Running spore on modern macs. [Updated - black screen fix]

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paranoid_modder
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Running spore on modern macs. [Updated - black screen fix]

Unread post by paranoid_modder »

This is a small tutorial aimed to help users who are having trouble running spore on their modern macs. Original post by r0#6739
SPORE was never officially released on GNU/Linux, and the Mac version had aged poorly. The Mac port is actually the Windows release packaged with Cider, which is a depreciated technology wrapping a (now old) version of WINE around games.
The port suffers from various issues on modern macOS, such as:
  • - Galactic Adventures not working
    - Base game only running through the cider_noui executable inside SPORE.app
    - Creepy & Cute not being available on Origin
The best way to run the game on these operating systems, is through a Windows virtual machine on Oracle VirtualBox 6.x. These settings have been tested on a 2018 Mac with macOS Mojave 10.14.4 :
  • - Windows Vista or higher recommended
    - 2D & 3D hardware acceleration enabled
    - WDDM (Aero) driver installed through Guest Additions on the virtual machine.
The overall experience is pretty natural, although not perfect.
EDIT: Another section has been added where a user called arthr explains how you can fix a common bug found on mac users who use the ultimate graphic fix mod.
For some reason, the transgaming config is all messed up in newer macs with Intel Iris, so usually if you set all the visual configs to maximum and applies the graphics fix, you get a blank screen. You can even hear the game, but the image is gone.

So I reinstalled my game and applied the fix before changing the graphic settings, and then found out that mac users can put almost anything on High, but Planet Quality (I don’t know the correct expression, since my game is in Portuguese) should be in Medium. If you put Planet Quality in High the image will break. I’m trying to figure out why this happens (but the game already looks better with the graphics fix).


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