2022-05-22
I'm in the process of doing some work to my house, meaning that a lot of my stuff (including my PC) has been boxed up. This means if I fancy playing a game, I'm limited to things that will run on my laptop (2015 Macbook Air).
Recently I've been playing Theme Hospital a lot. I grabbed it from GOG, which has a macOS installer (it's just bundled with DOSBox). I fancied playing some Morrowind, so I had a look on how to install it.
Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Morrowind is Windows-only, but there is an open-source project, OpenMW, that re-implements the engine for the 3 main desktop platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows), much like CorsixTH does for Theme Hospital, and installing it is simple. The main reasons I'm writing this at all are because a) the documentation doesn't mention the Homebrew cask, and b) the majority of the information is in a video, and I hate using videos for reference. If you're doing this for the first time however, it's probably worth a watch just for a high-level overview of the process (though it's very simple).
This probably doesn't need its own section.
brew install --cask openmw
You need a real copy of the game so OpenMW can use the assets. Morrowind isn't available for Mac, but you can get Steam to download the Windows version on one. From the official docs:
Close Steam
Create a file /Users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/appmanifest_22320.acf (where 22320 is the Morrowind
Steam app ID) and add the following (make sure it's a) plain-text and b) has
the right extension (appmanifest_22320.acf.txt won't work)
"AppState"
{
"AppID" "22320"
"Universe" "1"
"StateFlags" "1026"
"installdir" "The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind"
}
Open Steam - Morrowind will be downloaded
You can then use /Users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind/ Data Files
as the path when asked by the OpenMW wizard
It's probably worth backing up this folder on the off-chance Steam stops supporting this
Finally, just following the OpenMW wizard, pointing at this directory, and you're good to go.
It runs just fine at 1440x900 on my laptop (though it does start up the fans).
The only other thing I did (again mentioned in the above video) was to increase
the view distance. The details are in the video description, but in short, just
add the following to ~/Library/Preferences/openmw/settings.cfg (backing up the
original first, of course).
[Camera]
field of view = 65.0275
small feature culling pixel size = 6.0
viewing distance = 10000
[Cells]
exterior cell load distance = 1
[Terrain]
distant terrain = True