My Introduction - New MB'er & Member of the Community

[bosnovi]

Hello All! :D

My name is A.J, I have been a Warcraft fan since WIII and am a veteran player. Recently I purchased the brand new 24" Apple iMac
2.8 ghz 2 core machine with upgraded 4gigs of ram, and figured I should try multiboxing as a way to expand my WoW experience
since I've basically done it all. After a week of going deep into multiboxing I decided to go for it and last night purchased four sets of
battle chests with four 60 day prepaid cards off newegg which I will use to refer a friend for my main account. In 3 days when I set
everything up I will start keeping a log w/pictures for my 5 orc shamans I plan to roll on the PVP realm kalecgos.I hope to become
an active community member and am very excited about starting to mulitbox.

and if you are a mac multiboxer and can give me a few pointers for it doing on the mac os, please send me an IM at (aim: adothekid)

,thanks

[Naysayer]

hello there

[Fef]

We have the exact same machine.

I sometimes log into WoW from Mac OS X, but it is only when I just need to talk to a friend, check the AH or use in-game mail. This way I don't have to reboot the iMac into Windows.
For multi-boxing and "real" playing in general, however, I turn to a Bootcamp Windows XP partition.

There is no difference between OS X and XP when running one WoW client. When running several clients, however, I noticed significantly better performance under XP (even though all of my 4GB are not used under XP 32 bits). Also, ATITools, the application allowing to overclock your video card, is not available for Mac OS X (as far as i know). More importantly, Octopus and Keyclone are great tools, making life much easier for multi-boxer, and they are available only for Windows. Most of the features can be duplicated in Mac OS X, but I am not sure about all of them (PiP comes to mind).

Would you want more details about multi-boxing on iMac in Bootcamp, I have been writing about my set-up here (http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=12409).

[Crashman]

Hi! You should check out this post by Fef: http://dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=12409. It sounds like he has a pretty similar set up as you. Goodluck with your multiboxing and don't get too discouraged at first if everything seems overwhelming, it's worth it in the end.


edit: Ignore my post, Fef is too quick! :)

[bosnovi]

I just finished reading your tutorial and wanted to add that it was very informative. You have exactly the same system specs as I do if not the same computer in all. However I purchased mine a week and half ago
and is the new generation iMac not sure about yours.. but yes I'm well aware booting windows would be better performance wise and more compatible with most of the multiboxing software out now. The problem is
I don't want to go out and purchase a new XP disc that costs over $200 retail or $150 OEM just to switch WoW to a slightly better OS.



Hi! You should check out this post by Fef: http://dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=12409. It sounds like he has a pretty similar set up as you. Goodluck with your multiboxing and don't get too discouraged at first if everything seems overwhelming, it's worth it in the end.


edit: Ignore my post, Fef is too quick! :)Thank you for your response! Appreciate it =D


hello thereHi to you as well.

[wetstreet]

I 5 box on an MBP. The only 'problem' is I have to overlap the windows and turn down the graphics. Cities get laggy, but normal game play is fine.

For my setup I use one of the Logitech mice with about 8 buttons and a G15. ControllerMate is used to map extra buttons to other keys and dynamically reconfigure the keyboard as needed.

[bosnovi]

I 5 box on an MBP. The only 'problem' is I have to overlap the windows and turn down the graphics. Cities get laggy, but normal game play is fine.

For my setup I use one of the Logitech mice with about 8 buttons and a G15. ControllerMate is used to map extra buttons to other keys and dynamically reconfigure the keyboard as needed.Depending on the specs of your mac book pro, there really shouldn't be any lag if you turn down all the settings on 4 of the instances other than your main account.
I use the stock keyboard as it is compact and soft to type on and don't really like the bulky PC gaming keyboards. I use a Logitech g5 mouse though. My iMac can handle
5 instances pretty well as I have tested with my friends 5 accounts.(although he plays on vista) but like "fef" said there is a bit of performance loss when running more
than one. Sometimes the other 4 instances get distorted pixels or color loss cause the graphics card wasn't really build for gaming. Mac duh.. :rolleyes: but isn't so bad that
I have to go out and buy a new copy of XP or Vista just to multibox. Thanks for your response, I look forward to seeing your mutliboxing updates and I hope you check
mine out as I make them. GL with your boxing!

