Total Annihilation

August 16, 2012 7:45 AM

Is it possible to play the original Total Annihilation online (on e-WarZone etc.) on my mac?

It's a recent model MacBook Air running OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Or would I have to install Boot Camp + Windows?

posted by mnemonic to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

TA is pretty old at this point, you shouldn't have any trouble running it in an XP virtual machine through, say, parallels.
posted by Oktober at 8:07 AM on August 16, 2012

TA had to do software 3D rendering (though its units have a low-by-modern-standards-poly-count) because in 1996, nobody but the gamer elite had graphics cards. I'd give Parallels/Virtualbox a try (XP? I'd try to get Win98 SP2 if you can, but XP should run it fine) but watch the ol' CPU and see how it does. The default unit limit is 500 (250/side, in fact) but that's adjustable in the TA command-line. If your system starts to crawl, well, welcome to 1996! and drop the unit limit by 50 and stop Turtling.

Have fun storming the Core! And no Commander-bombing in single-player!
posted by Sunburnt at 9:50 AM on August 16, 2012

The Spring RTS open-source project is intended as a modernization of the TA engine, has 3d-accelerated shiny graphics, and runs natively on the Mac. I'm not sure how much trouble it is at this point to set it up to look and act like original TA, but I know its similarity to TA was a selling point of the early releases. There's a TON of mod content out there, you may be able to find something close to what you want at least.
posted by Alterscape at 9:55 AM on August 16, 2012

(Side note for TA fans: Uber Entertainment is looking to write a new version of TA that will "turn it up to 11", and there's a kickstarter for that which looks likely to succeed and to nail at least one of their stretch goals considering they've pulled in a quarter of a mil in like the first day or two.
posted by SpecialK at 11:34 AM on August 16, 2012