Any luck with FTB on Mac OS X?

[EricBuist]

Hi all,

As a Java application, Minecraft, vanilla or FTB modded, should work on Mac OS X. However, my past experience on a test Hackintosh has been varying. It worked for some time, after I upgraded the packaged LWJGL binaries, but after I changed boot loader from Chameleon to Clover, the game stopped working and never resumed. I would like to know if the game runs in a stable way on a real Mac with latest Mac OS X and Java 8. I am currently playing FTB Monster, so I would like this mod pack to work, but I presume if Minecraft works, any recent enough FTB mod pack will as well.

 

[FyberOptic]

Monster is a 1.6.4 pack, and Forge for that version has a problem under Java 8 unless you're using a fix. I believe they included it in a later update, so make sure you're running the latest version of the pack. If that doesn't fix it, a log would be helpful.

My experience with Hackintoshes way back when was that you could run them in 32-bit despite OSX normally running 64-bit, and I'm sure that could cause issues nowadays if your boot loader was configured in such a way.

Also if updating the native binaries at some point got it to work, perhaps the FTB launcher simply overwrote them at some point. Though you'd be better off modifying the JSON for the Minecraft version the pack uses to tell it to use a newer LWJGL version. Most modern packs use LWJGL 2.9.1, and I think 2.9.3 is the newest. Though I can't tell you what issues you might run into from updating.

 

[jodelahithit]

I have been playing minecraft and FTB on various apple machines for years and i have never had any problems (except for mc 1.5.3 or something when mojang f*ed up but that is ages ago)

 

[APproject]

I just played ftb infinity on a stock macbook from 2014. With proper ram allocation and select config changes, I ran with a consistent 60 fps, which really surprised me.

 

[EricBuist]

Good to know. I got no luck with my old 2006 Mac Book Pro. The game crashes with yet another cryptic impossible to understand error messages.

Here is the output that FTB launch spitted on the console.

[16:50:37] [INFO] MCLauncher.launchMinecraft:80: Java Path: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_31.jdk/Contents/Home/jre/bin/java
[16:50:37] [INFO] MCLauncher.launchMinecraft:81: Pack: Monster 1.6.4
[16:50:37] [INFO] MCLauncher.setMemory:240: Setting MinMemory to 256
[16:50:37] [INFO] MCLauncher.setMemory:242: Setting MaxMemory to 1536
[16:50:37] [INFO] MCLauncher.launchMinecraft:103: Defaulting PermSize to 256m
Mar 29 16:50:39 MacBook-Pro-15-de-Eric-Buist.local java[996] <Error>: CGContextGetCTM: invalid context 0x0
Mar 29 16:50:39 MacBook-Pro-15-de-Eric-Buist.local java[996] <Error>: CGContextSetBaseCTM: invalid context 0x0
[16:50:39] [DEBUG] Benchmark.logBenchAs:71: UnreadNews Init took 86 ms.

It can be a lot of things, ranging from insufficient memory to something incompatible in FTB Monster that got fixed in newer mod packs, so I may run into the same scenario as last year, having to upgrade my map to another mod pack. Not sure I want to reenter into this. At least the Mac is not purchased so I'm not stuck yet.