Skyrim on Macintosh - it can be done!

Skyrim on an iMac - It Works!

I’m a Mac user, but I’m more of a recent convert than an ages old fanboy.  Lets face it, fourteen years ago where Mac’s were related to relative obscurity and used by artists primarily, they really sucked.

Was is really that bad?  From the end user perspective, maybe not - but I always thought the way they loaded 5-10 screens full of icon extensions was hokey.  This was after the initial heyday of Apple, back when the SE20 was awesome.  Macs started out pretty cool, but grew tired until they got facelifted on Steve’s return.

From a network administrators perspective, supporting Mac’s on my networks was always annoying at best.  Novell and Microsoft both supported Mac’s, but it was not fun in any sense of being - the multiple name spaces, data and resource forks, the odd way shares were mapped, even the hokey support for Internet dialup.  All painful, but then again, Windows used to be pretty painful too.

I’ll just say that I’m glad Apple has done what they’ve done - I wouldn’t change much of their inner workings now.  I’d perhaps tweak a few things, but then again, they’re doing a pretty classy job right now.

Lets face some other realities - not every software maker has embraced the Mac as a great place to be.  Apple is still the most expensive computer in general - I mean, who’s really going to pay the money for a Sony computer, when the company can’t sell a PC that supports industry standards or that comes without tons of proprietary drivers and obscure proprietary bloatware.  If Sony could return to basics - just Windows without their lame additional “flavoring” - they might actually turn around their dying PC business.  But I digress.  My point is, Apple makes a good PC, but price-wise, its not cheap.  There are more expensive PC’s out there, but they’re not able to effectively replace the Mac.

Now I’ve had the argument with my family regarding the “Why would I go Mac?” thing - and until they get the clue that just about every add-on that you’d want comes built into the Mac and just works out of the box... well, unfortunately, they just don’t get it.  My family in my house gets it - and after I got Skyrim going, my son may even be coming around.  My daughter has already asked for her own Mac.  When more folks do get the clue, more people will move.  Maybe when Target and Walmart have their little Apple Stores inside..

So anyway, back to the point of my story - Skyrim is absolutely one of the most addictive games produced by Bethesda ever - and this coming from the company that created Fallout 3, Fallout 3 New Vegas, along with a host of other games.  The real star in their lineup right now is Skyrim, and it uses the same game engine as the fallout series.  This engine, when properly tuned, makes for games that have solid hours of playing times.

The one thing about Bethesda that cheeses me however is their complete and total lack of support for the world of Apple.

Apple users might recognize these games, but if they’re hardcore Apple users, they’ve probably never played them, or they’ve played them on their consoles - if they’re console gamer types.  Somehow I don’t think most hardcore Apple types would go X-Box, but some do - I know a few, but I think those guys are more the exception than the norm.  Frankly, I can’t stand playing on X-Boxes or on Playstation - the controllers just don’t work for me when I can precisely use a mouse to control myself in these games and the entire Valve/Steam lineup on my Mac.

For me, this dilemma has been plaguing me for a while - because I do have a pretty decent PC in my house, and I now have more than just a few Macs as well.  Our household has a plethora of Apple hardware here.  When I replaced my desktop PC with a Mac 2 years ago, I got the cheapest of the iMac line of the time - $1199.  My wife did this as well as her 4 year old PC was starting to have issues.

We went to BestBuy, stood around waiting for the sales mans glance (he was mid-explanation to a potential buyer) and I just pointed to the machine he was demoing and I said “can we get two of these please?”  The people seeing the demo were stunned, the sales-guy excused himself and immediately got us rolling.

As we walked out the front door, heads turned - some kind of foreign convention was going on, and people were just shocked to see us walking out the door with $2500 of stuff in nice Apple-white boxes with built in handles.  That or perhaps by going Apple we’d separated ourselves from the people around us so much that they appeared to be foreigners.  Either way, we were happy - and haven’t looked back... much.

Now in my wife’s case is special - she’s got work stuff on her PC and we needed some way for her Mac to virtualize her old setup (Windows Vista running Quickbooks) and the best approach was for us to simply move her desktop PC, which was on it’s last legs, into a VM on her new Mac.  We did just that, and it worked great.  The end result was, and is, that she’s running Parallels with her old Vista PC as a VM, running quickbooks.  Upgrading her to 8gb was $50 - for $75 I managed to upgrade us both to 8gb.

I had no real need for running a full VM for the longest time, however, my Piratefish VM’s and test beds did need a home, and so I knocked around various options - but those VM’s never replaced my PC desktop, which is located at another desk in my office.  When it came to playing games like Skyrim, or New Vegas, it was just normal for me to sit at the other desk, and play the games from there, however, this was a serious inconvenience for me as the good computer monitor is the huge Mac on my desk, and I have to even switch chairs when I’m playing on the PC, plus the good speakers are on my Mac, Etc. Etc.

I suffered my way through a few games this way, including my first play-through of Skyrim, and I’ve been considering a second play-through when a colleague mentioned that there’s support in Parallels to run Windows Bootcamp.  Now until this point, I knew full well about boot camp, but I hadn’t run it yet.  This was however, the last straw, so I immediately went to Amazon and ordered Parallels.

Yesterday, snail mail finally brought me my Parallels 7.  I’d been resisting getting this for a while, having run other more ghetto VM solutions on my Mac for a while.  My wife lives on Parallels on her Mac, so I was able to sell this as part support, part need, part fun.

