Mac Spore + OSX86 and the sound-but-no-video problem
A minor issue I ran into. My brother got a copy of Spore for Christmas and didn’t have time to play it, so he’s loaned it to me for the time being. I thought I’d give it a try on the hackintosh (using an iDeneb OSX86 installation).
It installed fine. Problem was that when running it, the screen was black. There was sound, but that was it. Did a little searching… and not a lot of luck. I found that alt-enter (or applekey-enter) sometimes worked for people having full screen issues. I tried it, and noticed the monitor continually bouncing to power-saving mode, then normal again. I decided to do a little guessing and deductive reasoning, and the solution was……
Solution: Plug your monitor into the other output on your video card!
See, the Mac version of Spore uses something called “Cider” from Transgaming. Think of it as something of a miniature windows-emulator, or for those familiar with Linux… WINE. In fact, in your preferences, you’ll have a spore folder with a config file made for wine.
In any case, it looks like it Spore/Cider defaults to the first video card output it finds. This works fine for iMacs etc because the first output is the built-in display! For those using OSX86 (and thus a discrete video card), it may not be the one you happen to have your monitor plugged into. Try changing it and see if it works.
