How do I limit my FPS in StarCraft 2 for Mac?

Question

I am trying to limit my FPS to 30 for Starcraft 2 on my MacBook Pro (after a while the machine heats up and the FPS drops) - I understand I need to add a few lines to the variables.txt file:

frameratecap=30
frameratecapGlue=30

My problem though is that I cannot find the variables.txt file! A few threads seem to indicate it should be under Users/{username}/Documents/Blizzard/Starcraft II, I found that path (username = shared) but no trace of variables.txt, so I went ahead and created one, but it has no effect on the fps (it is still shooting up to > 100).

Any help appreciated!

Asked by JohnIdol

Answer

I don't think that's the correct path, I have the following file on my machine:

/Users/username/Library/Application Support/Blizzard/StarCraft II/Variables.txt

I don't see the frame rate variables but there's plenty others, so try adding them there.

Answered by Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz

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Where are screenshots stored on Mac OS X?

Question

I know how to take a screenshot. I Rebound the hotkey, and have been snapping away - or so I thought.

I just went to look for my screenshots, and I can't find them. Not in Documents. Not in the Diablo 3 Application Folder, not in Pictures...

Where does the Mac version of D3 store my screenshots?

Asked by LessPop_MoreFizz

Answer

They are in [Your Username]\Library\Application Support\Blizzard\Diablo III\Screenshots.

Answered by Krazer

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Will the version of Diablo 2 included with the Collectors Edition of Diablo 3 run on modern Mac OS X?

Question

The collectors Edition of Diablo 3 includes a 4GB USB drive preloaded with Diablo 2 and Lord of Destruction.

Will this version of the game run on a modern Intel Mac running OS X 10.7 without modifications, virtualisation or other third party software?

I have read that Blizzard stopped supporting Diablo 2 on the Mac after Apple removed Rosetta from the OS, but does this also mean they would send out copies of Diablo 2 that won't run on a Mac?

Asked by Jasarien

Answer

No. The included Diablo II + LoD is no different than their latest version online, which works with Mac OS 10.3.9 through 10.6 Snow Leopard (and Windows 2000 through Windows 7).¹

Blizzard has no plans to support 10.7 Lion and above.^{2 3}

So, yes, the Collector's Edition USB soulstone ships without modern support. (I may add that D2 runs just fine in Parallels and Boot Camp on a MacBook Air.)

Mac OS 10.6.8 remains the only Mac OS able to run both Diablo II and Diablo III natively.

Answered by sean

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How can I play the Mask of the Betrayer expansion natively on my Mac?

Question

I'm reliving all games and I would like to play the mask of the betrayer expansion on my Mac, but although the initial campaign has been ported, Mask of the Betrayer seems it hasn't. Please, no parallels, VMs or similar.

How can I play the Mask of the Betrayer expansion natively on my Mac?

Asked by mvime

Answer

Take a look here

http://bbellina.blogspot.it/2011/11/getting-nwn2-expansions-working-on-mac.html

Looks like you need Bootcamp anyway, with a Windows version of NwN installed there to transfer files.

There's also a torrent somewhere on the Internet that lets you play MoB and SoZ on the Mac, but I don't think it can be linked here.

Answered by Kappei

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How do I change my offline name on the mac?

Question

I want to change my offline name in MineCraft on my mac.

I have only found ways to change it on Linux and Windows. Is there any way I can change my offline username on my mac?

Asked by user1079160

Answer

You can do it, but not through the Minecraft launcher. Open TextEdit and make sure it's in plain text mode. If it isn't, choose "Make Plain Text" from the Format menu. Then enter the following text:

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft
java -Xms512m -Xmx1024m -cp "bin/*" -Djava.library.path="bin/natives" net.minecraft.client.Minecraft "YOURNAMEHERE"

Replace YOURNAMEHERE with the name you want, but keep it in quotes. Now save your file, and make sure you uncheck the box that says "If no extension is provided, use '.txt'." Save the file as launcher.command (you can call it whatever you wish, just make sure it ends with .command).

