Thread: playing LOTRO with MAC

Hi Guys,

I'm a PC user and am happily playing on the game but I've got a mate who wants to play the game but has a MAC.

I'm not technical enough (he's worse than me) with my understanding to point him in the right direction, I've read up on some links and other threads but as a non-mac user I dont really understand.

Is someone able to help me out a bit.

I'm told he has to install a program called "Wine" is that before or after he downloads the "client"

If so does he then download the normal client or is there another one for Mac Users.

Also I know that there isn't an official mac users client but I also know there are mac players online from what I've seen on the forum so just looking for someone to share some knowledge to two relative idiots lol

From another Mac user, I can tell you it isn't hard to work out a way to play lotro on one, but it also is not ideal. Personally I choose Bootcamp over Wine, but both do work. Essentially what you have to do with a Mac is set aside a nice lil chunk of your hard drive to load up a Windows partition on. While you will be able to play with either, be prepared to grab some generic drivers to fill in the gaps and you may run in to some compatibility issues that generally are resolved by just playing on lower settings. Again, not ideal but manageable.

You will need to have a version of Windows to install as well. So if your friend does not own one, well there could be some extra costs there. I personally got annoyed with having to do the extra work every time I wanted to play, so I took the easy route and just fixed up an old PC I had lying around and loaded lotro on to that (only program on there other than Windows XP, which was the version I had installed on it originally). In my opinion, if you are going to have to sacrifice and play on lower settings and mess around with random drivers and all, might as well make it easier on yourself and just find a cheapo PC that can handle it.

My 2 cents, but if you search the forums you can find a bunch more info. Been a long-time issue and something we will unfortunately always have to deal with. Hey, at least now I can have the forums and some music going on my Mac while I play on my PC...

Originally Posted by Bradbic

I'm told he has to install a program called "Wine" is that before or after he downloads the "client"

If so does he then download the normal client or is there another one for Mac Users.

Also I know that there isn't an official mac users client but I also know there are mac players online from what I've seen on the forum so just looking for someone to share some knowledge to two relative idiots lol

I have been running LOTRO on my Mac since the pre-beta (I'm a Founder/Lifetime).

To answer your specific questions -- there is only one LOTRO client, for everybody - US/Europe, lo-res/hi-res.
You would load WINE, and then load the Turbine/Pando downloader into a bottle and "wait" (It's a 12 gig file.)

Ok...first off, WINE is not a "non-technical" solution -- by itself! Although, it is a Free one, but you pay with all of the particular headaches associated with it "bare" -- this is great for all us CS types, but for others, it can be intimidating.

I use a program called CrossOver from Codeweavers.com -- It is a supported version of WINE. What that means is you go to the LOTRO home page at Codeweavers: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibi...e/?app_id=2869 follow the steps... and you are most of the way there. (Codeweavers is the primary support for the wine project located at sourceforge -- http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=4891)

I say most, because Turbine is constantly patching the game. So the first thing you do after the download, is to "patch" it -- this is the same as you would have to do with a normal PC download.

The Codeweavers LOTRO Forum is available to answer questions. (I tend to be the one answering them lately.) The Tips and Tricks section contains a collection of "answers" from a multitude of uses and support folks. Start with "Installing LOTRO from the Crosstie file on Mac" and go from there.

There is (or was) a Mac page in the Lorebook. I have not checked it recently, so I don't know how current the information happens to be. (Lion did create issues when it came out.)

Note that all of this information applies to DDO as well.

hey guys so i have a mac book pro and i can't play LOTRO on it please help !

Thanks !

to run lotro on a mac you need to either use bootcamp and install windows
or you need use something like wine to install windows as a second OS
or use something similar to cross over games which iirc runs as a windows emulator
see this article on the lorebook
http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/LOTRO...x_and_Mac_OS/X

theres also an unoffical mac client but dont know if this still works

the normal windows client will not work on a MAC without using one of the options above and your mac book needs to at least meet the minimum requiremetns to run lotro. if you install windows as a second OS or use an emilator your specs need to exceed the minumum requirents as you need to run 2 OSes

playing on mac with the unofficial mac client (wine) works but you need to turn off some graphics settings to get a working game. for example on snow leopard you need to keep anisotropic filtering at a max of 8, otherwise the game will crash. also texture quality cannot set to "very high", only "high". shadows are the next problem: keep the landscape shadows disabled and the texture cach on 0.30. everything else can be set to the highest level if the machine supports it. i'm running it with the latest patch (be sure to do that before starting the first time) on the latest snow leopard on a 27" imac. it works fine and is stable.

playing lotro on mac its pain in &&&. First of all you should care about all patches, and pray, that update system dont break some files. Another thing its performance. Even on not so old mac(i7 2.6k) i cant reach more then 50-70 fps. So think twice before you try to kill few days on installing lotro on mac.
The best option is to install bootcamp with some old windows xp, and have no issues with playing.