I never played Fire Emblem, but I like trying something new. I have a good feeling about this game, but only time can tell: will I like it, will I beat it, how long will it stay in my memory.
It’s wonderful to see that we will be able to run frontier models on our desks at home, with the privacy and energy efficiency we deserve. The future comes knocking, sooner than I expected. More power to the rest of us. www.macstories.net/news/meta…
I am shocked by brutal lay-offs at one of my favourite publications. I’ve been listening to NVC and Beyond for a long time. More and more I am convinced that we as creative people cannot depend on anyone; to survive we have to go independent.
GOG GALAXY 2.1 now supports Apple Silicon natively and doesn’t run on Intel anymore, raising the dependency target to Sonoma. Sadly, I noticed that the app now takes twice the disk space. What happened? SSD price is not cheap; I wish management gave some priority to optimising for disk space.
No issues running on Golden Gate. I had to delete the old version before I could update to 2.1. I am happy it’s a modern build now and will be supported on macOS 28. Although a major GOG GALAXY appeal is game preservation, it doesn’t mean it needs to preserve itself and run on obsolete macOS versions. I am quite happy with this update; despite the increase in disk space, it’s still a step in the right direction.
As reported by Verge on 1 July, Sony is killing all physical discs after January 2028
This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.
That’s an interesting statement, and that’s not my preference at all, I think. So! I decided to check the actual numbers.
My Amazon order history:
Total: £194.40
PSN store:
Total: £89.00
Even with an additional £68 worth of digital PSVR2 games I never can play because the headset makes me feel sick, it’s still £37 less than what I spend on brand-new physical games ordered from Amazon.
I have not counted many physical games I ordered second-hand from CeX. Prices rounded.
There’s an issue with the main game menu scaling; the game is hard-coded to run in full screen, but the UI elements do not align with the pointer position. This is not a blocker and just a quality-of-life issue; after I was able to get through the menu, the game itself had correct click areas.
control + V in Windows to paste. We might need to restart the VM for UTM Guest Tools to start working.At this point, we should see the following error, which curiously also happens in CrossOver and PortingKit.
Image taken from GitHub
You might attempt a patch from the repo above; it didn’t fix the issue for me. Thanks to zocker-160 from Germany, for saving my holiday, there’s another patch which solves the issue, and this is the only patch we need.
The game will launch now, and we should see pre-rendered intro videos running with no reasonable frame drops. I tested this on a stock MacBook Air M3. Now we need to get through the menu and I realised that the game is unplayable; I could hear the music but the game appears to be frozen. Windows even detected a hang; this is helpful, but it only worked once. Future hangs required force quitting the executable manually.1
This is where Windows “Compatibility” options helped me; there are multiple flags and options Redmond gives us. Eventually I found what’s was working for me; I am not claiming this is the minimum change we need to make; I likely enabled more than was needed.
Click “Apply”, twice,2 then the game is running and playable. 🎉
You might want to play with resolution settings, don’t!** Keep them as default 1024px by 768px. It led to an issue where I couldn’t see any of the UI, couldn’t revert the settings and had to wipe the GOG installation and reapply the patch.
To fix the menu issue, I attempted to force the exe to run in a window using DxWnd, it does fix the menu, but it doesn’t work with Windows emulation unfortunately. And it has a pretty bad UI, first thing we have to do to intercept an .exe launch is to right-click on an empty space.
I have experimented with Windows XP builds, which I do not recommend, but if you need to, this ISO from the Internet Archive already has a pre-installed build, so there’s no waiting. However, we can’t access the internet on Windows XP, and UTM Guest Tools do not work either. I ended up creating my own ISO image using macOS Disk Utility and a single Terminal command, thanks to this article. Disk Utility > New Image > Image from Folder. Choose the “DVD/CD master” option. Then run hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o FILE.iso FILE.dvd.cdr.
I also attempted PortingKit and even the CrossOver free trial; I attempted both patches mentioned above to manually override the files inside the Exe folder, but nothing worked.
UTM has many options for GPU emulations; none of the options I tried helped me to work around the 3D issue.
Inside the VM, I have been experimenting with some emulation which has Voodoo in its name; this fixes the 3D error, but performance is unplayable. Essentially, it forwards all GPU calls to the CPU, and unsurprisingly it works but with FPS below 1.
The last time I used Windows was XP, control + option + delete no longer shows the Task Manager. Use control + shift + esc; I have not tested this yet, thanks for CCleaner the info. ↩︎
With the exception of iTunes, I have never seen an “Apply” button in any of the settings windows on OS X. I hope Windows 12 can copy this UX too, and I am optimistic. ↩︎
Synth Riders on visionOS is really fun.
Playing Half-Life 1 on Mac, using Mac Virtual Display is awesome in Vision Pro. It’s feels immersive. You can’t run it from Steam, but there’s a workaround.
Interestingly, Switch 2 has HDR enabled and the resolution is set to 4K. Although I know that my TV doesn’t support it with PS5, I don’t know how this is possible with HDMI 2.0 on both ends.
I am not 100% sure, but it looks like Luigi’s Mansion 3 runs in a higher resolution on my Switch 2. The game has an update before I launched it.
Last of Us, Part 1. Let’s go.
