OS X Tomb Raider for Mac [Unofficial Port - OSX10.6.8+ Compatible]

[dankoB]

Hello MacRumors community,

My name is dankoB, a member of the PortingTeam.com

If you are a fan of the series but were disappointed that Feral chose not to include support for 10.6, 10.7, or 10.8. Well then cheer up! You can now play the PC version on your Mac using Wineskin. I have created an easy to use wrapper that you can place the game files inside of and get started with one of the best adventure games I've ever encountered.

The Wineskin wrapper used to port Tomb Raider to Mac utilizes a Wine based engine that was patched from source and built using Wineskin Winery. The patches that were implemented address bugs that were occurring in Vanilla Wine. This wrapper does not use normal Wine. It utilizes a version of the open source Wine that CodeWeavers implement into there well known application CrossOver. This Wineskin wrapper is LGPL and therefore completely free to use. The full game however must be purchased. This particular wrapper is optimized for the retail version of the game although if there is a good response to this thread I can very well create an easy to use Steam wrapper.

Here's biggest news about this wrapper. I've been playing the game on my four and a half year old MacBook 5,1 It has a Core2Duo @2.13 GHz with the GeForce 9400M w/ 256MB vRAM

Much much lower system specs than required by the official port by Feral.

I haven't actually tested it but I suspect gameplay ranges between 60 - 75 fps when game options are configured correctly.

These are my system settings

Advanced

Basic

The only real limitation for this port is that DX11 is not supported so it has been configured to force DX9 through the registry files. The reason for this is that Wine only has minor support anything for anything above DX9. Hopefully these api will be implemented in the not so distant future.

If anyone is interested in trying this out the wrapper can be downloaded by clicking the link below:

Tomb Raider for Mac - Unofficial Wineskin Port

Brought to you by the PortingTeam.com

Full support can obtained for this port by signing up to the porting team community. I will try to provide as much support as possible here but I am not totally certain how often that will be. The community at the porting team is full of members that enjoy helping people get these ports up and running so a much quicker response will likely be available there!

Please read the installation instructions carefully and please report back if it works and especially if you are running into problems

Enjoy

 

[Djevlen]

While i appreciate the work someone put into porting games unofficially, I don't see why someone would use this wrapper.

When it comes to performance Feral's port is comparable to the windows version, and there is no reason for not upgrading to 10.9. Its miles ahead of 10.8 & 10.7.

With that resolution even Feral's port would run decent on old hardware. When it comes to setting system requirements they're almost too strict because they want to make sure you as a customer have a good time playing this game.

 

[Washac]

While i appreciate the work someone put into porting games unofficially, I don't see why someone would use this wrapper.

When it comes to performance Feral's port is comparable to the windows version, and there is no reason for not upgrading to 10.9. Its miles ahead of 10.8 & 10.7.

With that resolution even Feral's port would run decent on old hardware. When it comes to setting system requirements they're almost too strict because they want to make sure you as a customer have a good time playing this game.

I for one do not want to upgrade to 10.9, also I for one have lots of very good reasons not to upgrade OS, I have and use lots of software that will not run under 10.7 let alone 10.9, so there are my reasons for not upgrading.

It is as you say only comparable to the windows version, I run it under windows via Bootcamp and it runs just fine (hey, another reason not to upgrade), had enough aggravation with ferals last effort on the Mac without getting involved in another.

They shove it into 10.9 and only 10.9 because it is easier for them, they do not care that you have to upgrade, they just want your coin.

So there you go some reasons not to upgrade to 10.9.

Oh and just so you know the wrapper does not work for me anyway, I will just keep it Bootcamp, makes life a whole load easier.

 

[smoketetsu]

You might also want to realize that perhaps higher requirements of the Feral port are due to it having the DX11 effects which the Wine wrapped version does not being it only goes up to DX9. There's a compatibility mode and lower settings that can make it run on older versions of hardware and software. But the requirements are official guidelines to getting the best experience. There's a difference between a guideline and a rule.

