CrossOver Support - Community Forums

i notice when i try to play certain games (system shock 2, grand theft auto 3, and a few others)

the game will begin, and the screen will just flash random patterns, and when i press escape (which i believe opens the ingame menu in most games) it will show a black screen with a giant cursor in the corner, pressing escape again puts it back to displaying random patterns, moving the mouse tends to make the pattern change.

any ideas on this?

Hi,

For questions like this (and pretty much all others) you -have-
to let folks know what platform/OS{version}/videocard you have.
Mac models come with many different videocard/video chipsets, and
what may manifest itself on one type of video hardware, will not
be apparent on others. Likewise, the solution (if any) for such
problem tends to be video card/chipset specific a lot of the time,
so the 'fix' for a nvidia 9400M for example won't work on a GMA950
for example...

I do know that GTA3 (which I have) works best on linux with emulate
a virtual desktop enabled - many games are like this if they're
older titles and coded for 4:3 aspect displays...but like I say, as
far as the Mac is concerned, a lot of the time it boils down to exactly
which video card/chipset you have.

Cheers!

ah ok, im on a mac, tiger 10.4.11 with a GMA950

i have this exact same problem with a lot of older games.

Hi,

You'll be fighting the GMA950 and it's lack of performance here.

Any fix for any particular app wrt the GMA950 is application specific ;
some apps will require emulated virtual desktop enabled, a lot of
apps you may need to run a lower graphics settings, and other apps
may require some registry hacks as well. You may have to include
the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D keys into the bottle
registry....ie;

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
"DirectDrawRenderer"="gdi"
"OffscreenRenderingMode"="fbo"
"RenderTargetLockMode"="auto"
"UseGLSL"="enable"
"VideoMemorySize"="xxx"

(replace xxx with the actual amount of ram your video card has)

The other settings are more or less default settings ; you can
change a few parameters to obtain different results....ie; changing
"UseGLSL" from enable to disable etc. You can see the options here;

http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys

The settings in wine configuration -> graphics tab also have an
effect on how things are handled.

There is no 'magic bullet' or 'one tweak fixes all' solution wrt
the GMA950 -- you'll basically have to sit there, and via a process
of trial and error determine which settings help, and which do not.

Hope this helps....

Cheers!