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So....what to do. I tried a "gaming laptop", but that thing was a tank and I still needed to bring my Air with me. Hmph. After doing a little homework, I discovered that the Air actually has a little tiny bit of 3D video hardware built in. Nothing to write home about, but better than many of my non-gaming Win laptops.
The good news: MWO runs (okay, jogs...slowly) on a mid 2012 Macbook Air! No, I don't recommend this as a "proper" rig for gaming. But at low settings I'm getting around 28-30fps which I find tolerable for casual gaming while on the road.
The bad news: it was a bit of a pain to get running.
The other good news: once I figured out the trick it's relatively easy. I'm here to share the steps with anyone who wants to give this a try.
Note: the trick requires VMWare Fusion or some other virtualization software that can run the bootcamp image in a virtual machine.
1. Install bootcamp using Apple's Boot Camp Assistant. You'll need a copy of Windows (I used Win7). Make sure you give yourself enough hard disk space to fit the OS, MWO, and whatever else you want to run. I used 42GB and it just barely fits with enough room for all the Windows updates.
2. Once booted into Win7 from bootcamp, make sure to do a round of updates. There was an update to the graphics driver in there that might be important (not sure if it matters but better safe than sorry)
3. Download MWO. I also had to run the MWO repair utility. Don't know why, but it found a few files to clean up.
4. If you can run MWO at this point, awesome -- you're done! I couldn't. It would die and dissappear right after logging in. This is where I needed to find the trick.
5. Reboot into OSX and then open the bootcamp partition in VMWare.
6. Run MWO and change your video settings to use DirectX 11. I also changed my settings to full screen and match the resolution of the Air and set everything else to "low". I'm not sure which of these did the trick (I suspect DX11) but once I did this all was good and I could boot into Windows directly via bootcamp and have a tolerable MWO experience. As much as 28fps low quality is tolerable -- YMMV.
A couple of other notes/comments:
- When running in the VM, expect MWO to be slooooow. Be patient -- the only reason you're in there is to change the video settings. Then get out and reboot directly into Windows.
- If anyone knows how to change the video settings outside of the game, I'm all ears. On my main rig the nvidia utility seems to be able to do that but I'm not sure what file they're mucking around with.
- Apple keyboard function key mapping is a bit of a pain. You'll probably want to change your key mapping around a bit.
There you have it. Mock me if you want for running MWO on a Macbook Air, but at least I'm able to play when away from my main rig!