Many games can be run on systems lower than the requirements but you have to turn down or off some settings. Guess what? That's what you do to achieve lower requirements running in Wine! Especially since some features are simply not supported by Wine at the moment so they get stubbed out.

(Actually, I've noticed Singularity now shows DX10 effects in Wine now where it didn't before. But that's not DX11 obviously.)

Here I only use wrappers or virtualization for games that 1) not ported officially and 2) haven't been updated in such a long time that they don't have certain features I want or are not working any more.

BTW, I don't agree at all that Feral only "wants your coin". They put a lot of hard work and love into their ports and use the software that gets the best feature-set for the particular port. Tomb Raider is the first game to require 10.9 due to it using the Core OpenGL profile for DX11 equivalent effects.

I've never had much aggravation with Feral's ports in the past that simply removing and allowing the game to regenerate the preference files didn't fix or that them patching it or an OS update didn't fix.

 

[Djevlen]

I'm not interested in turning this thread into one about Feral but clearly you and I have had different experiences with Feral and their ports. Sure they want our money, but so does every other business out there.

The reason they "force" us to upgrade to 10.9 is because it supports openGL 4.1, which let Feral and others implement some features from DirectX10(and 11?) into their games.

I'm sure that in the future most games/ports will require 10.9 or newer, for the reason I mentioned above.

I'm aware of that there software that won't run on 10.7 or newer, which is why I wrote that 10.9 is miles ahead of 10.7 and 10.8.

For some of us bootcamp is the way to go and its perfectly fine that you and many others go do that.

 

[dankoB]

Your opinions always make so much sense smoketetsu! I have already upgraded to 10.9 and didn't enjoy the experience. I was using 10.6.8 for longest time because I was unable to upgrade due to hardware limitations (MBP 1,1). I was also limited to certain app versions still being on 10.6.8. I just recently purchased a MacBook 5,1 and decided to upgrade 10.9 right away. I gave it a shot for a few days but I was not happy in the end so I decided to get Mountain Lion and have been enjoying it ever since. I sometimes plug in the the old 10.6.8 hard drive for testing purposes and I think I like it best still. When I have better hardware I'll probably go back to mavericks but no time soon, that's for sure!

This is just an option for gamers that have the PC version that don't mind playing it in DX9. Like I said,when I have the hardware to run the games that are being released natively as of late I will run them natively. I still run Borderlands in Wine because the gameplay is much better for me than the native version and I have the graphics cranked much higher than I would be able to otherwise.

Certain Mac gaming developers don't port games in consideration for hardware older than two or three years.

DoubleFine is one developer I've never had any problems with.

Use it or don't it's up to you. I get great performance out of it and hopefully other people do too.

With that resolution even Feral's port would run decent on old hardware. When it comes to setting system requirements they're almost too strict because they want to make sure you as a customer have a good time playing this game.

There is absolutely no way I would be able to run the native port at medium across the board on my hardware plus, I as a customer don't really need to have all the bells and whistles. While DX11 style effects in OpenGL4.1 must look amazing I still have fun playing games in DX9. I have no interest in spending $3000 on the MBP that I want right now. When I have the money I'll buy it but even after I do, I'll still be porting games to work on systems that native port developers have forsaken.

 

[smoketetsu]

Well for me wrapped games tend to be hit or miss and to be frank.. tend to crash on me more than native ports do. I tend to have a lot more stuff like unhandled exceptions in wrapped games. Quite a few of my wrapped games I couldn't run for quite some time on my new system because of them exhausting VRAM quickly whereas native or even running in parallels didn't. Quite a few UE3 games simply run slower for me wrapped vs native or parallels as well.

Alan Wake is another game that has been running better for me in Parallels than in Wine lately. I don't know if there's any wine engine that fixes the bugs it has. Many people I've noticed simply turn down the settings and call it a day. But for example in that case it only prolongs how long it takes for it to crash.... eventually it does.

