Getting your copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 for Win/Lin to run on Macintosh without buying a new copy
by Adam G. Lowe
Friday, May 5, 2006
Updated July 18, 2007
Introduction
I
purchased a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 for PC. It runs in
Windows and Linux. But it does not run in Macintosh. I
purchased a new MacBook and I wanted to run UT2004. I did not
want to purchase the Mac port. So here is the solution. You
do not have to buy a new copy like idiots in some forums are telling you.
I had some errors in here. I
didn't realize people were still reading this. I was aware of
them. But I went well over a year without fixing it. Sorry.
All this works by piecing together
the UT2004 demo, an update, and your authentic copy of UT2004 for
Windows and Lunix. I tried it with Quake 4 and got pretty far.
The problem I finally encountered was the game required a DVD to
be in the drive to run and my DVD was for Windows.
Everything in italic is an update for July 18, 2007.
Step 1. Download the Demo
Download the UT2004 demo from here.
http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=18034
Simply untar it
or whatever and mount the image and drag the .app to your Applications
folder. Go ahead and rename it "Unreal Tournament 2004." It
should be named "Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo" right now.
Step 2. Copy your data files into the package
For those of you that don't know, the .app is actually a folder.
If you ctrl + single-click on the file and then select "Show
Package Contents" in the context menu, you will be able to view the
contents of the folder. Go ahead and put your UT2004 DVD or CD1
into your Mac. You will need to copy over the files into the
corresponding directories. For example, you'll see a "System"
folder. Copy of the contents of your "System" folder into the
"System" folder in the "Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo" package.
This will be kind of long and tedious.
This is where I made a mistake.
The files are all packaged. You can download a utility to
unpack them. Otherwise, you can install UT2004 on your PC, then
copy over the data files from that installation.
The reason why I overlooked this was
because the game still runs fine and you have all the levels and
textures and models necessary for the demo. If you try to play a
map you should already have, it will just download it. The
download usually takes a long time.
Step 3. Update and patch
You now have all the needed data files, but your executable is still
not quite right. At this point, you can run the latest UT2004
patch to get things running the way they should. The patch I ran
when I did it was "ut2004-macpatch3369-2.dmg." You can download
it form here:
http://www.mirrors.ausmac.net/AusMac/auslist.cgi?location=Games-SW/unrealtournament2004
This part is
pretty simple. Once you downloaded the image, mount it, and run
the application it contains. It should tell you that it can't
find the UT2004 installation of yours. Just tell it you'll locate
it for them and do so.
It should give you one more warning but tell it to continue anyway. You're thee-fourths your way there.
Step 4. Get your CD-Key
Within the UT2004 package and under the "System" folder, you need to
create a file called "cdkey" that contains your valid UT2004 CD-Key.
Open TextEdit. Now, switch to plain text mode.
Type in your CD-Key with the dashes like so: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX
Save the file as
"cdkey" with no file extension. If your key doesn't work or if
you didn't do this part yet, you will get this error when trying to
open the game:
And that is that. You are done. You should be able to enjoy
Unreal Tournament 2004 on your Mac. Congratulations! You
are the awesome.
Step 5. Rename the alias
I neglected this important
part. In addition to renaming the .app to "Unreal Tournament
2004" from "Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo", you have to do the same to an
alias within the .app package. So go ahead and navigate inside
the Unreal Tournament 2004.app and go to /Contents/MacOS folder.
There will be a file there. It is an alias for the actual
executable which is /system/ut-2004-bin. Remove the "Demo" from
the end of the name of the alias. It should now just say "Unreal
Tournament 2004", just like the .app file. All should work fine
and run by now. At this point, you really are done.
If you do not rename this alias, you'll get a message saying:
You cannot open the application "Unreal Tournament 2004.app" because it may be damaged or incomplete.
Additional Notes
You don't need the DLL files or the DirectX9 folder for example.
I wish I gave you guys more screenshots.
Note the date and particular files I used to do this. I'm not sure if it will work in the future.
If you're Unix
savvy, you can use the terminal to copy the files over without the same
tediousness of constant drag and drop for each individual folder.
I tried this on another Mac and it
ran fine. That's two personal success stories and I've heard from
several people that got this working. Some people have contacted
me saying they ran into some trouble. If you have trouble, feel
free to contact me, but if you do, make sure you are in a position to
troubleshoot with me and make sure you write down what error messages
you receive and what steps you had taken thus far. Otherwise, it
will be difficult to help.
Links
I had to do a lot of web searching so here are some additional links that I found helpful:
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=292620
http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/.../t-146922.html
Copyright © Adam G. Lowe