotRO using CXG:

11/12/11 18.10.26,290 [0x0-0x75075].com.codeweavers.CrossOverGamesHelper.Lord of the Rings Online.PyLotRO/.PyLotRO: err:gsm:GSM_DriverProc libgsm support not compiled in!
11/12/11 18.10.37,552 [0x0-0x75075].com.codeweavers.CrossOverGamesHelper.Lord of the Rings Online.PyLotRO/.PyLotRO: QProcess: Destroyed while process is still running.

(the last bit happening when I quit LotRO in CXG).

One reinstall coming up..

I'm having the same black screen issue.

Any solutions yet? :( :(

I suspect this is Apple's problem with the "new" ATI chips -- it would not be the first time that Apple has software issues concerning graphics support.

As I mentioned above, I am running on an iMac (see the above note for my config) and have NOT had a problem -- but I have a different Graphics setup (see above). Nor have I had an issue with my (now antique) MacBook Pro.

There might be a change when the new release of WINE and CXG appear, probably in February, but I don't know if I would hold my breath.