Don't get me wrong though this doesn't happen with all games and depending on engine is fixed for some games. But for a while it was pretty discouraging to me. Some games have ran better for me in a wrapper than in Parallels lately such as Aliens Colonial Marines. Which will probably never get a native port. Castlevania Lord of Shadows has glitches in parallels so I tried it in Wine and there it basically just crashes and has a garbage rating in WineHQ (it's just a DX9 game as far as I can tell).

As with anything your mileage may vary but that's my experience.

Also you have to realize that at some point if Wine doesn't keep up with the latest APIs you'll either end up with so many disabled features that the game looks like garbage or the game wont run at all. So if you want to play the latest games sooner or later you'll want to upgrade. More and more games will have garbage rating as more games start requiring DX11 and 64-bit.

Also, I here am doing just fine with 10.9. Especially after having customized it with my favorite apps (Flavours, Dockmod, etc) and configuring all the settings the way I like them.

 

[imacken]

Yep, I agree, wrappers are hit and miss.
For me, my priority for playing games on my Mac are:
1) native port
2) Parallels 9
3) wrapper
4) bootcamp - as an absolute last resort.
Funnily enough, as we are in a Tomb Raider thread, I played the paulthetall wrapper on my Steam version of this Tomb Raider several months ago through to the end, and it worked flawlessly @2560x1440 without a single crash. Not as good as the Feral port though of course!
Skyrim is another good example of how a wrapper can work well, but still, they are hit and miss.
I find that Parallels is becoming a good alternative, much better with each version. I recently played Dishonored (excellent game) @2560x1440 all the way through without any problems at all.

 

[bsauvage]

So I have finally tried this, and it barely starts: right after the "Profile" icon appears and disappears (with some noise), the screen gets stuck on the hazy background with the Asia map....

On iMac2013, running latest patched Mavericks.

 

[saturnotaku]

So I have finally tried this, and it barely starts: right after the "Profile" icon appears and disappears (with some noise), the screen gets stuck on the hazy background with the Asia map....

On iMac2013, running latest patched Mavericks.

How about purchasing the game from Steam in OS X or from Feral's website so you can support the developer so they can keep making official Mac ports?

 

[madeirabhoy]

So I have finally tried this, and it barely starts: right after the "Profile" icon appears and disappears (with some noise), the screen gets stuck on the hazy background with the Asia map....

On iMac2013, running latest patched Mavericks.

why would you bother if you have mavericks?

 

[edddeduck]

FYI I did have a look at this version during our development and when running side by side the native port always outperformed this unofficial version, it was also most stable at least on my Mac. The official version also comes with full support, no licensing issues and the warm fuzzy feeling you get knowing you have contributed towards improving gaming on the Mac.

We did look at 10.6.8 and newer as the min spec but we had to make a decision on performance and features. By selecting 10.9 we could offer a lot more performance and graphical features that you cannot if you support a 5 year old OS like Snow Leopard.

I should also point out even if the opening fps is good on the unofficial wrapper when you enter the high geometry sections the frame rate drops massively on older LegacyGL systems it's the same on DX9 on windows.

This was one of the major reasons we swapped to CoreGL only and set the min spec to 10.9. Most of the areas run fine in LegacyGL (and some run with a higher fps) however as soon as you get to high geometry areas the lack of geometry shaders hits performance very hard!

NV650 cards in DX9 mode (and LegacyGL) will drop to ~10/12 fps entering Shanty Town with DX11 or CoreGL and geometry shaders that leaps up to 25 to 30 as I recall!

 

[insane79]

No offence to the OP but i bought this game(Feral's version) & been playing it on my late 2012 iMac which has 512mb gtx660m & plays awesome. I got the rez on 1600X900 with almost everything on ultra & avg fps is 45. Feral has done a fantastic job