Installing Skyrim Using Wine on Mac OS X
Computer used: 2009 Mac Pro with 8 GB memory, a 1 GB Apple graphics card, and OS X 10.9 Mavericks
- Purchase Skyrim on Steam. (By waiting for the right sale, I got it for $5.)
- Download ThePortingTeam’s Wine wrapper for Skyrim.
- Follow the installation instructions under “Installation”. Run Skyrim at least once. At this point Skyrim worked excellently except for a horrible display bug. So, after a lot of websites and some guessing…
- Right-click on the wrapper (the Skyrim icon), choose “Open Package Contents”, and open wineskin.app just as you did during Step 3.
- Click “Set Screen Options”. Uncheck “Use Mac Driver instead of X11”.
- Under “Override Wine control of Screen Settings?” click “Override”.
- Under “Override Settings” make sure that “Fullscreen” is checked. Under “Installer Options” make sure that “Force Normal Windows” is checked.
- Click “Done”. Click “Quit”. Double-click the wrapper icon, and enjoy your game!
I also installed the Unofficial Skyrim Patches, SKSE, and SkyUI, but that’s for another time. Further, I updated the wrapper engine to WS9Wine1.7.21, but I’m not sure I needed to do that. If you do, the instructions are on the Wineskin Winery website.
Have fun hunting dragons!
BorgSpace Interplanetary
Since the days of my first Lego set, I have never lost the joy of building something – having a goal for how something should look and feel and function, then correcting and tweaking until what I was making came as close to that goal as possible.
Kerbal Space Program takes that thought and expands upon it, by offering one all the parts to build a neat-looking airplane or space rocket, then challenging you to make it fly. And once you make it fly, to do something with it: can you reach the Pole? Can you reach orbit? Can you reach a moon or another planet? Can you land a rover or build a base on another world?
I’m thoroughly addicted. And I knew I was cursed to a few late nights when the idea popped into my head of building an imitation of a Valkyrie space fighter from the Macross anime… and then making it fly. Did I succeed? Well…
Traveller
That’s right, I’m not dead yet. I just haven’t felt like journalling at all in months – my creativity and ability to string words together has been darn near zero.
But sometimes, going through my old work will inspire me a bit. To that end, here’s a video walkthrough of the video game level I designed – an addon for Excalibur: Morgana’s Revenge, a game still available for play on Mac, Windows, and Linux via the Aleph One game engine.
Designing game levels is fun… and doing something I haven’t done in years may be just what I needed to stretch my muscles a bit!
Play them off, keyboard dragon.
Finally finished running “Maria Mercurial” for the new Shadowrun group Monday night. I have learned many things doing this. For example, the adventure plotline fit the old TeeFivers better than they fit the new group. Frankly, I think this group had the most fun when I threw out the last remnants of the old plot and wrapped it all up my way.
They did get to kill a dragon (well, were involved in its death) and scored some nice boomsticks, nuyen, and Karma. I think I need to give them fewer, but more epic combats, and definitely more role-playing opportunities. (I know, gamers role-playing. What an idea!)
We definitely need new character sheets, though, and backup copies of the characters too. I’ve given up resurrecting the file with the old TeeFive Shadowrun four-page character dossier I constructed, and I’m rebuilding it from the hardcopy. This means of course that it’s not coming out quite the same, as I’m using Quark instead of PageMaker, and not quite the same fonts. But I did the first page and it looks pretty good so far.
Yeah, that was probably the best night of GMing I’ve had in half a decade. I just got a reference book for the next little adventure I’m sending them on, which hopefully will be even more fun…
Training, sir!
Bad news: we all have to take Office 2007 and MS Vista training; it’s not optional, even for Mac me. Good news: The company will reimburse tuition for any Microsoft certifications to which this training leads. Methinks I’d be a complete fool not to take advantage of this – extra certifications can’t hurt, right?
At the moment, Starr and I share the house with four cats, two of ours and two from her family that are on extended ‘boarding’ with us. We must put in a fair amount of effort to keep up with demands for food and clean litter! As a result, though, I woke up this morning with one cat sleeping on my lap, another nestled tight against my left hip, and a third tucked under my right armpit. It seems I make an excellent cat pillow.
Tonight, Starr works late, and my chore list includes laundry, cooking, and cleaning; our Shadowrun group meets again Monday, and I don’t intend to spend the weekend picking up. I need to chill, and take care of some happier business.
Digital dysfunction
Due to the red tape of services transfer, I will not have Internet at the house tonight or tomorrow. Not the end of the world, but nevertheless an annoyance.
