I installed Windows on my iMac last night using Boot Camp – what a breeze! Apart from the lengthy Windows installation (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen the familiar “Your computer will be faster and more reliable” over the years!), working with Boot Camp was really simple, and selecting the operating system to start is slick – simply press the ‘alt’ key at startup.
Now i’ve got the best of both worlds and today set about installing some of the many PC games adorning my shelves. With my better graphics card my old games never looked so good. Playing Dawn of War with all the settings turned up, including the option to have dead bodies ‘stay’, looks cool in a skirmish!.
Worms Armageddon is also suitably gorgeous – though playing at 1440 x 900 does mean the weapon selection grid is alot smaller than i’m used to! I haven’t tweaked the settings in Rogue Spear yet but it ran fine on the default settings. Red Alert 2 also plays like a dream.
One game I had a bit of difficulty with was Unreal Tournament (Game of the Year Edition). The gameplay was choppy which was surprising considering Unreal Tournament is one of the most system friendly games i’ve played – it doesn’t require the cd to be in the drive to run and it can run fine in Software Rendering mode if you don’t have a great graphics card (Direct3D Hardware mode). Trying to play it in Software mode on my iMac sorted the choppiness but the game was so slow, it was like my avatar was running through invisible soup.
After a few Google searches I discovered the answer – my Mac is just two good for Unreal Tournament, lol. The iMac has an intel dual-core processor which would normally allow things to run faster by sharing the workload between the two cores, but because Unreal Tournament is an older game, splitting the work over both cores means it receives information at different times resulting in lag (something like that anyway). The solution is to tell Unreal Tournament to use only one core – this is done by starting Unreal Tournament, minimising it, then opening the Windows Task Manager. From there select the Unreal Tournament process, right-click and select Affinity.
Affinity lets you specify which cores the program should use. I’ve never heard of this option before because I never had a dual-core PC. Setting this to only one core will then allow Unreal Tournament to run perfectly. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t save your choice so you would have to change this every time you run Unreal Tournament, but a handy utility from Tom’s Hardware called TaskAssign allows you to set the same option and have it in a profile. So long as TaskAssign is open when you start Unreal Tournament, it will follow the profile in TaskAssign and set itself to use one core only.
I still have lots of games still to install, but the final game I just had to try tonight was of course Eve Online. Apart from having to download the latest full build client which took awhile (My cd version is now so old, it’s not possible to patch it), it installed fine and I was up and playing almost immediately. Needless to say it looks sweet.
Well, here’s a screenie of my work so far. The wallpaper is a quick Paint job – I wanted something clean with minimal colours so that I’ll be able to see all the icons i’m still to add. Underneath is a pic of my Mac OS X setup – I finally learned how to take a screenshot on a Mac !
So long…
