Steam for Mac Platform
 

Guys, The Steam app from Valve is up in open beta.

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/12/...ot-yet-active/

( The article says it's not yet active, but it already is :) )

Here's the info. You can download free Portal and use it as long as the service is in beta stage. We should see Portal and Torchlight as first two titles. They announced new releases every wednesday. What's more, this platform is native to Mac OS X, and Valve announced that every new game will be Mac/PC ready at the launch time. Even better info - those of you who already own Steam powered games with SteamPlay option ( HL series, Portal etc. ) will be able to play cross platform with no additional costs.

As for now, the servers are melted....but this should cool down soon. And another thing is that the community asks hackintosh users not to take part in hardware survey, which is understandable so i guess i'll join it ;)

Anyway, many of you probably already know that but i just felt like sharing the info with you guys. Steam for Mac is quite a success for the platform, and probably the beginning of "not ignoring Mac so much anymore". See you on Steam.

The only bad part is that there is no good games for mac...

Not yet. But still, Portal is great, Torchlight is also nice for action rpg fans, and i can't say that i don't like Civilization :) Let's see what else will Valve prepare for us.

I tried it on my AMD Snow Leopard install and portal doesn't work, it just crashes... Any ideas why? says the error is:
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: 0x000000000000000d, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Thread 0 Crashed: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0 QuickTimeH264.scalar 0x2bbc7c7d JVTCompEncodeFrame + 2940844

Got the Same Error as scififan im also using a amd cpu....

extremely poor performance on my core 2 duo, 4 gb ram, ATI 4850. At max settings I'm only getting 20 FPS or less. In windows I have >80 FPS.

Using SL 10.6.3 with 10.6.2 drivers. Anyone know the problem?

i would say this is a temp fix so backup QuickTimeH264.component and delete QuickTimeH264.component from /system/library/quicktime/ it seems to work 4 portal tho...

So, when the intro movie starts playing, Portal will crash because of the component file. No need to move the component file out of it's folder in that case, just tell Portal not to play an intro movie.

Right click Portal in Steam > Properties > Set Launch Options > -novid > OK. :)

Now I would like to know what's wrong with our QuickTimeH264.component file, is it because it is patched by Marvin's AMD Utility ? I'm not even sure if it's patched.

Guys there's already a patch out for this, solving the intro video crash problem. Give it a try :)

Anyway, got around 28-30 fps on mid/hi setting with GeForce 9400M so i guess the performance is quite good.

Perm fix for amd: download h264 fixer http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utiliti...64-Fixer.shtml
then patch with amd patcher quicktimeh264.component at /System/Library/Quicktime
videos should work now...

Thanks, works great.

well, i have problems to get steam running.
"Steam failed to load: *SteamStartEngine(0xb.... ...Partial field header at end of record"
Does not look like a quicktime problem.

Ok so now we have both Half-Life 2 and Episodes 1+2 available, and it's definitely a great game. Guess what's next. Left4Dead would be pretty sweet.

As for now i guess it's going quite well.