Heroes V Expansions on a Mac

Angelspit · Unread postby **Angelspit** » 25 Nov 2008, 20:59

Celestial Heavens reader Richard Hallas sends the following trick for faithful Mac players:

<i>You may perhaps know that Heroes V was published for the Mac but that its two expansions were not; hence Mac players like myself are either deprived of HoF and TotE or are reduced to playing them by rebooting their Macs into Windows via Apple's Boot Camp. The two virtualisation solutions, VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop, are not up to the task of running such a demanding 3D game as Heroes V.

Until now, that is. The excellent news that I'm contacting you about is that the newly released Parallels Desktop version 4, which came out just last week, is capable of running Heroes V really well within the Mac OS X environment.

I have Heroes V with HoF expansion and Heroes V TotE (version 3.1) installed on my Windows XP Professional Boot Camp partition, and when I'd installed Parallels 4, I booted this Boot Camp partition through Parallels just to see how well Heroes V would run, if at all. I'd tried this previously with VMware Fusion version 2 (the current release), and the results were absolutely hopeless: glacial speeds and extremely poor graphical rendering.

Imagine my surprise to find that Parallels 4 runs Heroes V virtuallyperfectly! I set all the graphical options to maximum quality and played at a resolution of 1920x1200 on my 23" Apple CinemaDisplay, and the results were just excellent. The game played at a very good speed (obviously slightly less good than using the game 'natively' under Boot Camp, but more than acceptably fast) with superb graphical quality. Thinking it was too good to be true, I played through a whole single-player scenario (The Days of Fire, supplied with the game), and it worked faultlessly from start to finish; not a single problem or glitch.

The only very minor issue I've encountered is that there seems to bea problem with some of the shadows in the game. Moving creatures that cast shadows seem to leave a shadow-trail rather than a moving shadow. This is most obvious during battles, though it also affects the adventure map when birds fly overhead: the shadows they leave don't erase themselves immediately, and so you see a trail for a while (though it's not too off-putting and clears itself up eventually). But this is a very minor problem (doubtless something that will be fixed in an update) and in all other respects that graphics look superb.

As for the speed, overall I think that it's pretty much on a par with the Mac version of Heroes V, which runs under Cider technology; at least, it seems to run at a similar overall speed to that of my dual-core laptop when I played Mac Heroes V on it last year (which would be rather slower than on the desktop I'm using at present). Clearly it's not going to be as fast as playing under Windows natively, without the overheads of Mac OS X and Parallels itself to get in the way. But nevertheless, I found the performance to be very acceptable indeed, which means that I will no longer reboot my machine into Windows in order to play Heroes V; it's vastly more convenient to use Parallels to do this, and the performance hit isn't nearly enough to worry me.

The machine I'm using is a 2.8GHz 8-core Mac Pro (current model) with 4GB of RAM, and I've assigned 4 of the 8 cores to Parallels. The graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT.</i>

If you would like to take a look at the original page visit this link:
https://www.celestialheavens.com/1227646778

Asheera · Unread postby **Asheera** » 25 Nov 2008, 21:02

Well that's good news for Mac users I guess

ThunderTitan · Unread postby **ThunderTitan** » 26 Nov 2008, 14:26

Except they're still Mac users...

astral76minor · Unread postby **astral76minor** » 27 Nov 2008, 01:14

I owned an Apple IIe computer back in 1985 and can understand where Apple people come from. People like Apple since most of their Mac systems are not confronted with all of the system experience required to build a PC. It is an easy computer to use. But the PC of course will always surpass in hardware and software functionality. Even though a PC requires technical expertise to build, it defeated Apple long ago in the 1980's. The Amiga was better than the two, then. Since Apple has a hard time getting software (and I experienced this), Mac users are forced to deal with things like this. THIS IS GREAT NEWS for Mac users, by chance....

Donsta · Unread postby **Donsta** » 27 Nov 2008, 13:43

One more reason why my next comp will be a Mac

ThunderTitan · Unread postby **ThunderTitan** » 27 Nov 2008, 19:36

astral76minor wrote:>>People like Apple since most of their Mac systems are not confronted with all of the system experience required to build a PC. It is an easy computer to use. <<

You might want to join the rest of us in the 21st century here...

val-gaav · Unread postby **val-gaav** » 03 Dec 2008, 11:19

Wow so to run an addon on mac Celestialheavens suggest the poor mac users who already spent a lot of cash on their mac (way more then they would spent on a PC) to take some extra cash buy a windows copy, then buy a virtualisation software for it, then buy the windows addon... It just sucks IMHO

I don't think people who buy macs want to use Windows on it but it's just me.

Angelspit · Unread postby **Angelspit** » 03 Dec 2008, 16:35

I was just sharing a trick with everyone, in case anyone wants to try it. I'm not a Ubisoft salesperson.

ThunderTitan · Unread postby **ThunderTitan** » 04 Dec 2008, 13:24

I refuse to believe that there was any implication of any "buying" anywhere here...

astral76minor · Unread postby **astral76minor** » 06 Dec 2008, 00:03

I personally despise Mac systems since their hardware is all pre-configured and the software is shabby because of that. If you want to play Heroes 5, use a custom PC. They cost less and are faster than a Mac. Join people in the 21st century and build a PC - it is not that difficult.

HellSpawn · Unread postby **HellSpawn** » 06 Dec 2008, 00:09

I have to agree with astral76minor on this one.

I've never been a fan of apple for so many reasons.

With a PC, if you have a poor piece of hardware, you can just switch it out.

Not to mention that PC software is far more stable and configurable.

ThunderTitan · Unread postby **ThunderTitan** » 06 Dec 2008, 09:46

HellSpawn wrote:>Not to mention that PC software is far more stable and configurable.<

sorry, but the very fact that there are so many different producers for PC parts = tons of compatibility issues...

Richard Hallas · Unread postby **Richard Hallas** » 16 Dec 2008, 11:34

I can't believe how much irrelevant, bigoted and ill-informed nonsense I've just read here. I thought I'd share a useful tip with my fellow Heroes fans on my favourite Heroes sites, but I really wish I hadn't bothered now. Rest assured that I won't make the same mistake again in the future. By the way, don't waste your breath writing me a nasty reply to tell me what a moron I am for using a Mac etc. etc. I've better things to do than ever visit this page again. Merry Christmas, comrades.

Asheera · Unread postby **Asheera** » 16 Dec 2008, 12:13

Did somebody call you a moron? I thought some people just said that they don't like Macs, and that's different... I mean, preferences differ, but maybe some people really appreciated your help.

And don't take ThunderTitan seriously, btw

ThunderTitan · Unread postby **ThunderTitan** » 16 Dec 2008, 14:40

Richard Hallas wrote:>I can't believe how much irrelevant, bigoted and ill-informed nonsense I've just read here.<

New to the internet are you?!

@Asheera

Yeah, because of that one post in the beginning about Mac users (have you seen the ads) it must have been all my fault, all the other comments about how they despise Macs must be irrelevant.

Metathron · Unread postby **Metathron** » 16 Dec 2008, 16:47

I mean really, TT, you ill-informed bigot.

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