My superdrive doesn't work - can i boot windows from a USB drive instead?

[equalsabracket]

I decided I wanted to play a game on my mac. This can't be too difficult, right? It turns out they dropped support for mac at some point through development, so I have to go through windows.

First, I try burning a windows ISO onto my USB. This isn't as simple as pressing burn, i quickly realised I had to go through terminal and then wait an hour for it to do this. Once this was all done, i opened bootcamp and discovered that there was an option to install from a USB drive, but only if you have a macbook air or a mac mini, because in theory every other computer has a superdrive to work with. So it wouldn't let me partition my drive.

Next, I turned to something I discovered called WineBottler. After successfully managing to install my game using this, launching the game turned out to be less than successful. I was kept on a loading page for several hours before i realised that it had crashed long ago and wasn't doing anything. I force quit, and went on to my next plan.

I busted out Parallels 7, and installed Windows inside of it. I installed the game inside of windows, launched the game, and witnessed it run at a rate of 1 frame every 2 seconds.

I'm totally out of ideas. I've wasted my whole day on this, just trying to get my stupid mac to play a game. What are my options?

 

[MrCheeto]

This isn't as simple as pressing burn, i quickly realised I had to go through terminal

Actually, this could have been accomplished through Disk Utility's GUI...

That is all I have to offer, no further. I'm sorry.

 

[Hawkeye16]

When you use a VM, it splits your memory and processor cores between the VM and the original OS.

To get better performance you should install through bootcamp.

 

[marikavs]

Listen to Hawkeye16

When you use a VM, it splits your memory and processor cores between the VM and the original OS.

To get better performance you should install through bootcamp.

Indeed! I've never played games in my BootCamped Windows installation, but having "played" with both Parallells and VMware FUSION I can attest to the fact that Windows runs much "better" from BootCamp. FWIW, better than on my old, now defunct home Dell Dimension, or on a now equally defunct work Dell Precision.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but I have seen other people get decent answers to questions on how to deal with BootCamp installations and a missing superdrive on this forum.