City of Heroes Forum

I'm wondering what everyone is using with Crossover Games for the Mac. what is your model #, version of the OS, memory, video Card etc. I work for apple so if you just want to send me a serial number with you OS version I can look up the rest. we have a few new Lab machines and I want to try out COH on them to get a broader view of the issues, but I'm also just curious as to what is in use in the real world, not just my lab machines, (also unfortunately most of the lab machines have Leopard installed 10.5.3 so I would like to try to find some matching machines using tiger, etc.) Just trying to do my part to get people to purchase Crossover so they can play COH instead of being WOW drones!!! =-)

hey there rand. actually, i'm not using Crossover just yet. i'm here to see if i should. basically, if i can get something to run well and natively, then that's what i like to do. bonus if it's not a MS product.

right now i'm using BootCamp beta with XP on a MacMini OSX 10.4.11. 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo, 1GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Intel GMA950.

i'm still unsure as to the difference between Crossover and Crossover Games and which (if either) i should be looking to purchase. does CoX run just as good with Crossover Games as it does with a dual boot?

I'm running an iMac 1.83 ghz, MacOS 10.4.11, 1.5 gig ram, ATI X1600 w/128 MB ram. I always run CoH in windowed mode.

Ironically, of the options of WinXP in boot camp, any MacOS solution, and Cedega on Linux.. I've gotten the best performance from Cedega, with basically full functionality. It works quite well, but.. you know. Linux just doesn't compare to MacOS X yet for usability, as far as I'm concerned. It's got a long ways to go.

The MacOS options at present are Crossover/Crossover Games, and a virtualization environment. I've never been able to get mainline Wine working in MacOS, so I don't include that.

The game runs more or less correctly under Parallels, but at a significant performance reduction. It's usable, but sluggish. I wouldn't go on a TF or timed mission with it. I haven't tested VMWare Fusion with CoH; I don't currently have that product.

Crossover isn't yet even remotely at a comparable point to Boot Camp, Cedgea, or virtualization. It doesn't support the various shaders that CoH uses, so you get a very 'flat' visual experience. The overall performance despite that is decent, but not as good as native, or through Cedega on Linux on the same hardware.

As far as I'm concerned, Crossover is currently unusuable due to input issues, both keyboard and mouse. More specifically, there are problems with it 'eating' input when you use anything that opens the input line. Enter, backspace to reply to a tell, a slash, etc. It also doesn't 'release' the input line focus after you hit enter, you have to hit escape twice. Additionally, mouse behavior is erratic; if you're using the mouse to turn or rotate camera, and the mouse hits the edge of the window, you get rather chaotic mouse movement. It also is less stable than other solutions.

These issues apply to both Crossover and Crossover Games.

... all that said, I consider Crossover a worthwhile product. I've used it for other games, and for actual productivity. (i.e. doing my job) I've purchased it and already extended my support license once, and I've pledged to purchase two copies of Crossover for my friends once CoH reaches a usable state.

And, happily, last I checked Crossover Pro for Mac also gets Crossover Games as a compliment.

I can run CoX on my 2.0ghz iMac pretty decent for an hour or so at a time. I changed some graphical settings and keep a fan blowing on the back of my unit. Of course my graphics have to suffer some loss in order to run.

I am interested to know how bootcamp runs better than Codeweavers though. Wouldn't you still have some of the same graphical errors because the videocard is the same? To my understanding (but Im no expert) the videocards on lower end Macs are the heart of the problems when running huge games on a mac that natively run on a windows PC. On my iMac I have an ATI 2400 HD. I think those have like 128MB on those cards alone. On a windows PC it's best when they have 256Mb alloted to the video card. So wouldn't the same errors happen through bootcamp? I'm not saying you are wrong. I just want to know what you have discovered about bootcamp running better. Maybe the guys at codeweaver can find something that could fix it.

Bootcamp lets you install Windows on a mac, this gives windows direct access to the equipment, always better than having to run with any layers between. However you do have to have a full version of XP sp2 or greater to run it that way and you MUST boot to windows instead of the mac os. Crossover allows you to boot to the Mac OS and you DONT need a copy of windows to run the windows application. yes the iMac default config is 128 but that is enough to run COX fairly well (It runs better on my mac than it does on my windows box (although that is really getting old so it's not that fair of a comparison)). over all I've been very, very happy with how Crossover Games has been running on my desktop Mac's. My portables not so much, but maybe the new macbooks will do a lot to solve that!

I used the demo to try out both Crossover and Crossover Games with CoX and have also run it with Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox, and BootCamp.
In terms of game quality, Boot Camp with either XPSP2 or Vista works the best obviously, followed by either version of Crossover 7.1, then VMWare, VirtualBox, and finally Parallels. I use a MBP 2.0GHZ with the 128MB Radeon X1300 and 2GB RAM. I will be buying Crossover my next paycheck simply because of the terrific way it plays CoX.

Oh yes, running 10.5.5 on the Mac Side and have used XP and Vista in Virtualization and Boot Camp for CoX.