Trainz: A New Era on MacOS Monterey

Hello,

I have Just read something on the Trainz: A New Era Mac Knowledgebase website (https://support.trainzportal.com/in...which-versions-of-macos-can-i-use-trainz-with). I read that TANE does not work on MacOS Monterey, and that's the latest software I have, and I have to ask, does anyone know if there is a way to play TANE on Monterey with no problems, and no programs such as VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, Bootcamp Assistance, or Recovery Mode. Please I really have to know, I have so many problems with TANE running on Monterey, please help me, it would be greatly appreciated. (There has to be a way to do it very easily without virtual machines)

Not that I know of (Apple are pretty good at ending support for lots of things).

I suggest waiting for a sale on TRS19 or TRS22, or grabbing Trainz Plus to see what you're missing out on with the latest version.

FireLion12Yes said:

Hello,

I have Just read something on the Trainz: A New Era Mac Knowledgebase website (https://support.trainzportal.com/in...which-versions-of-macos-can-i-use-trainz-with). I read that TANE does not work on MacOS Monterey, and that's the latest software I have, and I have to ask, does anyone know if there is a way to play TANE on Monterey with no problems, and no programs such as VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, Bootcamp Assistance, or Recovery Mode. Please I really have to know, I have so many problems with TANE running on Monterey, please help me, it would be greatly appreciated. (There has to be a way to do it very easily without virtual machines)

Click to expand...

I have Just read something on the Trainz: A New Era Mac Knowledgebase website (https://support.trainzportal.com/in...which-versions-of-macos-can-i-use-trainz-with). I read that TANE does not work on MacOS Monterey, and that's the latest software I have, and I have to ask, does anyone know if there is a way to play TANE on Monterey with no problems, and no programs such as VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, Bootcamp Assistance, or Recovery Mode. Please I really have to know, I have so many problems with TANE running on Monterey, please help me, it would be greatly appreciated. (There has to be a way to do it very easily without virtual machines)[/QUOTE]

Over the years all my older mac versions of trainz have ceased to function on my macs as the OS has been updated, I very much doubt you are going to have any success with TANE in Monterey and as NV3 isn't interested in helping you my only suggestion is to buy a external drive, install an older mac os on that that your mac will run and boot up into that system and use it to run TANE ( if your current machine will allow you to do that of course).

One benefit if you upgrade to Trainz 19 or 22, is that Metal is supported, which gives better frame rates on newer Macs. I’m running Trainz 22 in Ventura.

What SP of TANE are you on?

If you're on an older SP, then try updating to SP4 and see if it works. And if you're running TANE on an M1 Mac, then I created a post a while back detailing how it doesn't work on Rosetta anymore. Here it is:

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?168242-TANE-Beware-M1-Mac-Users

Some of my issues may be applicable to Monterey, specifically framerates, since macOS doesn't support OpenGL (which TANE Mac uses) past Mojave. It's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is. I hope that an SP5 patch with support for Metal and Apple Silicon comes out for TANE, but since it's 7 years old, I don't think it'll come out.

FireLion12Yes, it says you have TRS19 in your timeline. Do you think you should download the disk image for it and transfer your database? It's not that hard, and I can tell you how.

amigacooke said:

What SP of TANE are you on?

Click to expand...

I have TANE SP4, The Latest one

SRKing783 said:

If you're on an older SP, then try updating to SP4 and see if it works. And if you're running TANE on an M1 Mac, then I created a post a while back detailing how it doesn't work on Rosetta anymore. Here it is:

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?168242-TANE-Beware-M1-Mac-Users

Some of my issues may be applicable to Monterey, specifically framerates, since macOS doesn't support OpenGL (which TANE Mac uses) past Mojave. It's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is. I hope that an SP5 patch with support for Metal and Apple Silicon comes out for TANE, but since it's 7 years old, I don't think it'll come out.

FireLion12Yes, it says you have TRS19 in your timeline. Do you think you should download the disk image for it and transfer your database? It's not that hard, and I can tell you how.

Click to expand...

Well I'll have to buy TRS19, but I haven't installed anything on TANE, so I don't think I would need to do a database transfer, I'm not quite sure though. I have an Intel Macbook Air 2017, and when I had Mac OS Catalina, it worked great, if not, flawlessly, with everything turned down of course, but when I updated my Mac, I haven't really used TANE until now, and that's when I found out that TANE doesn't work on Monterey.

