It a niffy idea, but the Engine and WineTricks that we set up for Black Mesa might not works well for the different games.
I am not an expert on Wine, but it is safe to check out which Engine and WineTricks work the best for certain games. You might need to create every new wrapper with Steam in each of them for different games, perhaps?
Thank you, that is good to know before I spend money on a game. I actually didn’t install any WineTricks. Just used the Engine you guys recommended. I’m on a 2011 27" Imac with 8 gigs of RAM, have played through about half the game, haven’t had any issues with crashing or stuttering or anything! I’ve pretty much played all the Mac games I’m interested in, and there are a couple in the Steam store that look interesting after I finish Black Mesa. It’s a really great game, and so glad to play it on my Mac.
An official list of what works and what doesn’t (and maybe the necessary tweaks) is maintained at https://appdb.winehq.org. The same engine won’t work for all games/apps. And often your video card and drivers matter too. BTW Black Mesa has been added in there too 
CrossOver has a paid-for porting service, and they also keep a list of what works/what doesn’t. As far as I can tell the CX/CXG engines are engines they modified.
There’s yet another list of wrappers and how well they work at portingteam.com.
Yes, the safest way to experiment is to save and not modify working wrappers. You can create new blank wrappers (or duplicate the .app, that works too) to experiment with different engines and wine tricks. A very nice feature of WineSkin is that all tweaks are self contained in the .app, and thus won’t break other working wrappers.
So Ive managed to install everything, but when i try to open BM through steam it trys to validate files and then says ‘steam servers are too busy try again in a few minutes’ then says all files 100% validated but doesnt open the game.
any thoughts?
I’ve seen that sometimes. To work around it: in Steam, select Library->Tools->Source SDK Base 2007, ctrl-click, Properties->Local Files->Verify Integrity of Tool Cache. When it’s done validating you should be able to play BMS without problems.
Worked and the game runs! Thanks for the fast response :freeman:
Only issue is, its too choppy/slow to play on my computer (jan-2011-macbook-pro15") guess ill have to try bootcamp
Glad to hear that!
Not so much about the choppiness :[
BTW Windows 8 Release Preview is free to try until something like January 2013. Personally I don’t feel like advocating for it, but it’s worth a shot for bootcamp if you don’t own Windows already.
Cool! I tried the windows 8 64 bit preview with the 14 day parallels trial. I actually think parallels 8 runs the same as wineskin for me. I only have 8 gigs of ram so gave the virtual machine 4 gigs. I tried installing windows 8 onto my boot camp and got an error. I definately want to try some other windows games, so I’m happy about this free windows preview.
When I open the new Steam window, everything seems fine except there are no words in any of the boxes. Whenever I attempt to type something, the cursor stays in the same position and no words appear. i can’t seem to figure out how to navigate the window. Help?
Which engine are you using? It looks like https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31374
To work around it, try this: open again the Wineskin app inside SteamWine, click “Advanced”, set “EXE flags:” to “-no-dwrite”, quit.
That looks like the same bug, but now, whenever I try to open SteamWine, it opens for a few seconds, then quits with no warning… I think i’ll just restart the process.
This time make sure you use “WS8WineCXG10.3.0” at step 2. Let us know how it goes.
It works!!! I have no clue what I missed the first time through, it might’ve been using the Wineskin INSIDE SteamWine (or was it the other way around? I dunno, but it doesn’t matter now). Anyways, thanks to everyone who posted about how to do this, my other Mac using friends have never been so jealous!
Hi. I’ve installed Black Mesa. It works very well on my iMac but when I play and it loads the map, the keyboard doesn’t work (only mouse, escape and special OSX keys - like volume up/down and light.) How can I solve this issue? Is there any “Wine trick” to enable my keyboard input? Thanks.
PS: My keyboard model is Apple Wireless Keyboard.
I tried a few different ways to get BM going on my macbook with no avail until I found this
https://portingteam.com/files/file/7540-half-life-2-black-mesa/
Pretty painless to get going and worked like a treat on my 2009 mb
It sounds convenient - but I have the impression the “csmania.ru” standalone hack that the wrapper is using is not quite compliant with the Steam Subscriber Agreement… :fffuuu:
The most convenient way to play steam games on a Mac is with parallels 8 and windows 8 free preview. You can get a free trial of both. I did the whole wineskin thing. Now playing the newest games with parallels and really like that better.
I found a good Black Mesa wrapper on Porting Team, installed Steam for windows in the wrapper, and then installed Black Mesa. Steam opens when I open the wrapper and then I just choose Black Mesa from the games list. Runs like a dream. The only problems I’ve seen are with the flashlight. Having it on gives you a choppy framerate (although I am running the game at 1920x1200 with 4g of RAM, so your situation might be better) and sometimes, instead of shining white light, it projects colory cubemap-ish textures or partial screenshots of my desktop and doesn’t illuminate what it’s supposed to, like what’s right in front of you. Go figure. I leave it off unless I’m in a dark room.
AND you’ll have a 12 gig file size application.
Macs prevail.
Can’t wait for Xen.
Hi guys! I installed BMS using kerning’s instructions, and it’s fantastic! (thanks to everyone involved in getting the port to work!) However, it’s quite unstable during large fights, and crashes randomly every once in a while (trying to run it on maximum graphics). Is there anything else that can be done to improve stability? (or another method that results in fewer crashes?)
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.