Im slightly confused. Steam has been released for Mac and there is no need for this Crossover business? You can natively play TF2 on Steam on a Mac. Maybe I missed the point, though.
Many Macs can run TF2 in Crossover but can’t run it natively: the OS X system requirements are much higher than the Windows requirements for Valve’s games.
(I believe this is because DirectX supports certain features on a wider set of GPUs than OpenGL currently does, and Valve’s engine depends on those abilities. For instance, I have an Nvidia 7600 GT/256 GPU in my current iMac, which is handling Windows TF2 just great. In fact, much lower GPUs than that will run some Valve games. But in OS X, you can’t run Valve games without at least an Nvidia 8XXX series GPU.)
I’ll get a new iMac in a month or two I hope—but meanwhile, I’m playing
For the record, these are the TF2/Crossover 7.1.1 quirks I’m finding (this is not the latest Crossover):
1. Steam wouldn’t launch at all—but I’ve fixed that as above
2. Steam’s News window crashes—but that only pops up maybe once a day, and this is avoidable as above. (In fact, the second time it returned for me, I didn’t have to rush to close it: it crashed once and then on re-launch the News window never appeared and never crashed.)
3. Crashes when exiting fullscreen (such as Command-~ to get back to Steam) or changing resolution. But the res change DOES work: it is remembered next time you launch TF2. Not really a problem.
4. Occasional other random crashes or freezes (never had to reboot my Mac or anything, I’ve just had crashes of Steam and/or TF2 itself). So far not too frequent.
5. Occasionally the arrow cursor appears when it shouldn’t. Hit Esc twice and it goes away. Not frequent.
6. Occasionally the arrow cursor won’t appear! No help for that other than the quit and relaunch, or just navigate blind using the rollover effects in the UI. Not frequent.
Basically it runs, including joining and starting servers. Looks good, plays great, runs smooth. (I didn’t count FPS, but I’m used to playing native UT2004, and this seems comparable despite having fancier visuals. I do have TF2’s textures set low, as they were by default, but I’ll play with that more. And I boosted my res from 1024x640 default to 1200x800. Maybe I could go higher, but it looks fine this way so I’ll leave well enough alone for now.)
EDIT: One more thing to try if the News window is making Steam hang: leave it open and just Exit Steam from the menu before it can crash. With a clean exit, it should remember that you’ve seen that News (even if you never really did!) and won’t re-show the News window (until some new announcement another day).
I will say that even when TF2/Steam crashes, it comes back. Maybe not on the first launch, but try, try again!
