FFXI on Mac: Working in Parallels 4.0

[Demosthenes]

Maybe this is of interest for somebody:

http://fnord.terror.de/images/ffximac.png

/edit: does a VM count as 3rd party software? This is actually the first time I got FFXI running windowed. Oh, and you have to set Parallels to View -> Single Window and POL to fullscreen. Coherence doesn't work, trying to resize the window results in "Full screen mode lost".

Or you could also try the latest wine. It is how I run it in nix.

[Air]

OMG! Thanks! This is really really nice.
I've been playing been FFXI on my MacBook Pro (I got the Core Duo 2.4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM one) for like a year via bootcamp.. I have a shitty desktop so it runs way better here>_>
However switching the OS everytime -even if I needed to do some simple ingame tasks- was very annoying. I previously tried playing on Parallels 3 but I wasn't even able to load the game.

Now with Parallels4 I have been able to reach _almost_ native game graphics/speed/fluidity in not-so-crowded areas. I suggest to use the fullscreen mode, since it looks like the coherence mode is CPU-intensive. You can toggle between OSX and the VM simply using spaces. Of course I allocated more resources to the VM to make it run smoother.. So OSX ran slowly, especially when I loaded any app, but then It worked semi-fine.
A lower res on FFXI and like somebody stated before, a RAM improvement could fix it.

Personally I found the coherence mode pretty neat, it was so weird to see the Playonline Icon on the dock.. and suprisingly enough, I was able to use both Exposè and Spaces without any lag on OS X. Impressive. A couple of pics here:

http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/3...ffxins7.th.jpg http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/7...ffxise8.th.jpg

Of course, yeah, with my current specs I would use it just to stuff like browsing AH, crafting, chatting or even doing simple stuff like soloing/partying on low level jobs and so on. Probably the game would become kinda unplayable on endgame events or Campaign. Still cool. Worked way better than I thought.

[Riker]

Ok so i'm completely mac retarded since I havn't had mine for very long, its a standard macbook, the higher tier white one (not black). Got it just before the new style macbook's came out with the pinch technology and the clickable touchpad...

Can I get a step by step of what to do please? Sorry if this isn't enough information let me know what you need to know and i'll try to find out...

[QotsaM]

OMG! Thanks! This is really really nice.
I've been playing been FFXI on my MacBook Pro (I got the Core Duo 2.4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM one) for like a year via bootcamp.. I have a shitty desktop so it runs way better here>_>
However switching the OS everytime -even if I needed to do some simple ingame tasks- was very annoying. I previously tried playing on Parallels 3 but I wasn't even able to load the game.

Now with Parallels4 I have been able to reach _almost_ native game graphics/speed/fluidity in not-so-crowded areas. I suggest to use the fullscreen mode, since it looks like the coherence mode is CPU-intensive. You can toggle between OSX and the VM simply using spaces. Of course I allocated more resources to the VM to make it run smoother.. So OSX ran slowly, especially when I loaded any app, but then It worked semi-fine.
A lower res on FFXI and like somebody stated before, a RAM improvement could fix it.

Personally I found the coherence mode pretty neat, it was so weird to see the Playonline Icon on the dock.. and suprisingly enough, I was able to use both Exposè and Spaces without any lag on OS X. Impressive. A couple of pics here:

Of course, yeah, with my current specs I would use it just to stuff like browsing AH, crafting, chatting or even doing simple stuff like soloing/partying on low level jobs and so on. Probably the game would become kinda unplayable on endgame events or Campaign. Still cool. Worked way better than I thought.

I have the same MacBook Pro than you, and it was also running fine enough to do Nyzul yesterday (but not enough for dyna/einherjar lol, I didn't even try but I'm sure it won't be playable), but once in whitegate, the fps decreased quite a lot (I'll check next time more precisely).
How much ressources did you allocate? I put what they recommend (128 for video and 512 for the RAM) but I wonder if it cannot be improved a bit more.

My brother told me about Snow Leopard that should be available this year (I think), that it would be a huge change. Not really regarding functionnality, but performance in general. Do you think it would be even better then? (I don't know if what I say is clear )

[Raineer]

Ok so i'm completely mac retarded since I havn't had mine for very long, its a standard macbook, the higher tier white one (not black). Got it just before the new style macbook's came out with the pinch technology and the clickable touchpad...

