The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Forum

Has anyone had success getting Oblivion to run on a Mac?

If so... could you post your tricks?

Thanks!

Greetings.

I was able to install Oblivion and patch it to 1.2 without any trouble. I can start Oblivion and get the initial screen. When I start a new character, the movie file plays without any trouble. Once the character creation screen appears, the graphics appear to be shades of black and the game slows way down. (I have an nVidia 8800GS graphics card, OS X 10.5.2 and CrossOver Games 7.1.1.)

I've tried the instructions mentioned in an earlier thread on this forum (registry edits, oblivion.ini file changes). I tried lowering the graphics settings down to "low", turned off HDR in the Options dialog, and have tried several other things too. After making these changes and patching the game to the latest release, the game no longer loads. I have a blank screen.

I am reinstalling and will try Oldblivion on the default installation (without patching). I'll let you know what happens.

I have a bunch of saved games from Oblivion with my old characters. I'd love to play the game again.

Ceffyl

I reinstalled and tried Oldblivion. The get a small application window showing that Oblivion is starting up, and then the screen remains blank. Nothing happens. I have to force quit the bottle. I tried installing Oblivion under Win2k and also XP. Same issue happened with Oldblivion.

Ceffyl

Just wanted to throw in a reply for running Oblivion on the Mac and am in the same boat as the other posters. I took advantage of the free day of Crossover and first thing I tried was Oblivion. I ran into the same, extremely, slow screen on character creation, but have not tried the other tips yet. Since this wouldn't run on VMWare Fusion, I am very hopeful for Crossover, as it looks like it might be closer. I am running this on a MBP 2.4 with 4GB and Nvidia 8600. I'm with the original poster and looking for any tips or tricks.

As I keep saying to everyone, works fine for me.
Make sure you are using a decent graphics card and try setting these values in the registry :
/HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Softwhare/Wine/Direct3D
Change the string value of "useGLSL" from disabled to Enabled. then create the following and set the strings accordingly;
"VideoMemorySize" set to greater then "256" ( It dousn't matter if you have less real Video Ram, but Oblivion might not start with any value less then 256 well 128 but 128 doesn't seem to work)
"DirectDrawRenderer" set to "opengl"

The video memory entry works only if you have less then the minimal requirement but always try to set it to the correct value otherwise crossover won't use all available graphics memory (at least that what I understand).

Aaron, it seems like you are the only person to get this working properly.

This is what I did:

1) Install Oblivion on a fresh winxp bottle.
2) Run regedit.exe, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Wine/Direct3D
3) Change useGLSL to "Enabled"
4) Make the new string entries for "VideoMemorySize" and "DirectDrawRenderer" and append the values "256" and "opengl", respectively.
5) Run the game.

The game runs flawlessly until I get to the character creation screen. The graphics are very buggy, and the mouse is barely responsive. For the latter reason, I'm unable to create a character. The game crashes 20-30 seconds after that.

Actually, the game exhibits the same behavior if I perform steps 2-3 or not, with exception that the character creation graphics glitches look different.

OS: OS X 10.5.7,
Processor: 2.13Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
RAM: 2GB DDR2 SDRAM
Video: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (256 RAM)

Sorry for the late reply mate, amm ok in that case it look as if there's a problem with the computer not crossovers.
I suggest you run a video card stress test and if it fails talk to apple, I have a macbook ( 2 ghz, 2gig DDR3 Nvidia GeForce 9400 ) and it works fine on that...
If the stress test works then you could try setting all the setting on Oblivion to low paying special attention to shaders and lighting as they are quiet GPU intensive.
The mouse is normally very slow because the operating system accelerates it alot, so just turn up the sensitivity in the gameplay section (i think it's in there ???)
As always make sure everything is up to date. In fact if you have an unused usb external drive, install a clean install of mac os on to it and try running it from there.
Sometimes the problem is a software incompatibility ( I know I know it's Windows jargon but it can still happen unfortunately ) >>>

Give me a yell if you make any progress 😊