City of Heroes on Mac
Overview
There are various ways to operate the Game Client on the Apple Mac line of computers.
Island Rum
Instructions for running Island Rum, the Mac installer and patching utility for Homecoming: City of Heroes, is available here.
Mac Client
This section contains information that no longer applies: the TransGaming Mac Client is unusable. The current Island Rum installer makes a custom Wine environment for the Windows client to run on present-day Mac systems in order to play City of Heroes/Villains. It is provided for historical purposes.
- Main Article: Mac Special Edition
Mac Special Edition was made possible using TransGaming's Cider Portability Engine, which acts as a "wrapper" around the game software, enabling it to run seamlessly on Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X.
November 7, 2008, saw the beginning of the Mac Client's closed beta testing. [1]
Boot Camp
This section contains information that no longer applies: Apple will be retiring support for Boot Camp in a future MacOS release when Apple Silicon hits the market and Intel Macs are discontinued from new sales. Boot Camp is no longer recommended as a long-term solution for any players of City of Heroes/Villains. It is provided for historical purposes.
Running City of Heroes through Boot Camp is exactly like running it under Windows. Because it is running it under Windows. Boot Camp is Apple's officially supported method of Dual Booting a Mac computer.
Prior to the Mac Game Client, Boot Camp was the preferred method of running City of Heroes as there were no extra emulation layers.
The standard comments about using Windows Vista apply.
After you've installed/patched Windows on your Boot Camp partition, you can copy the client from an existing installation location or DVD, or grab the updater and download the current version.
Read all about the Windows Game Client here.
Boot Camp Links
Parallels
Parallels Desktop for Mac is a piece of Virtualization software. It allows a second "guest" operating system to run along side the main "host" operating system. The later versions includes limited hardware video card support. In Parallels 4, up to 256MB of memory can be set aside just for the emulated video card. Some applications are able to smoothly utilize this video card.
Parallels 3
- 2008-11-20
- Unsuccessful test; graphical issues surrounding the cursor, even in fullscreen mode. Didn't bother entering the game because I couldn't click on things reliably. Wait for the native client. ;-) - @Ex-calibur
Parallels 4
- 2008-11-19
- Unsuccessful test; cursor is somewhat visible, -compatibilecursors helped. However, after selecting a character and clicking "Enter Paragon City", the status bar filled about half way, console claimed the game had finished loading, then program crashed. Wait for the Native Client. - Konoko
Parallels Links
VMWare Fusion
Overview of running under VMWare Fusion.
VMWare Fusion Links
WINE
Overview on running under WINE/Wine. Please note that Island Rum automates this installation for you, but you can build your own Wine/Winetricks solution to play the Windows client.
WINE Links
CrossOver Games for Mac
Overview on running under CrossOver/CrossOver Games.
City of Heroes runs perfectly well under CrossOver Games version 7.1.1 (but is not 7.2.0). There is a known bug in Crossover Games 7.2.0 that prevents it from going past the click "Next" screen.
However the game runs brilliantly well under CrossOver Games 7.1.1.
Simply download the COHUpdate.exe file (from ftp://client.coh.com/ ) and install it under a WinXP bottle inside CrossOver, and that's all there is to it.