Can I get a step by step of what to do please? Sorry if this isn't enough information let me know what you need to know and i'll try to find out...

My laptop is the same model as that one, I run FF on my iMac typically.

Go to spotlight and search "Boot Camp Assistant", run through it to partition about 15-20gb of your drive. Install a copy of XP (I recommend Performance Edition from piratebay, it's lighter and faster), for the record I really have purchased 2 licenses from Microsoft and never do have more than 2 installed at one time. In all legal conscience I can recommend doing the same. The pirated version works so much better than the real one.

Once this is done, you now have a dual-boot Mac. This is nice since you can boot into native Windows if you really have a need (FFXI will run much better like this, by the way, no matter how insane your system is).

If you want to run FFXI inside of OS X, now install Parallels 4.0. You should pay for it (b/c it owns) but you can get a trial key right from Parallels to test it out, naturally test it before you'd buy anything.

Once you install Parallels and make sure to run an Update from inside it to get any recent patches, now create a new Virtual Machine and have it create it from the Bootcamp partition.

Now you can boot into either OS X or Windows (hold option when you're powering on to pick, there are other ways too), or you can boot into OS X and run that exact same Windows partition in a window. There are lots of options to play with in Parallels also to make it run smoother / look cooler.

After you start Windows for the first time in Parallels, be sure to select "Install Parallels Virtual Tools" from the Parallels menu while running Windows. This will install special drivers which make it run much much smoother, and you cannot use DirectX graphics until this step is done.

There is so much more to cover with the topic of Virtual Machines, but that's the 10,000 foot overview of what you are doing. After Windows is running nicely and Parallels Tools are installed onto it, you are good to install FF just like normal, nothing will be different.

[Kaisha]

Snow Leopard is basically a faster version of Leopard from what I've heard, requiring a 64-bit Intel CPU to run (all of us MacBook Pro owners are covered), although I don't know how much that'll affect Parallels since I doubt the performance of the OS itself would be *that* much faster given how snappy Leopard is to begin with.

[nitsuj]

Whoa whoa whoa. Parallels is working now? I was using 4.0 beta before it was released and I could log in just fine with playable framerate, but I could not target doors nor could I see any other PC/NPC's.

I uninstalled and got VMWare fusion and it works perfectly (2.01 I think is the newest version).

I did EInherjar once inside VMWare and it was playable, but the fps can get kinda rough in situations like that (on a macbook pro dual core 2.2ghz, 3g ram).

Virtualization sure has come a long way, though.

[Mrcloudz]

This is extremely relevant to my interests >_>

So wait, now this may be a stupidly obvious question, but if I buy Parallels, will I need to actually buy a copy of Windows XP as well?

[Kaisha]

You have to have a disc or image of whatever OS it supports (pretty much everything from Win95 to Windows7, Linux, DOS, and OSX itself), as well as a means of activation of the OS requires it.

One thing that's had me curious though, has anyone tried FFXI in Win98 and see if the performance is any better vs. XP?

[Riker]

My laptop is the same model as that one, I run FF on my iMac typically.

Go to spotlight and search "Boot Camp Assistant", run through it to partition about 15-20gb of your drive. Install a copy of XP (I recommend Performance Edition from piratebay, it's lighter and faster), for the record I really have purchased 2 licenses from Microsoft and never do have more than 2 installed at one time. In all legal conscience I can recommend doing the same. The pirated version works so much better than the real one.

Once this is done, you now have a dual-boot Mac. This is nice since you can boot into native Windows if you really have a need (FFXI will run much better like this, by the way, no matter how insane your system is).

If you want to run FFXI inside of OS X, now install Parallels 4.0. You should pay for it (b/c it owns) but you can get a trial key right from Parallels to test it out, naturally test it before you'd buy anything.

Once you install Parallels and make sure to run an Update from inside it to get any recent patches, now create a new Virtual Machine and have it create it from the Bootcamp partition.

Now you can boot into either OS X or Windows (hold option when you're powering on to pick, there are other ways too), or you can boot into OS X and run that exact same Windows partition in a window. There are lots of options to play with in Parallels also to make it run smoother / look cooler.

After you start Windows for the first time in Parallels, be sure to select "Install Parallels Virtual Tools" from the Parallels menu while running Windows. This will install special drivers which make it run much much smoother, and you cannot use DirectX graphics until this step is done.