Now in order to make this launchable with a double-click, open up Terminal and type sudo chmod 777 and then drag and drop your file on to the Terminal window. Then press Return. It will prompt you for your password, which you should enter. You can now close Terminal.

The file will now be executable, so you can run it by double-clicking. It will open Minecraft in offline mode with the custom name. If you ever want to change the name, right-click the file and choose Open With > TextEdit. You can then edit the name and save the file, and it will use the new name.

Answered by Jake King

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How do I use function keys on a Mac?

Question

I recently switched my whole system to Mac OSX (Snow Leopard 10.6) from Windows 7. Now I've installed WoW and imported my old configs/addons without any problems, besides that my keybindings from F1 to F7 are completely overriden by some Mac functions like brightness/sound/keyboard backlight etc.

How can I use my F-Keys in games?

Asked by Rito

Answer

The option you want is in the Keyboard pane of your System Preferences:

Unfortunately this applies to all applications, not just WoW, which is kind of a pain because almost no other Mac OS X apps use the function keys for anything.

Answered by Brant

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Why does Steam not sell the Mac versions of all games?

Question

Specifically, there is a Mac version of DragonsAge and of Modern Warfare but none of these are offered on Steam.

Could anyone explain why?

Asked by Mechko

Answer

What games are sold on the Steam Store is entirely up to the publisher. If there's a Mac version but it isn't on Steam yet you could try to contact the publisher (EA) to see if they'll put it up.

The SteamPlay feature is very new right now, you'll just have to wait a bit for it.

There is also the issue that Mac versions are usually ported by other companies, so they're depending on sales for that version too. Steam makes it impossible to sell Mac and Windows versions of games separately, so a publisher has to think if it's worth it to sell two full-priced versions of the game for the price of one.

UPDATE: Plants vs. Zombies is now available as a SteamPlay game.

Answered by Arda Xi

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Can I use a PC gamepad with OSX Steam games?

Question

Will a PC gamepad work with all the key mappings for games in Steam on OSX? Would getting a Microsoft 360 gamepad work on OSX?

Asked by Lawrence Leung

Answer

There are many programs that convert gamepad actions into keyboard presses such as: Xbox HID Driver for Mac OS X and Game pad companion. All you need to do is set them up so that the buttons correspond to the in game actions you want them to do and you can control any game from and game pad.

Answered by Ronan Forman

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Are there alternate ways of opening the console in Oblivion

Question

I recently began playing Oblivion again, after a long hiatus. I'm doing so on my MacBook Pro, in a Parallels Windows Server 2008 VM (6 GB of RAM). The MacBook itself is the late 2011 17" Pro model, upgraded to 16 GB of RAM.

Everything in Oblivion, including the mods I've installed, works great -- except that I cannot bring up the console. The tilde (~) key is nonfunctional. That said, so far Oblivion is the only program on the Windows side to not recognize it. In Notepad, Visual Studio, Wordpad, etc., it works. Just Oblivion. (Admittedly, Oblivion is the only game I have on the Windows side here.)

Is there some way to open the console without the tilde, or failing that rebind the "open console" command via a configuration file, or failing that at least use a config file to display fps? (Which is actually the only reason I want the console right now.)

---

Total aside: The obvious answer to most of us would be to run Oblivion (and Windows in general) in Boot Camp. Not an option. Long story.

---

Update: I should have mentioned two things: 1) bAllowConsole is 1 and 2) I have no idea where to find the § symbol that everyone says is a workaround. (I have a US keyboard layout; that symbol is not on the face of any of my keys.) And again, the tilde works in every Windows app, just not -- I'm guessing -- games.

Answer

It's possible that your bAllowConsole setting in oblivion.ini has been disabled; it should be set to 1 to allow you to use the console.

Failing that, there are mods (of course) that add a spell that opens the console or let you change the console keybinding.

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How can I tell if I have the Team Fortress 2 update that supports Snow Leopard 10.6.4?

Question

I recently saw that TF2 has updated its code so it doesn't run slow for the Mac OS X 10.6.4 update (which I was holding off on doing since I wanted to play TF2).