I had resisted bootcamp for some time because I can’t stand the idea of dual booting any PC - that reason being primarily the annoying updates.  Apple has updates, Microsoft has more updates, and then there’s freaking Adobe, and tons of other updates - and if I have a “gaming partition” added to my desktop, then it’s a guarantee that I’ll be having to reboot and wait an hour after ever 10-14 days of not playing games on it - because it’ll want to update, do scans, and perform other annoying housekeeping stuff that won’t happen when it’s not running - with bootcamp it’s an “either, or” thing - no in-between.

Setting up bootcamp isn’t annoying at all - it could have been far more complicated than it was, however, Apple seems to have a penchant for making good windows software.  Bootcamp makes it easy enough though, and using it’s instructions was easy enough, and the tools were easily able to re-partition my drive once I cleared up enough space for the Windows side of my Mac.

Once I’d cleared up some space, I started digging, and I realized that there was no way the 64bit Windows 7 VM I already had was going to run as my Bootcamp partition - however, I was able to-reinstall Windows as my bootcamp partition and go from there - the limitation being disk space.  To alleviate this, a nice little network share and drive mapping, connects my PC (which runs my Minecraft server) and my Mac together.  So my PC side has only a little local storage, but can still access the tons of crap in my old gaming PC.

The install was smooth as butter - sure, some reboots afterwards - like any computer it needs to update itself and so forth, then I had to load the Apple drivers disk - and I’ll note that the Apple drivers that are added are about the smoothest driver updates I’ve ever seen in Windows land.

Here’s one to nod I have to give Apple on this - Apple apparently knows how to make driver installers for Windows better than most PC manufacturers - I mean, if you’ve ever re-installed a modern Windows PC to a clean state without all the bloatware that comes in the land of OEM, then you know that you’ve got to go out and grab drivers from everywhere - even on Dell’s website you’ve got to download some 20 different packages and then HOPE that you got the right ones.

Once my iMac rebooted as a Windows PC, it immediately was seeing my wireless network, asking me what network (home, office, public) I was connected to, Etc.  And I hadn’t even installed any of Apple’s drivers yet - and once I installed the Apple drivers, it just got better.

Now if one asks, just how good is your iMac when it’s booting in bootcamp as a full-blown Windows PC, well, let mw tell you - all I’ve added to my setup was two additional programs (Winrar and DaemonTools Lite), and I’ve installed Apple’s drivers.  That’s it.

I then asked Windows to figure out my performance rating, and wow.  Just wow.  I got a 5.9 and my lowest score was the SATA2 7200rpm 500mb hard disk my system came with!

I had figured my RAM, which being iMac RAM, in the form of laptop style SODIMMs, would rate lowest, second to my processor, which is only a Core-i3 - I mean, my wifes MacBook and my Air have Core-i5’s and Core-i7’s are supposed to be total hotness in Intel land.  As it turns out, the Core-i3 rated a 6.9 and the memory rated as a 7.0!!

I immediately wanted to see what results I get, so I setup Skyrim right away.

Playing Skyrim in full Windows mode is decent - my iMac screen is huge, and the video card isn’t an insane super-powered NVidia, so running full resolution with auto-detected settings and no tuning was playable, but not great.  Skyrim decided I should run in high-quality mode, though, not with giant textures.  The end result was that it had overstepped on the filtering and anti-aliasing a little - the images were great, but the frame rate suffered a bit, making combat jumpy.  I then tweaked the settings in the other direction, turning off all the filters, but keeping the screen resolution high - the end result is playable, however, there’s a kind of buzzy jumpiness to the playability of the game.

Once I got that environment stabilized, I then booted back into Mac mode and installed Parallels 7 for my Mac, and told it to make my Bootcamp into a VM.  Now when this happens, there’s definitely some finagling going on in the background - I mean, from the Windows perspective, the RAM changes, disk-IO changes, all sorts of drivers are introduced, Etc.  Turns out this is normal, and is such a change to the system base that the system has to re-activate with Microsoft.  Parallels default Windows 7 settings gave my VM only 1gb of ram, which is a fairly extreme change, so no surprise there.  I then reconfigured it to have 2.5gb of ram, as I could afford it.

So once things were stabilized with the latest and greatest of everything updated, I then decided to try one last thing - run Skyrim in my Windows VM, while running in Mac OS-X.  I had absolutely no hope of this working mind you - I tried installing New Vegas in my VMware VM with no luck, but this was a shot in the dark.  It started, I then started toying with reducing the screen resolution and leaving minimal filtering on - that should result in a playable nice looking setup if I’m lucky.

Not only did Skyrim run in my Bootcamp PC as a VM, it ran well.  I did nerf down the graphics and textures a bit, but after an hour of playing, I’m not just convinced, but actually quite pleased.  It’s playable, fast enough to battle with dragons and get the frame rates I need, and best of all, I’m not even running in bootcamp mode.

I had to run the Windows 7 rating once again in VM mode - and the results were not surprising - I’ve dropped to a 5.5, with RAM taking a huge hit and graphics taking a hit as well.  Funny thing, my disk performance went up for some reason as a VM - its a lie.

I can play Skyrim on my Mac - and I can do it from a bootcamp Windows 7 64bit running in a VM.  You should too.

Cheers!