Play Trackmania Nations Forever on your Mac for FREE

People who read this blog (if they exist), may know that I am a big fan of the Trackmania games. These are racing games, where you need to complete tracks in a given amount of time. You can play against the clock or online against anybody who is part of the huge Trackmania community. On top of that, you can create your own tracks and race against your buddies. In this entry I will show all intel Mac users how to get the awesome Trackmania Nations Forever running on their machines. Best of all, getting this game up and running won't cost you a dime! (In all fairness though, it may cost you some time, depending on the installation and how addicted you will get once you have the game installed).

A few notes on these steps: You will require an Intel Mac with a decent graphics card. I have tested this on an iMac Core Duo 2GHz with 2GB RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 with 256MB VRAM. I have also only tested this on Snow Leopard.

As Trackmania Nations Forever is a Windows game, we will need to install a recent version of wine. While there are a number of variants out there, I prefer to stick with the original macports version. So the first step will be to install macports. If you have macports installed already, you may skip this step. (To figure out if you have macports installed open the Terminal and simply type which port. If this yields a path, you're good to go, though you may want to run a self-update via port selfupdate).

1. To install macports head over to the macports website and download the correct version for your system. When the download is complete, run the installer
2. Next, we install wine. Note, that this may take a few hours, even if you are on a powerful computer:
   

   sudo port install wine-devel

   
   You will be prompted to enter your password. Enter your administrator password to install wine.
3. While you are waiting, you can go ahead and download Trackmania Nations Forever from Nadeo's website.
4. Once everything is installed, go to your Downloads directory and install Trackmania Nations Forever:
   

   cd ~/Downloads
   wine tmnationsforever_setup.exe

   
   The installer will run almost completely, though on my machine, it got stuck shortly before completion. If this happens, bring the Terminal back to the front, and kill the installer by pressing Ctrl-C. You will then be asked if you would like to launch Trackmania Nations. Uncheck the checkbox (we do not yet want to launch it just yet), and hit OK.
5. Before we start playing we need to setup wine to properly handle fullscreen games. In the terminal type winecfg. This will launch a configuration front-end. Go to the "Graphics" tab and uncheck everything but the "Emulate a virtual desktop" (Unfortunately, I could not get the pixel shaders to work correctly (they cause graphical glitches). So in order for the game to be playable, you will need to keep this off for now. Hopefully in future wine versions, this will be fixed). Set the desktop resolution to your screen resolution. Your settings should look like the ones below. Click "OK" when you are done.
   
6. We have now setup wine properly to run Trackmania Nations Forever. Since we want to run in fullscreen though, we also need to launch X11 in fullscreen mode. To do this, we change the settings of X11, by typing:
   

   defaults write org.x.X11 rootless -bool NO

   
   Now we are ready to play! Type the following to launch Trackmania:
   

   cd $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/TmNationsForever
   wine ./TmForever.exe

   
   And off you go! Happy driving!