Portal Forum

I own Portal and have played through the game under Windows XP (via Boot Camp). I just played through the game under CrossOver 6.2 for Mac, and here is a comprehensive list of all of the ways in which the experience under Wine doesn't match the experience under Windows. Some of these bugs are previously reported, while many others have not been mentioned before.

Problems for Which There are Fixes Available

1. If your screen resolution is larger than the game's resolution before starting Portal, the game will appear in the lower right corner, cut off.

FIX: You can play in windowed mode (by entering "-window" into the "Launch Options" field in Steam before launching the game) or you can set your screen to use the same resolution as the game (1024x768 by default, at least on my system) before launching the game. You can't set the game's resolution to match a modern screen's max resolution because of issue #4 below.

2. The text inside the game's options menu and dialogue boxes does not appear.

FIX: You need to use regedit to apply a fix created for Team Fortress 2 to Portal. Open regedit for the bottle in which you installed Portal by choosing "Run Command..." from the "Programs" menu and entering "regedit". Navigate to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\AppDefaults\hl2.exe\Direct3D] and look for the entry called "tf2_alpha_hack" with value "-game tf". Cause this hack to be applied to Portal (and Half-Life Ep 2) by changing the value to "-game tf2; -game ep2; -game portal"

Problems Without Available Fixes, as far as I know

3. After applying the FIX for #2 above, each letter of the "Portal" logo on the title screen is surrounded by a white box.

4. The only three resolutions the game offers are 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480. On Windows, more resolutions are available, including large and widescreen resolutions.

5. Irrespective of whether the FIX described in #2 above is applied, the text on the title screen ("NEW GAME" "BONUS MAPS" etc.) is jagged as though not anti-aliased. This is also true of the bits of text that appear in-game to explain the controls ("W Forward" "A Turn Left" etc.). On Windows, the text is smooth.

6. On my first run of Portal under Wine, the voice of the AI would sometimes skip ahead, as though the audio playback jumped forward a fraction of a second, cutting out a word or two. On subsequent runs of Portal under Wine, the AI's speeches were not cut off. I could not reproduce the audio skipping problem, but I read that other users have encountered it.

7. Portal has a "Portal Render Depth" setting which influences how many times you can see through the same portal before it stops rendering the scene. Even when you have reached this maximum portal render depth under Windows, the game uses a trick to fake further levels. Thus, even with a render depth of 1, you can see a few layers in, when running under Windows. You cannot see past your Portal render depth when running under Wine. This bug is particularly noticeable because of issue #8 below:

8. Every time you start Portal, it resets your "Portal Render Depth" setting to 1.

9. There is a relatively arcane portal display issue. If you have placed a portal on a vertical or diagonal surface, and then you place a second portal somewhere and look through it, there is a chance that you see out the back of the first portal rather than out the front. This means you normally see some clipped object or a close-up of a wall texture. You can sometimes see properly out the portal if you look straight on, while looking at any angle (even a shallow one) will cause you to see the wrong way out of the portal. You always see properly if you approach the portal so closely that you're practically inside it.

10. Selecting "Quit Game" from the Portal game menu after an hour of play froze the program instead of quitting. It could be successfully terminated via CrossOver's task manager. I have not been able to reproduce this problem.

11. There is a terrible framerate slowdown whenever an active turret is in your view, up close. There is a significant framerate slowdown even when dead (deactivated) turrets are clearly visible. There are also slowdowns in the last room with GLaDOS. There also may be gradually increasing framerate slowdowns in other areas, though quitting and restarting Portal might help with these.

12. After you defeat GLaDOS, she breaks apart and rises out of the chamber. On Windows, you are dragged upward along with her while your vision goes white. Under Wine, you simply stand or walk around on the bottom of the chamber until your vision goes white.

13. Throughout the final sequence (including a fly-through of an equipment area, a view of a cake, and the credits song "Still Alive") there is a persistent mechanical humming which sounds like a background track from the game which wasn't appropriately stopped. The humming is pretty quiet and isn't terribly noticeable, but it does interfere with the sound quality of the song. There is no humming under Windows.

My system stats are:

iMac 24" w/ 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Mac OS 10.5.1
3 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 2600 Pro w/ 256 MB graphics memory

I hope this post will be of use to people trying to run Portal and in fixing some bugs for future CrossOver releases.

