Skyrim on a Mac

Alright you gamers:  Skyrim probably took up a lot of time over the weekend if you play on a console or Windows PC.  That’s great?  How are you liking it so far?  But today’s article is geared towards Mac gamers, who spent most of their weekend trying to get Skyrim to run on their systems, either by virtualization using Parallels or VMWare, or dual booting into Windows using the Boot Camp utility.  Even I went out to Best Buy and bought a full copy of Windows 7 Home Premium with the intention of installing it on my MacBook Pro — just so I could play Skyrim.  Thankfully though, before I’d even opened the box containing the Microsoft OS, a better option came along and saved me from all that (and not to mention, about $217 with tax.)  So, how did I get Skyrim running on my Mac?  Read on.

Bethesda’s recommended system requirements for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have been dubious from the beginning, and now that the game is out, people are finding it runs perfectly well on systems that are well below those specs.  For one thing, they recommend a quad core processor — yet, the game can only use two cores.  And there are other things, like the supported video cards.  Basically, most people are finding the game doesn’t really need all that to play perfectly well on their sub-recommendation equipped systems.

So, when the guys over at The Porting Team announced Saturday night that they’d managed to produce both Wineskin and Cider wrappers for Skyrim, I took back Windows 7 and started hacking.  The game runs fairly well on my mid-2009 MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.53 mhz, the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, and 8 GB RAM.  Here is a link to a blog post, where one Mac user posted a video of Skyrim running on the same laptop I described above. By running the game from within a wrapper (which is really just a tiny virtual machine created solely for use with a specific application or game) I don’t have to use Windows at all.  That’s great news for Macheads like me.  So go out and get yourself a Windows version of Skyrim, crank up your adt security so no one will bother you for a few hours or days, and download a wrapper, and you’re good to go.