Team Fortress 2 Forum

Hello CodeWeavers Team,

I am looking to drop Boot Camp in favor of your product for a number of reasons (discontinued Boot Camp support, Dual booting, Windows issues, etc) and I have a few questions before I go messing around with the setup I have.

I am running Windows mostly for the gaming environment and some web page compatability testing. At the moment the only 2 games I play are Dawn of War by Relic and Team Fortress 2, which is what has brought me to this solution (nice YouTube marketing). I've read up on some of the issues (the font issue seems minimal and can be remedied) and I feel I am sufficiently technically saavy enough to perform the work arounds listed.

What I am concerned about is the actual installation process as I purchased Team Fortress 2 already using Steam. How will I go about reinstalling the program into the CrossOver environment?

Your work and advice is much appreciated and I am telling all of my Mac gaming friends about this exciting project as we are all looking to start playing TF2 in the coming weeks. Thanks again!

Sincerely,
Blair

If you install Steam using Crossover, it should let you redownload TF2 from their servers. Alternatively, since you already have all the files downloaded, you can just copy the files over from your Windows partition or use Steam's backup feature to backup TF2 in Windows, and the restore it in Crossover's Steam.

What Brian said. ;)

To clarify a bit. CrossOver is not able to use the contents of a Boot Camp partition directly. You have to install (most) Windows programs again in CrossOver. This is similar to the way you can't usually just copy a program from one Windows PC to another, you have to install it so the registry is set up, etc.

As Brian said, though, Steam games are a special case. Once you have installed Steam under CrossOver, and logged in once, you can install your games without needing to download them again. When Steam is not running, you can copy the .gcf files from your Boot Camp partition to the virtual C: drive of the bottle created by CrossOver. A bottle's virtual C: drive can be located at ~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/<bottle name>/drive_c, and the .gcf files are located within there at Program Files/Steam/steamapps. Before you copy the .gcf files, you might want to briefly start the downloads in Steam under CrossOver and then pause them. The benefit of this is that Steam offers to create Start Menu shortcuts for the games when you start the download (but at no other time), and CrossOver uses these shortcuts to create little helper applications to give the games presence in the Programs menu and Dock.

Brian's suggestion of using Steam's backup feature sounds promising, too. I've never tried it.

As far as Steam knowing that you're authorized to use the games (and download any ones you've purchased but not yet downloaded), that's all based on your login credentials. So, as long as you provide your proper Steam login name and password, Steam knows who you are and what you're entitled to.

Lastly, I would recommend that you experiment with the CrossOver trial to make sure it will meet your needs. It's free and allows you to avoid any unpleasant surprises. 😊

Well, sorry to dig this one up. But I'm running the latest trial of CrossOver on OS X 10.4.10 (24" iMac 2.8GHz 2GB RAM). I installed steam and added my games from the Orange Box. They work.. But that's about all I can say about that.. The performance is extremely poor. For starters, it takes nearly 5 minutes to even start Steam with CrossOver. On top of that, it takes another 3-5 minutes to load HL2:E2 or TF2. On top of that on top of that, the menus in HL2 seem to missing a font, all I can see is "O l i p M" and stuff like that (but are fine in TF2). And to even add more, while the performance of HL2 is rather decent, TF2 is absolutely rubbish to play. Even with all settings on low, I'm suffering from horrible framerates.

All in all, I'm not too keen on switching to CrossOver to run my Steam-games.. I'd rather pay 129$ to get Leopard with Boot Camp but have maximum performance.

Unless I'm doing something wrong here ofcourse, so if any of you got any idea on how to fix these issues, please do say.

PS: I run them in a 1024*768 window, because I know that the maximum resolution of the iMac will drop performance.

The more recent Mac models (the new MacBook Pro and the new iMac) brought with them new graphics chipsets and video drivers. These have been causing serious headaches for us. We have been investigating, but have not found solutions for the problems we've seen. To be honest, the drivers seem quite buggy.

We have some reason to believe that the video drivers in Leopard fix some of this. (Was that qualified enough? 😉)

We continue to work on the issue, but don't have any estimate on when we might deliver a fix. All I can say is that the situation is unsatisfactory to us as it is to you.

CrossOver will not any time soon compete with the performance of boot camp. There are limitations that we simply can't work around when implementing our 3D game support. Most lie in the fact that the Apple's OpenGL is incomplete and buggy. Things have improved somewhat with Leopard, but Games on the Mac (even native ones) do not yet compete games on optimized Windows hardware drivers.

With CrossOver, when things work, it's awesome, and you don't need Windows to use it. Just don't expect to get boot camp performance levels. It's not a fair comparison.

Thanks for the replies and clarification :)