Also in the FAIL department: instead of the nap I’d intended, I spent 30 minutes finding the old TeeFive character sheet, another 60 locating and installing the legacy software on an emulated OS 9 machine to open said sheet, and then another 30 looking for and failing to find the ACTUAL document, which I’m beginning to fear I no longer have.
Feh.
Stand back, I’m doing… stuff.
Most weeks I wait impatiently for my Kingdom of Loathing turns to build up to a useful level. This week, I’ve been sitting at the max of 200 turns for days, but I don’t have time to mess with it. I guess it’s a sign I’m using my time well… KoL isn’t exactly productive… but on the other hand, you can’t be productive all the time. Makes Jack a dull boy, you know.
On that note, I am going to watch a movie this weekend. Either in the theater, or from my list of DVDs to watch or re-watch. I don’t remember sitting through an entire movie since we watched “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” together.
One of the two 400MHz CRT iMacs that have been sitting in my office gathering dust since I left Decipher has found a good home – it’s in the possession of Starr’s youngest sister. She’ll probably want to give it an external FireWire HD and/or a memory upgrade before long, it’s only got a 10GB drive and 256MB of memory. But it’ll do Word and Photoshop and play DVDs, and she seems thrilled with it, so happiness all around. I need to find some old games to pass along that don’t involve serious mayhem.
Speaking of productivity, I am attempting to do something personally productive at least once a day. Either spend at least an hour on a personal project, or sit and write something with some thought in it (thus the recent outbreak of philosophising every week or so in my LJ). It doesn’t come easy: I am a slacker and procrastinator. But time moves with or without me, and I’m not going to be left behind.
Entropy loses a round
Hmph. The Microsoft Office 2008 icons are kinda ugly.
Listening to some Vangelis music at work this morning. “Alpha” is one of those tunes that sends tingles up my spine when I listen to it, and awakes wonder and potential in my mind. If only I could stay in that headspace for days at a time… it probably wouldn’t be good for me, but I feel that I’d get a lot done while I could stand it.
I wonder where the ‘tingles’ come from? It’s absolutely a physical sensation to me, but I have no idea what produces it.
Far more importantly, my mom is walking now without human assistance. She’s still using a walker or crutch, but given that she couldn’t even move the leg two weeks ago, this is an absolutely awesome development, and I joked that she’s making far better progress than I did. If any of my friends have ever wondered where my buried stubborn streak came from, this may provide a clue. I am thrilled for her – and while she’s there, they think they may be able to correct a nerve issue that’s pained her for about 20 years, so, silver lining!
And speaking of doctors, it took me a visit to Wikipedia to learn that the awfully-familiar looking archaeologist on Doctor Who this week was Dr. Corday on ER for seven seasons. Cool.
All is foggy to me
This morning brought a bank of that 30-meter visibility fog, and the “bridge from nowhere to nowhere” effect on the Monitor-Merrimac. Already, though, it’s turned clear, mild, and sunny with a cool breeze: I suddenly want to skip work tomorrow and go to Busch Gardens. Won’t, of course, but still.
Yes, “I can’t support your virtualization software at this time” means I can’t troubleshoot the apps you’re running in it, either.
I finally have the free Pirates of the Carribean MMO running correctly on my laptop. I’m likely to play it about as often as I launch Second Life – which is to say, almost never – but it’s amusing nevertheless to get “FedEx” quests* from Johnny Depp. None yet from Orlando or Kiera, but then, those are probably saved for people who actually play.
Starr went to her mom’s on Tuesday to plant the irises I retrieved. Turns out there were about two dozen, so with the other plants she’d brought, she spent most of an afternoon digging. Add that to her hospital shifts for Wednesday and today, and I’ve got a still-tired lady on my hands!
Happy WoW stuff: thanks to shrewlet, I got all the materials to finish building Mirandala’s epic quality Destruction Holo-Gogs. Among other materials necessary were 206 chunks of difficult-to-mine ore… I can only assume that a LOT of refining is done to turn that into a single pair of goggles.
Also, my polymorph quest issue was resolved while I was offline, so Mir can now turn people into pigs. Thank you, GMs! Too bad that the spell’s unavailable to my warlock, since I named her Circy.
And thank you ranchonmars for the postcard! I have too aged since the Pathfinder days, but it’s dang nice of you to say otherwise 🙂
*Game character A gives you item to take to character B, who will reward you with money, loot, XP, or often as not another FedEx quest. Perversely amusing when characters A and B are less than 20 gameworld yards from one another.