Hi,
Thank you for your great bug list, this will give me a few things to look at. I know some of them, but some are new.

For the first two workaroundable issues we should have a fix in the next release. They happen mainly because Crossover 6.2 was released before portal, and we didn't know the Steam game name beforehand(it's quite obvious though), and we didn't know wether it would be affected by the font bug.

Jeff R wrote:

4. The only three resolutions the game offers are 1024x768, 800x600,
   and 640x480. On Windows, more resolutions are available, including
   large and widescreen resolutions.

I think you have to specifically select "Wide-Screen" from another dropdown box to get them. Or does windows offer the wide-screen resolutions without that selection? Can you re-check that?

Jeff R wrote:

7. Portal has a "Portal Render Depth" setting which influences how
   many times you can see through the same portal before it stops
   rendering the scene. Even when you have reached this maximum portal
   render depth under Windows, the game uses a trick to fake further
   levels.

It is new to me that Portal does that, but I'll take a look. Maybe it is a dxlevel difference, because on Windows it will propably run in 95, but in Crossover we're still using 81.

Jeff R wrote:

8. Every time you start Portal, it resets your "Portal Render Depth"
   setting to 1.

Did you add "-dxlevel 80" or 81 to the startup options? This could cause this behavior. You can remove the -dxlevel switch after starting the game once, it will stick to the last used level. That way it shouldn't reset the portal rendering depth.

Jeff R wrote:

9. There is a relatively arcane portal display issue. If you have
   placed a portal on a vertical or diagonal surface, and then you
   place a second portal somewhere and look through it, there is a
   chance that you see out the back of the first portal rather than out
   the front...

This problem is known to me, and unfortunately it is unfixable with the current state of Graphics support on MacOS. The game uses clipping planes to cut of some unwanted geometry when rendering the portal content. We use GL_ARB_vertex_program for running DirectX vertex shaders, and unfortunately this extension does not support clipping combined with shaders. So the geometry doesn't get clipped away.
The newer OpenGL shading Language(GLSL) shaders support clipping, and we want to use that with the next release on Linux. Unfortunately, we found a lot of showstopper bugs in MacOS' GLSL implementation, so we stick to ARB for MacOS, until Apple fixes the bugs(reported already).

Jeff R wrote:

12. After you defeat GLaDOS, she breaks apart and rises out of the
    chamber.
13. Throughout the final sequence (including a fly-through of an
    equipment area, a view of a cake, and the credits song "Still
    Alive") there is a persistent mechanical humming which sounds like a
    background track from the game which wasn't appropriately stopped.

I have seen this issue once, but usually I am dragged up as well. The growling comes from the last part of GLaDOS you throw into the incinerator, and I think those issues are related. Is this behavior repeatable? Propably it is a game bug that depends on something you do when fighting GLaDOS.

EDIT: Corrected a broken quote

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Jeff R wrote:

7. Portal has a "Portal Render Depth" setting which influences how
   many times you can see through the same portal before it stops
   rendering the scene. Even when you have reached this maximum
   portal
   render depth under Windows, the game uses a trick to fake further
   levels.

It is new to me that Portal does that, but I'll take a look. Maybe
it is a dxlevel difference, because on Windows it will propably run
in 95, but in Crossover we're still using 81.

I tested it, it requires the portal rendering depth set to 2 or more. It doesn't work with rendering depth 1 or 0.

Okay, I've done some more testing and I have answers for your questions and some additional results to report.

Issue #4

You are right, this was a mistake on my part. There is a separate drop-down for aspect ratio, and if I select 16:10 widescreen, I get my full range of resolution options. Please disregard issue #4.

Issue #7

You are right, the game only uses the rendering trick when "Portal Depth" is set to at least two. Once you set depth to two, the game correctly applies the trick under Windows and Wine. Please disregard issue #7.

Issues #12 and #13

I tested the GLaDOS fight again, and neither of the problems happened this morning. I think they may be related to the extreme slowdown I had accumulated by the end of the game on my playthrough last night, while today I loaded a save directly before GLaDOS. Gradually accumulating slowdown is an issue under CrossOver. Related to this is the next bit:

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Jeff R wrote:

8. Every time you start Portal, it resets your "Portal Render
   Depth"
   setting to 1.

Did you add "-dxlevel 80" or 81 to the startup options? This could
cause this behavior. You can remove the -dxlevel switch after
starting the game once, it will stick to the last used level. That
way it shouldn't reset the portal rendering depth.