I just saw that I need to restart Steam because of an update which included this:

OSX: Fix several memory leaks
OSX: Fix copy/paste resulting in extra random string data

Sorry for the confusion on the real question. The question I am asking is: Do I have to do/download anything to see if the so called TF2 update for 10.6.4 is on my machine? They have told us before that we shouldn't upgrade to 10.6.4 yet since it was buggy with TF2 (graphics problem) so now that they have advertised it and I have upgraded to 10.6.4, is the update already on my machine or not? I checked the Steam update log as mentioned in one of the answers, but I haven't seen any trace of their 10.6.4 fix.

Another edit: Apple finally released an update for portal and tf2 specifically. Here's a screenie:

Answer

Pretty sure by default you don't need to do anything special.

TF2 is set, via steam, to auto-update when an update is available. You can turn this off, however, at which point the game will run, but you will be unable to join any servers running on newer versions.

Similarly, if you update before servers do, you wont be able to join them, however this is rarely the case unless you catch an update right as it happens.

TF2 updates do not generally require a steam restart, nor any other individual game for that matter. Steam platform updates, however, may require a restart and generally encompass a much broader spectrum of updates (like the Source engine). It may affect TF2, but again this is automated.

Edit:

With the additional edits to the original question, I'm not sure that my initial response sufficiently answers the question. I would reference Powerlord's answer and say that when in doubt, check the official forums for patch notes, updates, and troubleshooting.

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Wine on OS X: Playing Counter Strike

Question

Today, I was a bit bored so I decided to install Wine on my Mac. I am running Mac OS X Lion. Normally, when I wanted to play a Windows-only game, I would fire up Windows 7 through Boot Camp, but I wanted to try something different.

After quite some time of messing around, I finally managed to install everything that I needed to and run it. When I fired up the game, I noticed a few things: the gameplay is not very smooth and the mouse control is not very sensitive.

The second problem can be overcome by adjusting the mouse sensitivity, but this is odd because if I were to load the same game using Boot Camp, the mouse would be much more sensitive at the same sensitivity than it would be using Wine. Anyways, the first problem is a bit more concerning.

I am running a 1999 game on 2011 hardware, so I would imagine that performance shouldn't be an issue. I could play Counter Strike (1.6) on my Boot Camp partition without a single hiccup/slow down. However when I load the game up using Wine, the frame rate is slashed by half, and the performance is rather bad. I understand that Wine is not going to give native performance, but it performs at least 150% worse than it does using Windows. Is this normal?

Have any of you had a problem similar to this? If so, how (if you) did you solve it?

Thanks a ton in advance!

Answer

Wine itself isn't optimised for graphics applications and games. The issue is less about the hardware and more about software.

Certain interfaces to the graphics drivers may not have had as much attention paid to them as they have in Windows itself.

There's also the issue of the translation layer between DirectX APIs and OpenGL for rendering the graphics in an Mac OS environment, which could be a cause of latency.

There are other derivatives of Wine that have been optimised for games, namely:

• Transgaming's Cider
• Codeweaver's Crossover Games

In regards to Cider - it's not an end-user targeted product, so you won't be able to easily download and use it to play your games. Cider is used by developers and publishers to wrap their game as a stand alone app bundle that will run on a Mac. However, there are websites out there that spend time putting windows games into Cider wrappers. I'm not 100% sure on the legality of that practise, so I won't link to it (though, I believe you need to own the game yourself and all you download is the wrapper).

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CHAD (world 2 boss) level bugged in Super Meat Boy on OSX

Question

I get the key at the beginning of the level, but the stage doesn't start: the locks open but the screen stays fixed. The boss jumps up and down, always in the center of the screen.

Is this a known bug, somehow work-aroundable? I guess I could copy the savegame to a windows box and play there this level, hoping it works?

Answer

Apparently it's a known, and so far ignored, problem.

One kind-of workaround is to set the graphics to -ultralowdetail, which for some weird reason usually solves this (revert to normal details later, because the ultralow are really ultralow and horrible as it sounds).

