I've not played EQ in more than 5 years. I thought it might be fun to start up a game again. I have been unable to find a means to play EQ on my Mac. Is it possible to play EQ on a Mac? If so, how do I download the software, etc? Any insight and advice would be greatly appreciated!!
I play on a Mac. I use CrossOver, which is a commercially supported version of WINE for MacOS X. It frequently features in bundles, so you should be able to get it at a discount; and I think there is a trial version as well. Install CrossOver, download the launcher package, and proceed from there. There are a few settings you will have to experiment with, including using "legacy X" support and turning off some of the advanced pixel shaders in EQ. Good luck.
I play on a MacBook Pro. I can tell you to NOT use VMWare to play EQ. This used to be a viable way to play, but not anymore. I learned this the hard way and had my account suspended when I first game back to the game and tried to log on. It all got resolved, but it was definitely a pain. What I ultimately did was install Windows on my MacBook via Bootcamp. Works fine, but windows does suck, and I wish there was a way to play EQ natively in osx. I'm not a fan of crossover games.
Currently I am playing EQ on my 27" iMac at native resolution with everything max, shadows on, etc. It runs beautifully but I do hate rebooting to play. I am tempted to try Crossover but I'm not keen on turning any settings down. The game is old as it is but it does look quite good for its age in my opinion, at least with the way I am seeing it now. Is EverQuest actually a supported app on Crossover? One concern is will an upcoming patch or expansion break compatibility. This seems kind of unlikely since I don't foresee any graphics engine updates in EQ's future but you never know I guess. I am also wondering if there's any particular reason to use Crossover for EQ versus using the free Wineskin which I am already familiar with. I'd be interested in hearing more about your experiences with Crossover if you don't mind such as how long you've been using it, to what extent are visual tradeoffs needed, etc. Did I mention I hate booting to Windows? This is tempting.
Crossover has it's problems. Multiboxing is tricky, and raiding, without reducing settings, would also be a problem. At max graphics settings, and two boxes, it will lock or crash at various times, often when zoning, or in a heavily populated zone. I could probably get around these with tweaks to the graphics settings, but as it is I can live with the crashes, and I'm running on a couple of years old 27" iMac with only the pixel shaders downgraded, and max frame rate set to 60. Very few games are officially supported by CodeWeavers, and the unofficial ratings system can indicate more how much attention users are prepared to spend on tuning, rather than actual problems. Sometimes new releases of Crossover make things worse, and there have been times when I have downgraded - which fortunately isn't too hard to do. If you try with Wineskin, let us know how you get on. I couldn't get as good a set up on a Windows box as I can with the iMac, and there's no way I'm going to send any more money to Microsoft for such a poorly made OS.
Thanks. That was very helpful info. I actually prefer to just play one character at a time but I do have multiple accounts and may try out 2 boxing again at some point with my enchanter and mage. Since I do have a windows 7 license at this point, I think I will stick to rebooting for now simply because other than the reboot itself, it's painless and works well. My next iMac will have at least a fusion drive so rebooting should be less painful down the road. We'll see I guess but it is good to know the option exists to play within OS X. It's a shame they don't allow virtual machines. I imagine EQ would run very nicely with Parallels. I use that for some games with XP and that works fine many times.
I've been playing on VMWare Fusion the last few days. How long ago was this and how long until they banned your account? I don't use Bootcamp and would hate to use that for one game. Since I last quit, I've switched all my systems to Mac based computers so no Windows system to use.
One would think that after sunsetting the Mac version they would be welcome to allowing VMWARE to run their game? More customers is always more better?
I tried VMWare about a year and a half ago. I was still playing on EQMac at the time and decided to see what was new on the live servers. Tried to login and it said my account was locked. They banned automatically on trying to login via VMWare. The rationale I got was that apparently a lot of people used VMWare to use 3rd party cheating software. Idk. It was a pain in the butt trying to get the accounts back. It was pretty shady to ban without any warning. Maybe (hopefully) they allow VMWare again since you aren't having issues. That would be awesome. I hate having to run bootcamp. Windows is terrible. I'd like to be able to play via VMWare and keep my native osx to browse the internet and stuff.
The last I saw on virtual machines (e.g., VMWare) was this was not permitted and a bannable offense. Perhaps the policy has changed, but Benzarden outlined the reasons why.
Which is why I use CrossOver - no need to reboot, and no risk of a ban. There are some disadvantages, but for me the advantages outweigh them. I'd be interested to know what other WINE implementations work with EQ, and how people like them.
