Railworks on Mac using Parallels

[UP1989]

Hello all,

I am wondering if anyone has tried running railworks on mac using parallels desktop. I have a mac book pro dual booted with windows xp. I am sick of having to shut down and reboot my computer every time I want to play railworks. I bought parallels a while back before I got railworks and thought I would try running railworks through it. Unfortunately it didn't work, the game wont load all the way and on the rare times that it did it would be extremely laggy and unusable. I know it can be done, I have seen pictures of it running flawlessly on parallels. I know it can be done I'm just not sure why it wont work for me. I am not sure if the settings in parallels are set wrong or what. I'm just looking for any advice for running railworks on my mac.

Thanks in advance,
Zeb Thomas

[Scott_AUS]

Hi Zeb, I have RW2 running fine on my Mac, using Parallels.

What are you running exactly?

I'm on Parallels 6. I'm running a 64bit Windows 7 Ultimate for Railworks. I do have a Vista 32-bit Home as well, but haven't done much RW on it.

My Mac is a iMac 21", current model - i3-3.2GHz, 4GB of RAM with the ATI Radeon HD5670 (512Mb) graphics card in it.

In the VM properties for the guest - I'm only running the default - 1Gb of RAM (I probably would increase this to 3GB (yellow zone!) as when I'm running RW2, I'm not really running anything else to speak of but have also run RW2 with all my normal programs running/open (usual mac usage - 15 programs running as I type this).

I have run in both Convergence and Full Screen - can't say I've seen noticable difference in either for guidance.

So in summary, I'm running pretty well default, but that should give you some settings to compare against.

I thought I was having issues with WCML, but fired up my old desktop (Vista, grunty web delopment desktop) - same outcome - then saw on forums that most machines take a thumping. So as a comparison, I started RW2, Oxford to Paddington route, Chasing Yellows scenario, on load up sitting at the station my FPS is 20 up to 25.

Have a compare, tell me more about what you are running - see if we can't get you up and running a bit better.

[Scott_AUS]

p.s. Parallels has <F6> as a default to "minimise the active program, recommend you uncheck the <f6> box - it still sort of works when you hit it, but disabling it is less painful to show labels in RW2.

[UP1989]

hello, thank you for the response.

I have a mac book pro with 4gb of ram and a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM and a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I am using parallels 5 but downloaded the trail version of 6 to see if it worked any better, which it did not. I am using windows xp which I wasn't sure if that could be the problem. I do have windows 7 available to me too but I do not have it installed. I have played railworks in bootcamp a lot. But I have been looking for an alternative way to run it without rebooting every time. And its not just the game that wont work well for me, windows xp takes a very long time to boot up. Sometimes it can take a half hour for everything to load. I have done a little tweaking with parallels and at this moment it is running just about the same as you have yours set to. Nothing seams to speed up parallels enough to run windows much less the game. I hope this information helps, hopefully we can get this working for me.

[Scott_AUS]

From the specs, is that a 13" MBP?

[UP1989]

Yes it sure is

[Scott_AUS]

OK....My understanding (...and am very happy to be wrong here) is that with the MBP 13" the memory is shared between the core and the video card, ie it's not a separated card with it's own RAM. So while you are aligning the settings, your RAM is being pulled and pushed in regards to supporting RW2 hence the struggle.

I'm running an iMac as mentioned, so it and the MBP 15/17" have separate cards - which is probably the difference you are seeing.

RAM Upgrade possible? It may give you some relief?

sorry it's not more of a "check a setting" fix...

[UP1989]

Mhh well it makes sense. Makes me wish I had gotten a 17 inch now, but I just didn't have the money. I know I can upgrade to 8 gb of ram, which I might just look into. I'm not sure how much it will cost but I will check it out. Well thank you for the information. At least I know what's causing it now, before I was just so frustrated because I had no idea how to fix the problem. So thanks again for the help. I guess I will just have to keep using boot camp to play the game. I'm hoping that railworks will be made for mac someday in the near future. Then it will solve all my problems. lol. But hey thanks again for your help, its nice to know what's going on.

[Scott_AUS]

No problems at all, glad to be of assistance.

[UP1989]

Well I had a very tech savvy friend over the other day, he was able to get railworks running in parallels. I couldn't really tell what he did with parallels, but I know one thing he did was disable most of the start up applications on windows. Besides that I have no clue what he did lol. But railworks is finally working in parallels for me, so im happy. lol.

[Scott_AUS]

That's a great outcome.
It'd be great if he can drop you a few notes on actions he took, then this thread may help others in addition to the other settings we went through?
Happy Driving

[UP1989]

Yeah I'll talk to him and put what he did on here. I think I might still get more ram someday, but for now its running great. I've been running railworks a bunch through it and no problems yet.