Supreme Commander on MacBook Pro

This friday I joined Paulo to pick up a WII controller at a gaming store. He asked the guy at the counter for a demo disk of Supreme Commander, an RTS that I’ve been eagerly awaiting. Back at the office he had a look at the specs required and then gave me the disk as his gaming PC wasn’t up to it and he mostly plays WII these days anyway. Back home I found that my own gaming PC also struggeled a bit but then I remembered that Apple released an update to BootCamp the other day.

The MacBook Pro is quite a piece of hardware and it has a better GPU than my gaming PC so I thought I’d try BootCamp again to see what kind of performance I’d get. Easier said than done as my 120Gb harddrive was almost full and Bootcamp would need about 12Gb of space to install the game and XP. After a lot of cleaning and backing up old stuff, I had more than 30gb free, but BootCamp still wouldn’t install since there wasn’t enough contiguous free space on the drive. OSX has this funky Unix filesystem that supposedly does not suffer from de-fragmentation so there’s no tool in the OS to compact what is on the disk. After a bit of researching, I found this tool called iDefrag that did the job in two hours for $30. I now had 30Gb of contiguous space and BootCamp installed smoothly.

It’s kind of funny - updating XP after the install takes longer than the install itself. I must say that after using a Mac for such a long time, it really feels messy with all those balloons popping up in the lower right corner telling you that you don’t have any antivirus installed, windows update needs to be updated, I need to activate my XP, I need to prove that I have a Genuine copy, a bunch of updates must be installed and so on. OSX is just so sleek and “wise” compared to that. Anyway - Supreme Commander runs beautifully on the MacBook so I’m picking up a copy of the full game tomorrow. Great Fun and the zoom from World View to Battle is amazing! Runs pretty smooth on the native 1680x1050 resolution on the MacBook Pro.

Too bad that I didn’t try this before ordering a new motherboard and a MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB for the gaming PC. Guess I’ll install Vista then since I’m soon the owner of a DirectX 10 capable Graphics card or maybe I should cancel the order? Hmmm…