I was not a fan of crossover games. I found it laggy and the mouse functionality did not work well with my MacBook trackpad. I couldn't imagine trying to raid on crossover games. But whatever works for you. There really isn't an easy, or best, solution.
It's my understanding that CrossOver (and WINE) is another virtual machine that, as far as I'm aware, is against the EULA.
Good to know, thanks. I know I've been hesitant to make any recommendations myself other than "Bootcamp into Windows." The nature of WINE, as you pointed out in your earlier post, leaves a lot of performance to be desired by its nature, but it should work good enough for many players.
Fwiw, I go through the effort of using bootcamp to play EQ bc it is a game that I have played since 1999, and it's a game that I truly love. But if EQNext isn't Mac friendly, there is a 0.0% chance that I'll try it.
I tried setting up EverQuest to run with the most current Wine release using Wineskin. Wineskin refers to releases as "engines" and the one I chose was Engine WS9Wine1.7.10 so basically Wine 1.7.10. Following selected advice from WineHQ's AppDB page for EverQuest, I then used Winetricks to install core fonts and DirectX 9 in the DLLs section and lastly in the settings section to set glsl=disabled. This got me most of the way there but I also needed to go into options within EverQuest and set display to fullscreen (my preference) and within display options under the advanced button, in the dialog that pops up when you click that, I turned hardware vertex shaders off. This was necessary for enemy npc models to display. I was able to leave all pixel shader levels turned on. The gamma seemed dark but when I tried to correct this in the EverQuest options dialog for it, there was no visible change for some reason. Fortunately, Wineskin has a gamma boost slider so I set that to 50% and to my eyes it looked just right: not too light nor too dark. One might need to play with that a little to get it to their own liking but I think my choice was probably fairly close to default once I'd made the adjustment via Wineskin. One other thing, to avoid permissions issues I followed some advice as follows: chown -R username path_to_EQ_directory and chmod 0755 -R path_to_EQ_directory So in terminal in my case I typed: chown -R Michael . and chmod 0775 -R . as I had already navigated to the EverQuest directory, the dot following my user name just means "this directory" in case you didn't already know that. With that stuff done, the game now starts normally and I was able to login to gloomingdeep with a little guy and run around checking some things out without any problems. It ran great but of course that is some mighty limited testing. I didn't even zone for example. So I'll report back further after I put in some hours of play and we'll see how it goes but as of tonight it certainly looks promising. One last thing, to save time and preserve settings choices I already had in my bootcamp EQ install, I chose the Wineskin option to copy an installed app rather than install it. So it copied my EverQuest folder from my Windows partition into the appropriate place for it in the EverQuest.app Wineskin was setting up. For an icon, I just googled, found a nice one in png format from Deviant Art I think it was, downloaded it and converted it with the Web based free icon converter found here: http://iconverticons.com Other helpful sites: http://appdb.winehq.org http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com If all the above sounds scary and complicated to anyone reading this, honestly it isn't rocket science. If you can read directions at the sites I mention and do a little experimenting sometimes you can certainly do this stuff too.
Using VMware product is instantly bannable in every SOE based game. Its sad really, since SOE uses VMware to host their server architecture. I had all 7 of my accounts banned for using it without warning or explanation. I had to speak with "head cs" and explain why I might use a perfectly reasonable product. I found it .. beyond infuriating to say the least. I ended up having to buy a laptop just to play SOE games on due to the fact I use a hypervisor as the base OS (for those who don't understand this.. I have an OS that loads virtual machines on top of it.... so everything on my machine is run from inside a virtual machine). It is one of the reasons I have since quit supporting SOE games in any shape, fashion, or form. Banning players of Everquest (or other SOE games) due to a policy decision (that was frankly ludicrous) made for Planetside 2 was a truly /facepalm moment. The last official answer given that I am aware of is that Macintosh users must run windows on the machine directly or via Bootcamp to play SOE games. No virtualization products (including wine) are allowed. That being said, I have yet to hear of anyone being banned for using Wine directly. Cross over (and other wine branch projects) have reported sporadic bans.
While the policy is beyond stupid to the point of ludicrous, WINE & Crossover are indeed VM Ware designed to emulate a Windows environment on a Mac or Linux based system. The fact that SOE does not have an OSX & Linux client for all their games shows a very big lack of knowledge about their target audiences & how large of a market share OSX & Linux have gained in the last several years. Especially so now with Windows XP no longer being supported.
