Team Fortress 2 for Mac

by Hexxeh on May.18, 2010, under Other

After Valve released Portal for Mac last week, it’s been possible to get Team Fortress 2 running on your Mac. After lots of fiddling around, I’ve nailed down precisely how to do it. First, a video:

Here’s the howto I’ve come up with:

1) Reboot to Windows or grab yourself a Windows machine.
2) Create a folder called “team fortress 2″
3) Extract the following GCFs into it, in order: source materials.gcf, source models.gcf, source sounds.gcf, source 2007 shared materials.gcf, source 2007 shared models.gcf source 2007 shared sounds.gcf, team fortress 2 materials.gcf, team fortress 2 content.gcf, team fortress 2 client content.gcf, source 2007 mac binaries.gcf. These may be more than is actually required, but your client will just crash if it’s missing something sometimes, so it’s better to get them.
4) Put this “team fortress 2″ folder alongside your “portal” folder in “Steam Content\yourusername”.
5) Open a Terminal, and navigate to this new “team fortress 2″ directory.
6) Run the following command: chmod +x hl2_osx
7) Run the following command cp tf/bin/client.dylib bin/
8) Run the following command cp tf/bin/server.dylib bin/
9) Ensure steam_appid.txt is present and contains “440″.
10) To launch the game, type the following: ./hl2_osx -game tf -novid

Doesn’t run quite as well as it does in Windows, but it’s nice not to have to reboot. How do I do this, you might ask? It’s quite a long process right now, but if you’re up for the challenge and don’t mind getting yours hands dirty, then there you go. Steam will need to be running when you launch the game, or it’ll just crash. You might also need to have the GCF files in the right folder too, didn’t test this, I had them there anyway. If you crash just as the game is about to enter the map, try setting all your graphical settings to the absolute minimum, as this sometimes helps. Once you get in, you can bump them back up again. Not sure why this is the case, but it helped for me.

As a bonus, here’s Counter-Strike: Source BETA running too: http://grab.by/4rJL
(Note: the FPS is actually around 250fps, I had to tab out to take a screenshot which caps it at 20fps because it’s in the background)



Maybe you can kill that Boot Camp partition like I did now. Have fun! :)


14 Comments for this entry

  • Jim
    May 18th, 2010 on 11:58 pm

    i’ll give it a try if TF2 isn’t released tomorrow. But tbh if some player can do it easily then it must be ready for release for mac.

  • Lollerskates
    May 19th, 2010 on 12:36 am

    There is now no reason for me not to get a Mac.. Except, of course, for price. D:

  • Reag
    May 19th, 2010 on 8:53 am

    So thats how you did it, you crafty bugger.

  • Nicholas
    May 20th, 2010 on 5:37 am

    I doesn’t surprise me that a somebody figured out how to do this. Its what a being a valve fan is all about! If they didn’t give you exactly what you wanted, you make it yourself with what they gave you =D we’ve been doing this for years (how do people think TF and CS started?)

    Good job mate ;)

  • Raz
    May 20th, 2010 on 1:41 pm

    Won’t work for me, get as far as loading the map then crashes :(

  • rb
    May 20th, 2010 on 9:49 pm

    mind making these instructions a little more detailed? the Steam paths are complicated and I have a feeling I’m doing something “the correct way” which is probably wrong, since this is a giant hack.

  • chesse20
    May 21st, 2010 on 2:04 am

    this is very cool

  • minifraank
    May 26th, 2010 on 2:10 pm

    TF2 works fine here! :D But CS:S can’t create a server or anything, so I can’t see the performance in CS:S.

    But do anyone know about this will work with GMod? :D

  • David Davison
    May 28th, 2010 on 1:12 pm

    Update leaves this ‘installation path’ broken, but LAN games still work well. Doesn’t work for servers. Oh well, hopefully Valve pushes out the official release soon*.

    (In Valve Time).

  • McCool
    May 29th, 2010 on 2:19 pm

    okay i did exacly as you said coping all the GCF’s and shit.

    But when it cd into the directory and you gave us the commands, there are no such files in the directory…

    maybe you missed a step please help..

  • Jayrodathome
    May 29th, 2010 on 10:40 pm

    @McCool

    1st. don’t copy the .gcf files. He says you need to “extract them” the way he put it leaves it a little cofusing. Start with windows and get a free app called “GCFScape” and use it to extract the necessary files into the same folder. Make sure and do it in that order because as you go through them they overwrite themselves. Once you have done this use whatever means necessary to copy them into your mac directory. users//Documents/Steam\ Content/

    Make sure you have portal installed. Don’t know why but this makes a difference. use the above as a reference on how to navigate through “Terminal” use forward slashes as spaces but still use a space. I just figured this out. I’m new to terminal. Anyway. if anyone has any more questions email me. Just don’t blow me up with spam pls. jarrodlilly@gmail.com

  • TF2 Good Sir
    May 30th, 2010 on 3:16 pm

    Hey Hexxeh, any update? Can’t wait until Wednesday. Checked your steampowered thread, but no news there either.

  • John
    June 8th, 2010 on 7:24 am

    do we really need a windws to do this?

  • Капитолина
    August 30th, 2010 on 11:40 am

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