FFXI Mac Rumors?Follow

There are many ways to get around this these days, but the easiest is just to use a virtual machine to install and run a windows environment 'within' your OSX environment. Provided you have a license for Windows XP lying around, you can easily run play-online this way.

If you are technically skilled, you can rig FFXI to run natively in the OSX environment via one of the many variations of Mac Wine available today (I've done it, but I don't recommend it primarily because I've seen some video-cards fry due to improper hardware interaction).

So while there are several ways to accomplish your goals these days, the easiest to manage properly is probably some free emu (qemu, for example) with windows xp.... but.... if your boss says No, you probably shouldn't do it, just remember that he may be saying he doesn't want you to run bootcamp due to viruses just to 'save face', he might actually mean he just doesn't want you to run games, period.

Last week I just started playing again, and I'm running FFXI on Parallels 7 (still on the free demo period for Parallels). It's flawless. And it's awesome to not have to leave the OSX environment. You can use Spaces in Mac OS to have FFXI running full screen in one of the spaces, and keep Safari open or whatever else in the other spaces. I really am thrilled with how it's worked out. The up-side is I happen to have a Windows XP license from many many years ago that I've kept. So that didn't cost me anything extra. If I end up buying Parallels though, the lowest price around 40 bucks. Still not too bad.

I"m all for a native version for Mac OSX, just don't see it happening, and it's not really necessary with Parallels and the other options around.

Edited, Jul 9th 2012 3:45pm by ticojpunk

mmmkay,
Went through all this, downloaded Xcode, macports, and wine....now to download the game I have to purchase it again...guess i should take this as a sign that i should leave this as a "after hours hobby"...

Oh well, thanks for the help everyone

Except Xcode

The methods listed on that link are dated and, even knowing how to do it (I've done it with all the little annoying wine hacks / wine tricks to get it running right), it's still a pain to get it going that way properly. For a newbie in wine, I wouldn't recommend it. For someone who lives and breathes wine, I still wouldn't recommend it, because having done it myself, I can say without a doubt it just works better in a virtual environment. There are many virtual environments available on OSX, some work better than others. Parallels had it's high points (most notably native-osx-style simulation, where it trimmed the application to fit in it's own window and was launched from a shortcut on your desktop / made it feel like citrix), but I found it really ate my hard-drive alive (I could hear it cranking at my hard drive pretty much 24/7, which is what drove me to look into a Wine-based solution in the first place). Today I'd recommend trying multiple, and using the lightest weight VM you can find. VirtualBox works very good and offers several features that may come in handy, you can download the DMG file right from their site. Qemu is older and a bit out of date, but I found it surprisingly light weight and it worked really well.

If you 'must' have a wine solution, take my advice and use whichever version of wine you can get pre-configured for STEAM (there are many just a google search away). Then install FFXI right from STEAM, it will save you a lot of hassle as it takes care of the proper DX pieces, and if it's preconfigured for steam, it will most likely have the core pieces you'll need to render text / html properly (these are two things almost every complex app has a problem with in Wine, since internet explorer 'as we know it' isn't there, so there are components you 'need' to install to make these things work better and give the applications the ability to render those elements or you'll get blank buttons and black screens etc). A commercial version of wine like Crossover does a pretty good job of this, and they have a small faq on which games are supported, where FFXI is listed as 'gold' and there are comments from the users on how to get it up and running (I had it running best with Crossover, but today there are MANY more options for OSX wine that are free and probably do just as well, when I did this it was years ago). Here's a quote from Crossover users, from here http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=22;tips=1



Most likely your best bet today for a 'free' wine solution would be to use Wineskin, and try to match up the cores with whatever the most recent Crossover gaming solution is using (it's got a very clean core / framework selection utility built right in), but keep in mind that at some point along the line, you are still going to find yourself going "damn, if only I had the full windows environment", so a VM is still what I'd recommend.



Edited, Jul 10th 2012 10:43am by FUJILIVES

I would highly recommend boot camp if it's an option, I have both OS X and Win 7 on a Intel 520 SSD in a Early 2011 MBP 17" and the game looks and runs fantastic on the Windows side. I removed my super drive and used the 750gb SATA drive as a secondary drive where my personal folders for both OS's sit on separate partitions. It's a nice solution and I've never lamented the loss of the super drive. Only trick is setting up both OS's before removing the drive, I was never able to get boot camp to see the USB key with the Win 7 install on it.

I guess my reply wasn't specifically to the OP. Your solution I think is the best, trying to finagle this to run natively in OS X is almost always going to be more trouble than its worth.

Is this not essentially the same as the thing you weren't supposed to install?

Edit: Nevermind, hah. Wrong poster.

Edited, Jul 10th 2012 11:16am by AshOnMyTomatoes

I play on my boot camp partition. I tried playing in Parallels and I always had problems with the graphics not playing nice.

I had issues with graphics after the upgrade to dx9 because of how the VM drivers work. To resolve this, I deleted the Directx folder in the windows registry. After a reboot, it had reverted back to DX8 and all graphics errors disappeared.

Was that the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DirectX folder? Just tried that, hasn't solved the issue though.

Objective C sucks. Xcode sucks. Apple should take notes from Microsoft and Visual Studio.

After a quick play through over lunch, I feel I should clarify. "Works just fine" means the game starts, you can log in and everything looks as pretty as a picture... since the frame-rate is sub 5fps. Admittedly that's running in Coherance mode, so proper full screen may speed it up, but looks like I'll have to keep using Boot Camp for the moment. This does however mean I can have it logged in in the background whilst at work for LS chat and AH camping I suppose.