SRKing783 said:

If you're on an older SP, then try updating to SP4 and see if it works. And if you're running TANE on an M1 Mac, then I created a post a while back detailing how it doesn't work on Rosetta anymore. Here it is:

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?168242-TANE-Beware-M1-Mac-Users

Some of my issues may be applicable to Monterey, specifically framerates, since macOS doesn't support OpenGL (which TANE Mac uses) past Mojave. It's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is. I hope that an SP5 patch with support for Metal and Apple Silicon comes out for TANE, but since it's 7 years old, I don't think it'll come out.

FireLion12Yes, it says you have TRS19 in your timeline. Do you think you should download the disk image for it and transfer your database? It's not that hard, and I can tell you how.

Click to expand...

Oh and also, I can't access your post on TANE on M1 Mac, I just wanted to read it, and I can't access it, it says this

FireLion12Yes, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

1. Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?

2. If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

If your Mac is a M1 get TRS22 it is written in universal code so the program will run on the ARM architecture of the M1

FurnitureMaker said:

If your Mac is a M1 get TRS22 it is written in universal code so the program will run on the ARM architecture of the M1

Click to expand...

Trainz19 SP3 and above supports ASi Macs. Looks like they already have Trainz 19, so that will work until they decide to go higher or not.

FireLion12Yes said:

Oh and also, I can't access your post on TANE on M1 Mac, I just wanted to read it, and I can't access it, it says this

FireLion12Yes, you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

1. Your user account may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?

2. If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

Click to expand...

You can't access it? Here's what I wrote (TANE Mac users, you might want to check this thread):

Hey everyone,

Even though Trainz users on M1 Macs probably aren't using TANE anymore and have moved on to either TRS2019 or 2022 (like I have), I still want to put this out there...

So, I decided to reinstall TANE on my M1 Mac, because why not. The game runs fine initially - no problems with the menus, Content Manager runs fine, and everything is still relatively snappy. However, even though I do have a computer that is more than capable of running more demanding versions of Trainz (I use TRS22 everytime I play Trainz nowadays), even on mid settings, and with the draw distance at the default 2500m, the actual game's performance is abysmal.

The game is hit-or-miss when it comes to performance - surprisingly, when I tested out the ECML, by far the largest route I have ever seen in TANE, it ran at a tolerable framerate - but still seems to constantly run under 30 FPS. Load times are not the best, though they never were, accessing settings while in Driver is incredibly painful, and it crashes. A lot. Half the time, when I try to run a session, the game crashes, or when I want to close out, it crashes. It is completely terrible on M1 Macs... but it's not because of N3V.

I am well aware of the fact that Trainz A New Era is an app that was designed for x86 architecture on both Windows and macOS, and that it will probably not be updated to support Apple Silicon (though that would be incredible). And I am well aware of the fact that Trainz is running through Rosetta, essentially being "emulated" in some way. It's not that the computer cannot run TANE - if it can run TRS22 at 60FPS+, then it can easily run TANE - but it's that Rosetta is not powerful enough to run TANE.

I would love to see TANE get native Apple Silicon support, so that I can always have it on my computer if I ever want to go back to it, but I will still probably prefer TRS22. I can still access all of my TANE DLC, and it comes free of charge with most of it looking... better, in some regards. TANE routes honestly don't look all too different in my eyes. I do remember trying out TANE on my M1 Mac a few weeks ago before tonight, and I remember it running surprisingly smoothly. Maybe it was because at the time I ran it, I was reinstalling all of my TANE DLC into that database, but... whatever. I'm still gonna keep TANE installed, just to see if performance improves, but I'm still probably gonna play TRS22 for the most part.

So, to M1 Mac owners who own TANE... it kinda works. But Rosetta's not powerful enough for Trainz, so you should just buy TRS19 or 22. I mean, TRS19 Platinum's only $50, that's not a bad deal.

Anyway, thanks for putting up with my rant about trying out the first version of Trainz that I could not get running properly for 2 years barely running on a modern machine that can tolerate the latest version of Trainz on more demanding settings at higher framerates. Take care.

FireLion12Yes :

Contact the helpdesk regarding your forum permissions.

Customer Support (trainzportal.com)

... (Apple are pretty good at ending support for lots of things).

Click to expand...

This is the drawback. The advantage is having a very well done recent OS and not a mess such as Windows full of prehistoric code and a robbish such as the useless Registry that kills the overall quality and performance of the OS.

SRKing, Metal and ASi Mac optimizations started with Trainz2019 SP3. For TANE to run good, it would need to optimized for both. That is a heavy lift for software that has been out of support for a long time.

Oh, right, it would. It is unfortunate that it's probably long gone for Macs, but most of its userbase was and probably still is made up of Windows users anyway, so it probably won't affect a lot of people.