There is so much more to cover with the topic of Virtual Machines, but that's the 10,000 foot overview of what you are doing. After Windows is running nicely and Parallels Tools are installed onto it, you are good to install FF just like normal, nothing will be different.

Thank you for taking the time to explain that to me, I think* i understand what to do for the most part however.. I can't afford parallels so im not gonna bother atm, unless I can get that even better pirated?

thanks again

ps. you can run app and stuff on this?

[fndragon]

ps. you can run app and stuff on this?

/facepalm

Edit:
To clarify:
Didn't that last round of bannings sink in? Do we need to get out the clue-by-four and proceed to trauma our way to enlightenment? Don't cheat. Don't use app.

[Raineer]

Thank you for taking the time to explain that to me, I think* i understand what to do for the most part however.. I can't afford parallels so im not gonna bother atm, unless I can get that even better pirated?

thanks again

ps. you can run app and stuff on this?

Yeah, literally anything you can run off Windows (related to FFXI) will run.

As for Snow Leopard, there actually is a decent chance it would up performance a little since the whole point of 10.6 is to streamline 64-bit and multi-core performance. It's not just MBP's which are safe for 10.6, anything released after a G5 should be fine.

[Raineer]

You have to have a disc or image of whatever OS it supports (pretty much everything from Win95 to Windows7, Linux, DOS, and OSX itself), as well as a means of activation of the OS requires it.

One thing that's had me curious though, has anyone tried FFXI in Win98 and see if the performance is any better vs. XP?

Actually not a bad idea, however a stripped copy of XP runs really really fast, I doubt that any recent VM software would be optimized better for 98 than XP.

[Air]

How much ressources did you allocate? I put what they recommend (128 for video and 512 for the RAM) but I wonder if it cannot be improved a bit more.

I can't check right now, but I think the second time I ran it (when I took those screens) I allocated like almost the full Video Memory (like 200) and the highest RAM possible. Don't remember the exact value, but the programs tells you what it is. If you allocate more even the VM is gonna slow down, along with Leopard. And yeah, they say Snow Leopard is gonna be better performance wise, too bad they didn't present it on the latest MacWorld >:

[Raineer]

The only real problem is if you have a rig which you need to allocate almost everything to it, then OS X will likely barely run in the background and you're probably better off just booting straight into Bootcamp.

[Air]

The only real problem is if you have a rig which you need to allocate almost everything to it, then OS X will likely barely run in the background and you're probably better off just booting straight into Bootcamp.

Yeah that's true, if you give too many resources OSX could really slow down bad. >_>
Oh, and another thing I didn't add before: When I tried to use the F keys ingame, they worked the MacBook Pro's way (changing the brightness and stuff) to make them work on the VM you need to press the fn key at the same time. Probably there's some option that makes you skip that, but I haven't really looked for it.

[Raineer]

Yeah that's true, if you give too many resources OSX could really slow down bad. >_>
Oh, and another thing I didn't add before: When I tried to use the F keys ingame, they worked the MacBook Pro's way (changing the brightness and stuff) to make them work on the VM you need to press the fn key at the same time. Probably there's some option that makes you skip that, but I haven't really looked for it.

It's worth mentioning, I was never able to fix that either. If someone has a workaround, feel free to post it!

Overall, it's great for crafting/AH/chatting but it's just not ready for primetime for big events (imo). I still use Bootcamp for the big stuff.

[nitsuj]

Is anyone running in parallels of VMWare WITHOUT using your bootcamp partition? How does it compare speed wise?

[Raineer]

Is anyone running in parallels of VMWare WITHOUT using your bootcamp partition? How does it compare speed wise?

I tried it. No difference to me, I just use bootcamp out of convienence.

[Shadowrunner]

It's worth mentioning, I was never able to fix that either. If someone has a workaround, feel free to post it!

Overall, it's great for crafting/AH/chatting but it's just not ready for primetime for big events (imo). I still use Bootcamp for the big stuff.

Lol, this made me tickle inside.

This is a setting inside Bootcamp's tools (and I bet Parallels, but I don't need to set it as the bootcamp partition has it defaulteD) that allows you to deactivate all function keys so that that you have to hold down FN to use the shortcuts (like volume, etc). It occasonically glitches, but usually not bad.