Spore on a macbook?

September 11, 2008 10:33 PM

Spore on a black macbook?

It gives me a warning that my video card isn't supported, but it installs anyway, i can start playing the cell mode, but as soon as it gets to the part where i have to edit my creature, the screen is black and i can't do anything. Has anybody else seen this? I have the gma950 card on it. Is there a way to get it to work? It's wierd cause the windows version supports the gma950 card, why wouldn't the mac version? If I install Bootcamp or parallels will I be able to run it?

posted by empath to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

It's because Spore uses the Cider library to convert Windows Direct3D calls to OpenGL. The OpenGL drivers for the GMA950 on MacOS probably don't have the equivalent rendering features that Spore expects to use, giving you the black screen. Decreasing graphics detail may result in whatever feature it is not being used, so give that a try. If you install Bootcamp you'll be able to run the Windows version on the GMA950.
posted by zsazsa at 10:55 PM on September 11, 2008 [1 favorite]

A friend tried installing Spore on a black Macbook under Bootcamp - it worked, but then the machine overheated and she wasn't able to play for more than a few minutes. It doesn't sound like a good idea.
posted by adrianhon at 1:14 AM on September 12, 2008

Yeah, the GMA950 is utter crap. And unfortunately the same card I have in my MacBook. I never anticipated there being any hope of playing Spore on this thing, and it looks like you've confirmed it.
posted by joshrholloway at 5:08 AM on September 12, 2008

The GMA950 chipset on the older Macbooks is not supported. Newer Macbooks have the X3100, which is supported.
posted by mkultra at 5:24 AM on September 12, 2008 [1 favorite]

Destructoid's report on Spore and MacBooks.
posted by spamguy at 6:31 AM on September 12, 2008

I played Spore on my white macbook with a gma950, only I played it on my bootcamp partition. Seems that video card is supported for the windows version, but not the mac version.

In other news, as soon as I got past the tribal stage I found spore to be boring and ultimately not worth the $.
posted by nougat at 7:03 AM on September 12, 2008

The gma950 is not a gamer video card. Its a garbage cheapest 2d chip available. You need a computer the meets this games minumum requirements. This has nothing to do with drivers or software. The hardware cannot handle it. Most anything by nvidia or ATI will work.

Spore website says:

A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0


IIRC, the 950 on the macbook only uses 64megs of ram.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:54 AM on September 12, 2008

...and all of its shaders, and most of the 3D pipeline, is implemented in software.
posted by Netzapper at 11:02 AM on September 12, 2008