Macbook Pro w/Win7 dual boot - anyone tried?

Technology and Gaming
#1

First off - thank you thank you THANK YOU to the amazing people who pulled this off. Breathing life back into one of my favorite games of all time? You are now some of my favorite people of all time.

Now the question… I have a 2011 Macbook Pro with enough free space to add a Win7 (x64) partition. I haven’t done it yet as I haven’t had a good reason. This is a good reason.

Before I spend the evening in raw geek mode repartitioning, downloading, installing, crashing, etc… I’m hoping I’m not the first to have tried this.

Anyone else?

If no one replies within the next few hours, I’ll probably volunteer as a test subject. Oh wait… that’s the other company. If I’m the first that we know of, I’ll report back.

#2

Did this with a 2011 iMac, worked like a charm and was super easy. I’d imagine the Macbook will be the same deal.

#3

I have a 2012 non-shoe goo and it works great on the highest possible settings at 1680x1050

#4

I can happily say, I did this on my mac mini, with an unofficial CD-Drive, which is faulty,
and it worked fine. (late 2011 edition to be specific btw). So you should be fine as long as you do it properly.

#5

Very Simple. Did this on my late 2010 Macbook pro and stilling using it right now. Just make sure you partition the right amount of space for Windows. If you’re going to be gaming on it then get some extra space.

#6

Previously, this post suggested that you just run the game natively as a mod for the OS X version of HL2, along with some brief instructions on how to do that.

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However, I’ve removed those instructions after playing further because it’s very broken.

Brief summary: You can throw the game into the sourcemods folder on the OS X version of steam, symlink it under HL2, and add the “-game BlackMesa” arguments under Advanced Launch commands in Steam, then launch HL2 to load Black Mesa. However, you’re only going to get the first 10 minutes or so, because most of the scripted events are broken. Even with cheats, it’s not worth doing. However, I’ll leave this post here because someone else with more experience with HL2 might be able to figure out the “right” way to do this. There are other source mods available for OS X, so maybe one of those developers knows the “correct” way to launch the game via steam.

#7

Thanks for all the responses. I got it running (after doing battle with Win7 and rEFIt for a few hours) and it rocks! I was able to run the Steam SDK benchmark thingy at full resolution and 8x antialiasing and got something like 170fps.

I partitioned off 100GB for Windows right now. If I need more, it’s reasonably easy and safe to resize in OSX.

#8

I should do this

#9

Is it really? I also partitioned over 100bg and ran out of space almost instantly. I need more.

#10

I own a late 2011 macbook pro 15in. I bootcamped windows 8 with only 40gb.

I then use an external hdd to play my games off of. Everything works fine and fast.

BF3, Sleeping Dogs, Dead Island, Skyrim, MW3 all work just fine on high settings. :wink:

and btw WIN8 plays my games better then W7… just saying…

#11

Why would you do this? It’s easier to run the windows version on OSX using Wine.

#12

EDIT: Ah, didn’t got the point. Delete this post.

#13

Wine. Virtual. Bootcamp.

I’d still pick bootcamp over the rest. Less resources used. Even over wine.

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.