How To: Play SWTOR on Mac OS X using BootCamp

uhuu, vexx to the rescue! great tutorial man, it will help alot of people (specially beginners)

great read man, you should really start making more of these, not everyone is a computer savvy

I think there was a hack somewhere that could install Windows 7 on OS X 10.4 - well, I'm not 100% sure but I'll look into it and report back great tutorial btw

it sucks Bioware didn't made any native version of SWTOR. They should follow Blizzard on this one too damn it Anyway, there's a thread on the official forums for people who vote on such option to be added, however, I have my doubts

yes i will be playing during school during the lectures ohhh yeahhh...

Do I need to purchase a windows dvd or can i use the one that came with my PC?

one day they will release a native MAC client... until then have you actually calculated the size of the SW:TOR install and a windows 7 install? the client its self is around 30gb I hear so 32GB seems way under the space you would need to get this done. Also should be noted that sometimes the BootCamp assistant fails to partition and you have to wipe your drive and restore from back up.

I think a native Mac client will be released too. It's fair enough since there are more and more ppl using Macs.
And this is a great guide btw, gg!

This is great ! Now i only miss the Mac ...

Originally Posted by Synatra

Do I need to purchase a windows dvd or can i use the one that came with my PC?

you need to have a different license, otherwise, the 2 machines will conflict at authentication

Fantastic article. Extremely thorough. Now there's no excuse not to see all you Mac people there on launch day! Love it!

Good article. I installed on a Macbook Pro for the 11/11 beta. I had 25gig free on my Win7 bootcamp partition (60gig partition size) and was able to download the SWTOR client and patch data. However, the installation failed due to lack of drive space.

Having cleaned a few gig of space I had just under 30gig free and it installed, but there was not much free space.

Yesterday I cloned my Mac onto a larger drive and allocated 200gig for the Win7 partition with a fresh install and am downloading the SWTOR client and patch for this weekend's beta. While 200gig is overkill, I would much rather have PLENTY of space on the drive for future updates, add on software should it come in the future and for disk paging should it need.

Your partition should be at least 100gig, with 30 - 40gig free space MINIMUM after install of Win7 and updates. It would be better if you can have more.

yep, I agree that the partition should be bigger but I know some people with older Macs just can't afford it. For example, on my MacBook Pro I have only a 320 gig HDD, so making a 100 GB partition kinda sucks

What about linux?

Originally Posted by jgalan1981

What about linux?

Hmm, I'll think about that and maybe I'll do an article for SWTOR on Linux too. Basicly you need to have Wine installed under Linux and you're good

Thanks the the guide. Wish you were around about 5 months ago when I first split my hard drive. I am a Mac Book Pro owner who has a Mac built with gaming HD. I had split my harddrive to play alot of the games out there. There is a big untapped market, but just first hand.. I run SWTOR and I love it... no issues.

thanks again.. still learned some stuff

I work in a law school and up until last year, the software we use for students to take exams on computers was not available for OSX, so I became quite familiar with bootcamp. I am running it on my new 13" pro with windows 7; and my four year old 17" pro with xp and I do see some misinformation here.

First off, when bootcamp was first offered in beta it was available on OSX 10.4, but once it went out of beta (coinciding with the release of Leopard) Apple removed support for 10.4 and you could no longer install it. If you still had the installer and drivers; you could put it on an older system and I'm sure people could have hacked and redistributed installers; but it was no longer supported. Currently, Apple is only supporting drivers for windows 7. If you have an older machine with windows drivers on the mac install disc you can install vista or xp; but updates to bootcamp can be buggy and make your performance les than good. On a new machine bootcamp will have you make a driver disk before you partition the drive. which will basically install bootcamp and the drivers into the Windows OS.

But the other important thing to note, as someone else mentioned, is drive space. Windows 7 I believe takes up maybe 10 gigs and SWtor will take up 20-35 or so depending on language files, but each update will take up a decent chunk and in a year or two if we are graced with a xpac count on another 6-10GB. You also want to have free space for virtual memory and scratch space for downloading and installing updates to both windows and SW. You could squeak by with 50-60 GB to start I'm sure, but I'd go with 90-100 GB in the partition to be safe assuming this is your long term plan, and that's assuming you're keeping the rest of the partition clear.

Also, even if you want a stripped down system, get some sort of AV. A lot of accounts get hacked from viruses like koobface which can be had from bad facebook links and leads to keyloggers. And I know you're probably not used to dealing with these sorts of threats if you're running into a Mac.

As a sidenote; over the two weekends I played beta, the first weekend I played on my old 17" with xp which has a decent graphics card, and the second I was using my new 13" which doesn't have the extra VRAM; but a faster newer processor, both with 8GB ram and I'd have to say that the performance seemed better on the four year old 17" pro than the 3 month old 13".

-skexy

I know this point has already been made, but just to reiterate - you suggest that a partition of 20gb will be enough for Windows; it's not. I would strongly recommend you give as much as you can. The game installation is 25gb at minimum let alone ridiculous Windows updates etc., patches, expansions. Just for those who are low on HD-space :-) Just saying this yet again - because it's the only issue I had today when I was partitioning and the game is now ready for installation!

I have been really looking forward to getting this game, however I have a 2010 MacBook Pro with these specs...

2.66 GHz Intel Core i7

8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB

Intel HD Graphics VRAM (Total): 288 MB

Will it run well with these specs? I also have plenty of hardrive space to dedicate to the windows partition so thats not an issue. I'm just concerned that I'm going to get windows and SWOTOR and there not going to play nice with each other which would suck. Any input would be much appreciated.