I have several results to report here.

First, I was playing without any "-dxlevel 80" or 81 tag in the launch options. (Was there a place I should have looked to know to do this?) Without the "-dxlevel 81" tag, the game does not remember your portal render depth setting, but it does remember your screen resolution setting.

Adding "-dxlevel 81" immediately causes a VERY dramatic boost in performance. I had a huge framerate, possibly higher than I get when running under Windows. This is clearly the way the game ought to be run in CrossOver.

Removing the "-dxlevel 81" tag actually does revert the game to the way it behaved before adding the tag. On my system, at least, it does not "stick to the last level used." Therefore, to get good performance, I need to leave this tag in place.

With the "-dxlevel 81" tag in place, the game still does not remember my Portal Render Depth setting. In addition, with the "-dxlevel tag" in place, the game also forgets my screen resolution setting, so I have to re-set it to 1920x1200 each time I start Portal. Luckily, the image offset due to issue #1 is just barely small enough for me to reach the "Options" button, so I can do it in-game each time.

Two more notes related to adding the "-dxlevel 81" tag:

The first time I ran the game after adding the "-dxlevel 81" tag, I had the audio skipping problem (Issue #6) return, but on subsequent runs, the audio skipping problem was again gone.

The problem with loss of framerate when you see turrets (Issue #11) still happens with the "-dxlevel 81" tag in place, but since you have better performance overall, the problem doesn't feel as bad. Also, I realized that some portion of the framerate you lose when looking at active turrets (especially shooting ones) persists until you quit and restart Portal. Today, I completed Testchamber 16 (with many turrets) and rode in the elevator to Testchamber 17 (where there are no turrets). My framerate remained bad even after loading the new level. Quitting and restarting Portal fixed the framerate problem.

As far as I can tell, the way to get the best experience running Portal under CrossOver 6.2 is:

1. Apply the regedit fix for the menu text issue (#2) above.
2. Add the "-dxlevel 81" tag to the Steam launch options.
3. Every time you start Portal, set your "Portal Render Depth" to at least 2 and re-select your preferred resolution. If the offset issue (#1) makes this impossible on your screen, start with the "-window" launch tag in Steam, then select "full-screen" in game.
4. If you encounter the sound skipping issue (#6), quit and restart Portal. It usually goes away.
5. If you begin to get accumulated framerate slowdown, quit and restart Portal. After leaving a place with turrets, quit and restart Portal. I would also quit and restart right before the GLaDOS encounter, since it might be a minor source of slowdown, and it's important to have good performance in this section.

You will simply need to live with text issues #3 and #5, and the portal backward visibility issue #9 (until GLSL is implemented well on the Mac side, followed by a CrossOver release).

-Jeff

I'm unable to see the text in the boxes in Portal and Episode 2, so I applied the TF2 fix described above (-game tf2; -game ep2; -game portal), but it still didn't work. I tried removing the semicolons, and then I could see a few Ts and Hs in the text boxes. I rebooted the computer and added the semicolons again and now all I can see is one T on one page and two Us on another. I'm running Crossover 6.2 on my MacBook. Any ideas, or should I just wait for 6.3?

You need the semicolons, but there should not be any space after each semicolon. It should be "-game tf;-game ep2;-game portal".

When the hack is not in effect, you sometimes get a random letter or two working. It changes each time you run the program. Your various changes to the registry key and rebooting was not causing the perceived difference -- it was just random fluctuations due to none of what you tried being quite right. 😉

I took away the spaces, but I'm still getting no text in the boxes. I was able to play through Portal regardless, but Episode 2 is more problematic because the game runs slowly unless I can access the options screen to turn down the graphics options. Any ideas?

These problems aside, I'd still like to thank the Codeweavers team for making such a great product that's allowed me to experience Half Life 2, Episode 1, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 on my Mac.

Hi,

It might be worth retesting those issues with CrossOver Games. We fixed a few issues, most notably the missing font bug, so the side effects of the workaround are gone. Users also reported that the turret shooting slowdown is gone.

Thanks,
Stefan

Wow, I've had none of these issues with a machine of exact same specs except with 4GB RAM