Team Fortress 2 Forum

well, as you said stefan, i might have broken tf2 with messing with the dx levels, and so i threw everything out, including crossover games. I wasn't able to locate all of my gamedata to throw, however. Anyhow, i had redownloaded crossover games, and was downloading half life 2 and css on steam when everything stopped. pretty soon the mouse couldn't move, and the screen started flashing weird patterns of pink, yellow, and blue. I forced it off, and when I restarted the computer, all I could see were black and white large pixels flashing and twithcing. I think it has to do with the dx level, perhaps the graphics card was messed up. Anyhow, i'll either have it fixed, or i'll get a new one, but I have a couple of questions.

first, if it is necessary to get a new macbook pro, and I were to put the old harddrive into it, would crossover and steam restart at dx 8.1, or would they start in dx 9.0, which crashes? I don't want to get a nice new one running only to open crossover games and get the crash again.

If i simply redownload everything from online, does it restart at 8.1 as well?

thanks for putting up with all the annoying questions so far, i don't see any more coming.

The dxlevel the game comes up in depends on the stuff in the Steam registry keys. Those are in the bottle, so if you create a new bottle and reinstall Steam(and possibly move the SteamApps folder to avoid the redownload), then it will come up in dxlevel 81 on Macs.

great, thanks.

the guy at the mac store got my mac started fine, did some updates for security purposes, and got it running. So I should be back in game as soon as everything redownloads, and I don't think i'll do any more messing around.

thanks for all the support, you guys are great.

alright, i'm really sorry, but it did it again. if I open crossover or steam, it crashes the whole computer in about 30 minutes. runs fine, then boom. if i try to reboot, it gives me weird pixles, and if I let it alone for an hour, it's fine again. you said to move my steam apps folder, but I can't even locate it. I actually can't locate any gamedata at all, i enter "steamapps" in the find bar, nothing. any key words for crossover and half life 2 or counter strike, or tf2, etc, and all that comes up is the icon. I can't actually access the stuff through the icon, so im stumped.

Are you sure that you don't just have a hardware problem? Sounds like your machine when it is under load and heats up crashes. Once it has cooled down again, it works again.

Try the "Grapher" application that is pre-installed on MacOS. Use it to animate a couple of 3D graphs simultaneously to generate load on CPU and GPU - your fan should step up to maximum quickly. Let that run for a while and see whether it brings the machine down, too.

It may be worth getting something like Fan Control set up (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23137) and dialing it all the way up before running the game; see if it's more stable that way.

If the computer crashes hard, and even more if it doesn't properly start after being powered on instantly, this is for sure a hardware(or very low level MacOS) problem. CrossOver Games, as a pure user mode application, must not be able to crash MacOS, and under no circumstances is it allowed to affect your hardware in this way. It is MacOS' job to stop it from doing that. Remember: If CrossOver can do this accidentally, any other Mac App, like a Virus, could damage your HW on purpose.

I recommend to ask the Apple support for help on this issue, before your hardware takes permanent damage. It sounds very much like an overheating problem, perhaps due to a broken or dusty fan, or a bad soldiering contact on the motherboard.

yes, at first i thought crossover was crashing it and was considering boot camp, and when i read this i listened for a fan sound like that of my other computer when i would be ingame. there was none, and as soon as i had crossover and a couple of other apps open it crashed. definitely overheating. i'll take it back and have em fix it for good this time. I just knew that crossover couldn't be that bad, after all those smooth months.

any hints on finding my gamedata?

alright, i'm really starting to get annoyed. a completely new computer, and i open tf2 and it works fine. i play for a while and it freezes. so, i reopen steam and decide to play css. i open it, and the main menue freezes. i try to open tf2, and the menue freezes. im about ready to pay forty bucks for windows xp and use bootcamp.

no ideas?

strange. Your computers don't seem to like you(or CrossOver). Do the games still freeze after a reboot?

actually, i think i found the problem! when i tried to make css go in a window in game, it did not, but made the game freeze. after that, nothing worked, and i was mad. I finally tried deleting the bottle and redownloading tf2, and, instead of windowing it in game, i windowed it at launch options. It works fine, me and my friends had a gaming overnight last night and it worked very well. im now going to try with css. so, dx levels up anytime soon?

Regarding the dxlevels it's Apple's turn. We cannot support dxlevel 90 on Macs until the shader support improves in the drivers. On Linux, dxlevel 90 and 95 support is available on Nvidia cards, and I think on ATI cards it is pretty close as well(intel chips don't support that yet). On MacOS, some people have reported limited success on ATI Radeon HD 2x00 cards, although the framerate indicated that it was software rendered mostly.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Regarding the dxlevels it's Apple's turn. We cannot support dxlevel
90 on Macs until the shader support improves in the drivers. On
Linux, dxlevel 90 and 95 support is available on Nvidia cards, and I
think on ATI cards it is pretty close as well(intel chips don't
support that yet). On MacOS, some people have reported limited
success on ATI Radeon HD 2x00 cards, although the framerate
indicated that it was software rendered mostly.

Is this something likely to be addressed in 10.5.3? One of the focus areas is apparently Graphics, but the notes aren't really very detailed ("xxx fix", "yyy resolved", etc.).

well, again, I seem to have encountered a new problem, menue freezing, which i thought didn't happen on crossover. everything set to english, and it wasn't even a server screen with a web page. i'll give it a few more shots, though.

ok, i got a bit farther this time, played for 30 seconds and it froze. when I quit crossover after that, it asked me if I wanted to quit x server. that's new.

Stefan Dösinger wrote:

Regarding the dxlevels it's Apple's turn. We cannot support dxlevel
90 on Macs until the shader support improves in the drivers. On
Linux, dxlevel 90 and 95 support is available on Nvidia cards, and I
think on ATI cards it is pretty close as well(intel chips don't
support that yet).

Anything that we as customers of Apple can do to indicate to them that we care?

Manuel Chakravarty wrote:

Anything that we as customers of Apple can do to indicate to them
that we care?

I cannot think of anything that is going to work for sure. You could file bugreports that this doesn't work, but Apple is likely to close them claiming that it is a crossover bug, or the bugreports are next to worthless, because they are about a huge binary blob(Half Life 2) which Apple cannot look into.

I have filed bugs for the HLSL compilation inefficiency issues that cause the software fallback. Reading the mac-opengl mailing list it seems that those issues are known since years, and many MacOS releases. Recently Blizzard has begun pushing those issues as well, but so far I haven't seen any improvements.