The Boot Camp experience
Jul 6th, 2007 by Kevin Holler
Before my iMac had arrived i had begun researching how i would play my games on the iMac. After stumbling across the Boot Camp page over at apple.com, i took note of the page. Once i felt comfortable with Mac OS, i downloaded Boot Camp, installed it, started it and installed Windows XP and transfered the licence from my older pc.
After rebooting i ended up back in Mac OS. Puzzled i began to read the documentation (something you should do first, but nobody ever does) and realised i had to hold a key for the boot screen to apear. I was presented with two shiney HD icons and clicked the windows one. In comparioson to Mac OS, i was amazed at the boot time Mac OS had after realising that Windows slow boot speed had nothing to do with my old pc. Anywho, i logged into windows, updated it and got my games going on it. The sole purpose of this whole adventure. The driver package that Apple had provided was excellent, and even the tools for setting the screen brightness were very helpfull.
Game One - Battlefield 2
So i installed Battlefield 2, patched it and started it. I decided to test the game with low graphics settings first of all to see how if it was going to take a liking to my new iMac. The game loaded fine, so i exited and advanced to the Video settings tab. I threw graphics settings up to the max and started a new game. But this time the whole game just existed at 60% loading, and threw me right back to my windows desktop. Once again i was puzzled, so i opened up my browser and googled. Nobody seemed to have this problem and various reports of the game working at max gfx settings had been reported. So i tweaked the settings a bit and got it working eventually. The Game runs like a dream now.
Game 2 - Anno 1701
The second of the games i installed was Anno 1701, another one of my favorites. Everything went fine with this game, all graphic settings to the max. So no problems to report with this game.
Even tho Boot Camp is still in Beta, it is an excellent tool and i’d recommend it to anyone looking to run windows applications natively under an Apple based computer. My next adventure will be with parallels, which i will blog about in the coming weeks.
