Hi guys,

Im currently looking for a new laptop after the weight of my Dell is really getting me down and am considering the Macbook Pro 17", http://www.apple.com/au/macbookpro/. I understand that this laptop has a NVidia GeForce 8600M GT adapter so it should support Pixel Shader 2.0.

1. Any Mac owners out there who have tried coding XNA on the Mac?

2. Does booting into Windows XP via boot camp make it work better?

3. Does the Mac work with the MS Wired 360 Controller ok?

4. If I run DXCapsViewer from the DirectX SDK am I only interested in PixelShaderVersion or should I look for anything else which may interfere with XNA coding?

Thanks all :)

1) I've just purchased a MacBook Pro with the intention of it being my primary XNA development platform.  I'm boot camping Vista Home Premium and can confirm both my DBP entry and the Space War starter kits compile and run fine.

2) If you want to develop on OSX you'd need to look at the Mono / XNA project.  XP would be a much smoother solution.

3) Haven't tested yet - I'll see if I can try tonight and let you know.

4) It's the shader model as a whole you are interested in (which means vertex AND pixel).

and a few random thoughts...

It's an utterly gorgeous bit of tech.

It gets hot - very hot when playing games.

Installing Windows (Vista in my case) was a breeze.

Double Quote is in the WRONG PLACE - if you are used to it being over the number 2 :)

I'm a Mac user (20" Core Duo iMac) and I code in XNA fine.

I used to use Windows via Bootcamp to do it but recently I've been using VMWare Fusion to code in and then running the code on my 360. Using this method though the only problem would be that both VMWare Fusion and Parallels only support accelerated graphics up to DirectX 8.1 so you wouldn't be able to run the games in virtualisation unless you used the reference rasterizer which is incredibly slow.

I've done quite a bit of XNA development on Intel Macs running Boot Camp and they work very well. For a while I was using a Mac Pro with a GeForce 7950 and it SMOKED! Currently I am using a slightly older Macbook Pro with an ATI x1600 w/ 128mb and it does a good job and runs every shader I've thrown at it. A friend of mine showed me the new Parallels, which now has 3D support and I was a little skeptical of how well that would work so we jumped on pouet.net and tried some demos on it. Most of them ran and at pretty acceptable framerates, but definitely nothing to write home about there. You could conceivably develop more casual XNA stuff inside parallels, but using Boot Camp is as fast as any other computer you'll use.

Also, I don't know about running Vista with the setup you describe. I'm running XP. A friend of mine tried running Vista on a Macbook Pro with identical specs and Apple didn't have any decent graphics drivers so in an OpenGL app, he got an error about trying to use a texture that was 1024x1024 or larger! But I don't have any of those problems using XP.

Thanks guys,

Think Im getting close to ordering one :) However anyone had the opportunity to try out the 360 wired controller on it yet?

Cheers

Silmar:

Thanks guys,

Think Im getting close to ordering one :) However anyone had the opportunity to try out the 360 wired controller on it yet?

Cheers

If you download the driver from http://tattiebogle.net/index.php/ProjectRoot/Xbox360Controller it works great. Handles the guitars and even the wireless controller through the receiver. That's definitely the way to go. Even installs a simple Preference Pane so you can check all the devices (in the case of multiple controllers) and test the inputs to make sure everything is working fine.

And if you do boot Windows or run in VMWare, you obviously will be fine as it'll use the Microsoft drivers.

Anyone been able to test XNA with the new Fusion Beta?

"New experimental support for DirectX 9.0 3D graphics (without shaders) to enable more Windows 3D applications and games."

http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/

>(without shaders)

Thats going to make it pretty hard to run XNA apps - unless you switch back to refrast...

How much space did you partition with Boot Camp for Windows XP? I'm thinking 60 gigs should allow for many SDKs, VS 2005 and XP.

I currently have 85GB of my hard drive for Vista and the rest (28 or 30) for OS X because I really never use OS X much besides music stuff. 60GB is going to be plenty for XP with all that stuff. You'll regret it though if you start wanting to put a bunch of games in there. That's what made me go with 85GB.

I blew away MacOS X and installed Vista Ultimate on my Mac. I did give MacOS X a fair chance for two months (and I won a Mac programmer award in 1995 :-) but it just didn't float my boat.
And, yes, when running Windows, the wired Xbox 360 controller works just fine, as does XNA Game Studio (Express).

hi there

i tried XNA on my brothers 20 inches imac (the one with aluminum and glass) and everything runs fine on xp and vista on bootcamp.. just like any other windows based pc.. you just will to get a new mouse because of the one button apple limitaion. but everything works just fine

and yes your wired xbox360 controller will work ok on windows... and even on macosx hahaha if you google abit i tried this one playing with the macosx version of the snes9x emulator and my xbox gamepad

note: tiger comes just with a beta of bootcamp.. the final version of it comes with leopard.. but right now every mac comes with leopard

currently the macbook pro and imac have shader model 4 cards and are directx 10 compatible if you are runing vista

imacs are laptops too just placed inside of a big screen

windows runs just as fine as any other laptop with the same specs.. the fact that are macs doesnt make them run better on windows hehehehe

the regular macbook i dont think would work ok.. as they have an integrated intel video chip...

hope this helps

DodongoXP:

currently the macbook pro and imac have shader model 4 cards and are directx 10 compatible if you are runing vista

That is true, however I wouldn't get a MacBook Pro hoping to do DirectX 10 programming. The iMacs are probably much nicer, but my MacBook Pro, while it runs the DX10 samples, doesn't run the samples at anything more than 25-30 fps.

imacs are laptops too just placed inside of a big screen

With faster processors, larger hard drives, and better graphics cards all at cheaper prices. So not really like laptops at all.

the regular macbook i dont think would work ok.. as they have an integrated intel video chip...