[Fef]

Sometimes the other 4 instances get distorted pixels or color loss cause the graphics card wasn't really build for gaming. Mac duh.. :rolleyes: but isn't so bad that
I have to go out and buy a new copy of XP or Vista just to multibox.

I noticed very weird graphical artifacts when I first ran several WoW clients on my iMac under Windows XP. I was then running with default Bootcamp drivers for the video card. A lot of polygons in the background would show up as completely black. Very distrurbing. It completely disappeared as soon as I installed the most recent drivers from the ATI web site. Interestingly, this didn't happen when running a single copy of WoW at once, even on highest possible resolution with all eye candies turned on.

This led me to think that video drivers are updated less often for Mac OS X than for windows, even though the windows drivers are still "bootcamp specific".

For the rest, I very much understand your will to completely stay away from windows.

[bosnovi]

For the rest, I very much understand your will to completely stay away from windows.I would very much like to get windows xp to use with bootcamp but I've already spent $280 on the 4 sets of wow and prepaid cards. College isn't cheap :( so getting another os to do something that the current os I have is capable of doing isn't really a smart financial move right now. Thank's again though for your response and tutorial. I enjoyed reading it, and the layout of the wow instances gave me something to think about.

[mikiurban]

As far as Screenshots, one handy addon i love is "LevelSnap" (not sure where i got it), every time a char dings, it types out /played then captures the screen, including the glowy yellow lights. It's a cool way of keeping track of time spent per level. I am currently boosting 4 lowbies in instances, and will try to post a thread later on time per level, and the zones they happened.

[bosnovi]

As far as Screenshots, one handy addon i love is "LevelSnap" (not sure where i got it), every time a char dings, it types out /played then captures the screen, including the glowy yellow lights. It's a cool way of keeping track of time spent per level. I am currently boosting 4 lowbies in instances, and will try to post a thread later on time per level, and the zones they happened. LevelSnap:
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/3185/

Thank You! this is a perfect addon for keeping a multiboxing log, I wasn't aware of it until now. Something cool you can do with it would be use it from 1-70 and in the end compile it into a video or make a gif out of the Screenshots. Good luck with your boosting.

[mikiurban]

One thing to keep an eye on in Levelsnap, is the default General chat frame is too small to capture the whole "Ding" message. All the "you gained 1 strength" etc messages make the "You made level X" message scroll out of sight. If you double the height of your chat windows, you should be fine.

[bosnovi]

We have the exact same machine.

I sometimes log into WoW from Mac OS X, but it is only when I just need to talk to a friend, check the AH or use in-game mail. This way I don't have to reboot the iMac into Windows.
For multi-boxing and "real" playing in general, however, I turn to a Bootcamp Windows XP partition.

There is no difference between OS X and XP when running one WoW client. When running several clients, however, I noticed significantly better performance under XP (even though all of my 4GB are not used under XP 32 bits). Also, ATITools, the application allowing to overclock your video card, is not available for Mac OS X (as far as i know). More importantly, Octopus and Keyclone are great tools, making life much easier for multi-boxer, and they are available only for Windows. Most of the features can be duplicated in Mac OS X, but I am not sure about all of them (PiP comes to mind).

Would you want more details about multi-boxing on iMac in Bootcamp, I have been writing about my set-up here ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=12409'). I took your recommendation and purchased and installed Windows XP with Bootcamp...Well after a few hours of thinking about it... I went to Best Buy a
popular electronics store here in the states and bought a retail Windows XP for a great sale price of $100 off the original cost.
Anyways I installed it with bootcamp on a new 32gb partition and everything went perfect. I installed the drivers off of the apple cd
that came with the computer... but now my problem is I don't how to update the ATI Graphics driver because I couldn't find it anywhere
after an hour of looking :( Could you please show me the websites I need to go to update the driver to the newest one?



Heres a screenshot =D

http://i36.tinypic.com/1zyzbcp.jpg
Thanks again, A.J