Sometimes, even with higher details, if you go at one end of the screen and then another end, and do a little jump, the level starts scrolling. It's not much good, since it increases way too much startup time and frustration.

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Where do Minecraft texture packs go on OS X?

Question

I play Minecraft on OS X and for some reason clicking this button doesn't do anything.

Where should I be putting my texture packs?

Answer

I poked around and discovered a new folder:

~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/texturepacks/

Putting the texture packs you download in this folder makes them appear in the menu. Don't extract the files, just leave the .zip there.

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Team Fortress 2 Beta Icon Stuck on Launchpad in Mac OS X

Question

I am currently running OS X 10.7.2 with an updated version of Steam installed. I recently downloaded the Team Fortress 2 Beta to this Mac and then removed it via Steam's "Delete Local Game Content." This has left the "Team Fortress 2 Beta" icon stuck on the Launchpad, and I cannot remove it.

All of the typical methods for removing an icon have not worked (i.e., dragging to trash, Control+Option+Command+Left-Click, holding down left-click over the icon until icons start shaking, et cetera). I have uninstalled Steam and removed all game content and that has not deleted the icon.

I have also deleted the "Application Support" folder to try and force the Launchpad to reset itself; it did reset, but the icon stayed there. There is also not an icon in the Application folder for the game, or Steam (now that I've removed it).

Does anyone know how to correct this issue?

Answer

Steam creates “shortcut” applications in the Applications folder in your home folder, not the system-wide one. Unfortunately, it does not delete them when you delete a game, but you can delete them yourself; the path is show in this screenshot (yours will have your own HD and account names, of course):

You can also recreate these by right-clicking on a game in Steam and choosing “Create Desktop Shortcut”, then moving the result into your Applications folder. (This can be useful to restore a missing icon, though it only works sometimes for that.)

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Civ V GOTY edition soundtrack download on Mac

Question

Where does the Game Of The Year edition Civilization V soundtrack get downloaded on Mac? I looked at this question and from it deduced that the equivalent location on the Mac would be ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/sid meier's civilization v/assets/DLC/DLC_Deluxe but this directory didn't contain a soundtrack directory.

Any ideas where I should be looking?

Answer

I have Steam, a Mac, and I own the Deluxe edition of Civ 5 that I got for Windows, so I thought I'd go digging around to see if I could find the soundtrack.

The directory you mention on my install contains a Soundtrack directory, in addition to Sounds, Gameplay, Behind the Scenes, and the Babylon Expansion files.

/Users/{username}/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/sid meier's civilization v/Assets/DLC/DLC_Deluxe

You might try right clicking on the game in your Steam library, and then click "View Downloadable Content" to see if you have "Civ V Digital Deluxe Content (Mac)" as one of your DLC packages. I pre-ordered the Deluxe edition for Windows, and got the Mac version via SteamPlay after that became a feature of Steam, so that might be a factor.

Previously I found another method of extracting the soundtrack, which you can find below:

---

I checked around and I found this thread on the Steam forums. It appears to have a sections of interest:

You can access the soundtrack files directly from the game contents. Mine were here:

/Users/{username}/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/sid meier's civilization v/assets/Sounds/Streamed/Music/

You'll have to use the Finder to get to this directory, and then you can copy these files out, which are in .ogg format.

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Can you recommend a simple wireless Mac-compatible gamepad / controller for retro gaming? [closed]

Question

I like to use old-school emulators to do some retro gaming every now and then.

I’d love to have a wireless gamepad that’s compatible with Apple computers (and the SNESX9 emulator, but I suppose that won’t be a problem).

Since it’s only for retro gaming, I don’t need a lot of buttons or vibrating parts… Just a simple D-pad and some buttons is more than enough. Here’s an example of the SNES controller to give you an idea — something as simple as this would be perfect!

Any suggestions on what works and what doesn’t?

