Mac

UPDATE 2015-11-28: Hey BeamNG forum users. These instructions worked for me way back when I was using CrossOver. You might be able to get similar or better results with Wineskin Winery or some other Wine wrapper. And those are free too! I don’t run BeamNG on my local laptop anymore nowadays but I Game on Amazon EC2 and it works fairly well with BeamNG at a very minimal cost.

Gotta make this quick. This post will change.

Here’s how to get BeamNG Drive working in Mac OS X. I’m sure there are equivilent instructions for Wineskin but I have no time to find out.

Make a new bottle in Crossover. Make sure it is a Windows Vista bottle. Run the Wine configuration setting inside it and set the version to Windows 7 in one of the sheets. Enable the Mac Driver so you don’t run it through X11.

Install the Modern DirectX runtime into it. Install BeamNG into it. Mute your speakers. Change the audio options to use OpenAL for output. Unmute speakers. Enjoy.

So far this works for the tech demo. I’m going to try it on Alpha later.

UPDATE: It works on Alpha. Yay!

A few days ago, I decided to pull the trigger and install Windows on my Retina MacBook Pro at a LAN Party. It’s a perfectly fine machine with a decent graphics card and CPU. I started Boot Camp Assistant and followed through with the instructions to install from the USB drive using the ISO of Windows 7 I had on my Desktop. If you follow Apple’s steps to the letter, your installation of Windows will never proceed.

If you do follow the steps, you will most certainly get an error of “Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. " when you select the BootCamp partition that you had just formatted in the Windows installer on your Mac. This can occur on PCs too but basically the issue is that the USB drive is initialized as another valid bootable disk. If you were to Google this, you will find solutions online that involve yanking out the USB drive and reinserting it before pressing “Install Now” on the Windows 7 installation screen. This “Install Now” screen is a big centered button that prompts your to install now and the arrow is set inside a blue circle that’s like a gem.

This is where Apple’s helpfulness can get in your way. By default, Boot Camp Assistant copies the Boot Camp support files to your USB drive. It also adds an Autounattend.xml file to the root of your drive to automatically install Boot Camp support drivers and utilities in Windows. With Autounattend.xml present, you will not have the opportunity to yank out and reinsert the USB drive before continuing. Instead, the setup just proceeds as if that button was pressed. While this is a good file for disc installations, it causes a massive problem for USB installation which is most likely to be the case for all new Macs from now on since they do not include disc drives by default. If you try to ask Apple to ‘fix’ this, they will just blame Microsoft which admittedly isn’t blame free either.

To solve this problem, move or delete Autounattend.xml on the root of the USB drive and proceed with the normal steps afterwards . After Windows is done installing and since Autounattend.xml was nullified, you will have to run the Boot Camp support installer from the BootCamp folder on the USB drive.

It’s a shame Apple’s instructions just do not work. The fix required would probably mean removing Autounattend.xml functionality for USB Drive installations. In the meantime, this worked for me.