Warcraft III Support

J

jv4n

Registered
I just bought an iMac that runs on Intel Core Duo with Mac OS X 10.4.7; At first, i was having difficulties running my Warcraft III: Frozen Throne. I tried to run the software as soon as I finished my installation but the application "quits unexpectedly". As I was reading the threads in this forum searching for help, I found out that I need to delete all the Warcraft III prefs and all the DivX apps and prefs. So I did that and It worked. I could play my Warcraft III. But suddenly when I was in the middle of the game, the application, again, "Quits Unexpectedly", this happened 3 times when I was playing "DotA: I f you guys are familiar with this". The first one happened when the creeps just spawned, the second one happened in te middle of the game, the third one happened when I was trying to restart the game.
is the Warcraft III still unstable on Mac OS X 10.4.7? or did I make any mistake? What should I do?
I'm new on Mac so it would be awesome if you guys helped me out.

Thanks
 
This has been discussed quite a lot here. WarCraft 3 as far as I know hasn't been updated to a Universal Binary (this is an app that can run natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs). Remember that the Intel chips and PowerPC chips are very different architectures, so they can't really understand the code that was written for the other architecture. Because of this problem in trying to suppport both PowerPC and Intel Macs, Apple allowed for creation of what is called a Univeral Binary in order to run the same app natively on either architecture (the app actually contains the code for both architectures).

For those OS X applications that don't have a Universal Binary and are only for PowerPC Macs, Apple has created a hardware emulation environment called Rosetta that is only installed on Intel Macs when OS X is installed (Leopard will be the first retail OS to sell that will install on both Intel and PPC Macs....currently there is no retail OS X version that will install on Intel, only PPC). Rosetta basically translates the PPC code to x86 instructions that the Intel CPU can understand. Of course, this causes a performance hit due to the translation process and while it's an exceptional process, it's not perfect. This is why sometimes you'll have the random gremlin appear when running a PPC OS X application (like WarCraft 3) on an Intel Mac.

How can you resolve this problem? PEster Blizzard to make a Universal Binary for your copy of WarCraft 3. You aren't the only one wanting this, so the more that gripe to Blizzard about it the more they might be willing to make a UB available. Just make sure you do so politely but assertively. ;)
 
So basically you're saying that Warcraft III is still unstable on Intel powered Macs?
I'm still kind of confused but you clear things up a bit for me though.
 
While there are some things that you can do to make it a better experience, there's only so much you can do since it's being run through Rosetta. I know that blizzard has made a Universal Binary available for World of WarCraft, but so far they haven't done anything for WarCraft III. If this still isn't good enough for you, then you might want to consider setting up a partition for Windows XP using Boot Camp and running the Windows version on your Intel iMac through XP. Not the best scenario, but it's an option that Intel Mac owners have that Mac users previously didn't have with the PowerPC architecture.

Even still, I would let Blizzard know about making a UB available for WarCraft 3.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top