The X3100 should be perfectly fine for probably all 2D stuff and most basic 3D stuff. It's not going to give you all the fancy shaders, but it's still going to be a decent GPU for learning the basics. If you get into the higher end graphics programming, you will likely want a real GPU like on in the MacBook Pro or iMac.

SuburbanMonkey:

I used to use Windows via Bootcamp to do it but recently I've been using VMWare Fusion to code in and then running the code on my 360.

You mean you're able to export your builds directly to your XBox via VMWare? I haven't been able to get this to work... the VMWare machine can't find the XBox, even though it's a cinch if I reboot into Windows and try again. Any advice?

(BTW, hi everyone... I started with XNA a couple of weeks ago and this is my first post. Whee!)

Can somebody confirm, that XNA runs o.k. for 2D Development using either Parallels or Vmware on a MBP with 256mb grafik memory and vista ins bootcamp?

XNA does NOT run in Parallels, since DX9 isn't fully supported (at least I've never gotten it to work). Everything works fine in Boot Camp, though it can get a little hot in Windows.

I love being able to use it on the go, but it wouldn't be a great primary development machine.

No, it will not run in VMware or Parallels. The reason is that the emulated graphics adapter is not supported for XNA.

It will run fine using BootCamp.

Actually I was informed the other day that the new VMware Fusion 2 Beta will run XNA games because it supports DX9.0c and SM 2.0. I haven't tested this myself, but if someone wants to run XNA games without rebooting into Windows, it sounds like it might finally be possible. Not sure if there's a performance hit from it, but it's there if you want it.

Plus you can always do your coding in VMware or Parallels and then deploy to the Zune or Xbox 360 and run your games there. Just as another option.

I have used XNA 2.0 on VMWare Fusion 2b1 running Vista 64bit, runned slowly on my MacBook Pro 2.5GHz 4GB ram! I couldn't get it working on Windows XP under VM

Interesting stuff - there is a video showing it running proper DX9 games http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCcyoHp9RIM which would imply that most XNA apps should run just fine.. Those games are running quite well

Anyone know if they are doing it all in software or passing it on to a GPU if its present?

Interesting. I'll try running one of my 3D games in VMware later tonight and see how it fares. My guess is that you have to throw a lot of your RAM into the virtual machine to see it run well at all. Even if you have 4GB physical, VMware usually only gives virtual machines 512 or 1024MB of RAM by default. You usually have to go up that yourself.

Related to all this, I noticed another really cool thing about VMware is that it can partner up with BootCamp. So I can dual-boot my machine and choose between OS X and Windows, but then VMware can use that second partition as your virtual machine hard drive. So it's a really cool way to have the freedom to run some apps side-by-side with OS X, but then boot up Windows when you really need all the hardware power.

So here's the catch with VMware. It only supports VS/PS2.0 (which is fine), but you have to be running in XP. It won't work inside of Vista. That right there is a no-go for me personally because I like Vista way more than XP. But for those who like XP, it would probably be worth checking out. Shame Vista doesn't work at all because I'd love to be in OS X doing my XNA work. :)

Thinking that most of this is already answered, but posting anyway since there's not really a "solution" listed from someone who's made it work.

Studio 2.0 seems to run fine on my macbook pro. Only having trouble with the 3d components.

ie:

GraphicsDeviceCapabilities caps =
                    adapter.GetCapabilities(DeviceType.Hardware);

fails miserably...

errors out in the build (just tested from the sample robot game)

also errors in other software that needs to get directx questions answered at a system level (the blade3d beta won't launch either & the error looks to be something similar)

That being said, I'm only running vmware fusion 1.1.1 & xppro - i tend not to upgrade if something is already working.

there's posts in here that imply that this could be resolved in the new beta, but I didn't get a good read on if anyone has actually made it work...

has someone? if so, please post, would be nice to run this in the virtual machine & not have to dual boot or move to my other pc (my copy of adobe CS3 master collection is mac)

 

The only way to run an XNA Game Studio game in VMware is by running the VMware Fusion 2 Beta and running Windows XP in it. That said I did actually try that out the other day and it's still hardly worth it. Frame rates jump between 30 and 60 frames per second for absolutely no reason (I was running the default Windows game template). Honestly, it's much more worth it to just dual boot. I do it all the time and it really isn't that big of a pain. The other option is to use VMware to write the code and then deploy it off to the Xbox 360, but the deployment over and over could become time consuming for every little change you made.