I am Biting the Bullet and Dual Booting

Tomorrow I am picking up an external HD and will make a complete backup of my system with time machine. I will then install windows XP with bootcamp. I am going to format it as FAT32 so I have the ability to transfer files from mac to windows, but will that have an effect on game performance?

I am mainly doing this to play black and white 2 and oblivion. I know oblivion will play well but how well will black and white 2 perform? (Specs in sig)

Wish me luck!

 

Congratulations.

 

black macbook has a gma 3100 graphics if its one of the newer blackbooks.intel gma 950 if its older. im not to sure how well oblivion will play with that graphics card. you may have trouble particularly in citys because of all the textures and outside in areas of tall grass.

intel GMA graphics are not really for gaming. you can get away with something like pogo games and real arcade games but real pc games like oblivion id be surprised if it ran playable.

 

I have oblivion running in os x right now Look a few threads down Lowest settings but still

B&W 2 is my other fav, and I don't care about graphics, as long as it plays. I found this:

In a x3100 compatibility topic. I have a much better processor, and double the ram...

 

do you have a powerful desktop? make it do all the work and stream it to your laptop. then you can run oblivion on high at max fps.

http://www.streammygame.com/smg/index.php

actually works pretty well and not that expensive. works far better then other companys efforts at streaming. they dont even compare.

 

Won't be able to pick up the hard drive till tomorrow, so i just gotta wait another day.

Can anyone tell me how well B&W2 will play on my machine in windows? Lowest settings and resolution are totally fine with me.

 

Ew! Fat32. Why don't you do yourself a favour and just download MacFuse and the ntsc-3g addon?

 

I believe bootcamp only supports windows 32bit.

 

I am just making the first backup with time machine right now

Thanks for the tip! I will look into it

I still need to find my xp disk, but it is fairly old so i doubt it's 64 bit. The computer it came with had 256 mb of ram LOL

 

not true. You can install Vista x64 in BC. Leopard DVD comes with x86 & x64 drivers.

 

or could just learn how to use Wine.... can run B&W1 and 2, as well as oblivion in Wine on OSX fine without needing Windows...

 

I would question the full quality of the game with a 3rd party portal such as Wine. I'd recommend using the actual copy of Windows to get the full effect. Hope you can get it working good!

 

depends what "full effect" means to you.... little graphics features that i can barely notice unless i compare side by side? some people are graphics enthusiasts... I still play old DOS 16 color games at times... so i don't mind settings being at bare minimum settings if the game is fun... heck i started playing games before they used more than 2 colors, or had more than text... fancy graphics doesn't do anything for me if the game is crap otherwise... but that said, usually you can still get decent looking graphics even if some antialiasing or shaders or something else isn't working right with Wine.

 

Got it all working, B&W works awesome, now I gotta find my copy of Rome Total War Thanks all for your helpful tips

 

You have a valid point there. I was wondering what the FPS would be through Wine as compared to booting into Windows.

 

booting into Windows is usually faster, on newer games (though not always)... but I'd rather take a 5% to 15% hit in performance to not have to run Windows.

 

I definitely see what you are saying. People switch to Mac OS X to get away from Windows, and they make some compromises to stay away.

 

somewhat... but I actually switched to OSX from Linux... after switching to linux from Windows... which is probably why I get all geeky and use OSX more like a Linux box.

 

I see. Well they are alike in many ways, so I could see the similarities.