Diablo 2/LOD, Starcraft/BW and Lion

I recently learned Diablo 2 / LOD and Starcraft/BW will not run in Lion, which will stop me from upgrading. Will Wine be an effective workaround if I re-download the game client from Blizzard as the Windows file? And if so, will I lose my game saves? Is it possible to do this without losing game saves?

Thank you!!

Why don't you wait awhile to see if Blizzard updates or patches their games so that they're compatible with Lion? You can continue to use Snow Leopard and play your favorite games in the meantime. There is no rush to upgrade to Lion.

As far as WINE goes, I don't have an answer for you but I suspect that you would have to start over. Your game saves will probably be lost.

I agree with chscag that you should wait a little bit to weigh your options if you can. I rather doubt though that Blizzard is going to update those games though. The reason they won't run is because Apple is completely dropping Rosetta and with it all support for running PPC apps. If Blizzard hasn't updated these to be Intel-compatible by now, it's not likely they will.

As for what options there may be… Both D2 and SC run perfectly well in Crossover according to their database, so that will be viable. There's also the possibility that a 3rd party will start working on a way to run PPC apps in Lion using their own code, though I wouldn't expect that to happen real soon if it does. The 3rd possibility may lay in using a virtual machine. Apple relaxed the rules on VMs and with Lion you can now run it in a virtual machine if need be. I don't know if this will extend to Snow Leopard, but if it does, you could have Lion as your OS and run Snow Leopard in a VM for your games. We'll be more sure of this in the coming weeks.

Thanks guys!
How exactly do I run Snow Leopard as a VM? Install Lion on a separate partition?

applefan90 said:

Thanks guys!
How exactly do I run Snow Leopard as a VM? Install Lion on a separate partition?

Click to expand...

We don't know IF it will. I'm only speculating that it might. We won't know until some time after Lion is released.

applefan90 said:

I recently learned Diablo 2 / LOD and Starcraft/BW will not run in Lion, which will stop me from upgrading. Will Wine be an effective workaround if I re-download the game client from Blizzard as the Windows file? And if so, will I lose my game saves? Is it possible to do this without losing game saves?

Thank you!!

Click to expand...

Diablo 2 was released for the Macintosh over 11 years ago...and minimum requirements were Mac OS 8.1. To expect Diablo 2 to run on the latest Mac OS "Lion" (11 years later) on a Macintosh computer new enough to run Lion is asking a lot! If you can get Diablo 2 to run under Lion awesome...but don't be surprised if it doesn't run (even with the "work-arounds" to get Rosetta to run under Lion).

If you cannot get Diablo 2 (or the other games you mentioned) to run under Lion...a really easy solution (and relatively cheap) is simply buy an older used G3, G4, or G5 based Mac computer to run these games. They will even run "natively" (due to the PPC cpu)...and may run faster than on a newer Intel-based Mac using Rosetta (emulation slows things down).

HTH,

- Nick