_{I should probably say that I own the original SNES console and games, so I don’t think what I’m doing is illegal. It’s just that I’d like to play these games on my MacBook instead, using a wireless controller.}

Answer

Well, it's not an SNES shaped controller but DarwiinRemote allows you to wirelessly connect a Wii Remote via Bluetooth and map each button to a key on the keyboard. Of course, this technique only works if you own a Wii remote. I use this technique as I don't need to buy anything extra.

If you don't mind it being wired, you can buy this product which essentially adds an SNES controller port to your MacBook. (As you said you own the SNES games, I'm assuming you also have an SNES controller). If you don't have the controller anymore, you can buy this product which is an SNES controller that plugs directly into an USB port.

Edit: Just remembered that this probably won't work for an SNES emulator as you need to map the X and Y button. If you have a Classic Controller, you can use it with DarwiinRemote as well. You may, however, need to apply this patch.

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How do I “alt-tab” out of full-screen games on Mac OSX Lion?

Question

As silly as it sounds, I just can't manage to switch out and back into full-screen games on my Mac OSX Lion laptop, like Alt-Tab does on Windows. I've tried searching online and found posts saying I should use the ⌘ (Command) key with m or f or Esc, but none of these work... and in general I had some trouble searching for it online since Lion has a new "fullscreen" feature for applications which behaves differently than fullscreen games but is called the same :(

So, is there a way to do this?

Right now I'm relying on the Steam overlay which allows me to access a browser from in-game, but sometimes I want to access other applications and I just can't figure out how.

Answer

⌘tab usually is correct.

Unfortunately many games are badly ported - so they often do not support it in full-screen mode. Some games (for me Telltale games) allow to switch to a "window" mode - when you are in that it is typically possible to switch.

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Can I play Terraria on a Mac?

Question

I've been meaning to try out Terraria, but it requires Windows and I only have a Mac. I can use things like Boot Camp or a virtual machine, but is there a way to run it without resorting to running a copy of Windows?

Answer

An enterprising user on the Terraria forums created a wrapper for Terraria using MonoGame called MacTerraria.

To use it:

1. Download Steam and purchase Terraria. You can do this on a Mac.
2. Download Terraria using Steam. This can also be done on a Mac: Steam doesn't check the platform requirements until you try to run it.
3. Download MacTerraria from the linked forum post and place it anywhere you want (probably good to keep it in your Applications folder.

4. Locate Terraria.exe. This will be in Steam's application support folder. You can get to do the default location by going to the Go menu in Finder, selecting Go to Folder..., typing in the following and pressing the Go button:

   ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/terraria

5. Copy Terraria.exe and place it in the folder alias MacTerraria came with. If you don't have the alias, right-click or control-click on MacTerraria and select Show Package Contents. Then, navigate to the following folder:

   Contents → Resources → exes

   and place Terraria.exe in there.

Once done, run MacTerraria and enjoy.

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How can I find out about current Mac OS X games?

Question

I'm looking for something like http://gamerankings.com/ where I can find comprehensive information about current (and past) games, but for Mac OS X. Not necessarily just a site linking to other reviews, but it shouldn't be a time sink like normal gaming sites, either.

http://apple.com/games/ and http://insidemacgames.com/reviews/ come to mind, but the former seems to be either incomplete or outdated, the latter very puzzle- and casual-heavy.

Answer

Steam has started supporting and distributing Mac games a couple of months ago. You can use the Advanced Search to filter by OS. At the time I am writing there a 138 games and 18 DLC for Mac listed there.

On 19 June 2010, Appstorm.net wrote an article about 50 Games for Mac.

Wikipedia has a long list as well.

Pay attention that not all games run on all Mac models. Check the requirements before buying them.

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Why are Aspyr COD games so expensive in the Mac App Store? [closed]

Question

In the Mac App Store, Aspyr is selling the following COD games for super inflated prices:

• Call of Duty: $19.99
• Call of Duty 2: $29.99
• Call of Duty 4: $49.99

Why are they so expensive?

Answer

The price of an app in the Mac App Store is set by the publisher. Aspyr is charging so much for their ports because, presumably, they believe people are willing to pay those prices.

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