Can't read anything in main menu

[brunonian]

So I'm on a Mac and I finally got the game to start up (through Steam), but now once it loads, all I see is the outline of the main menu. I know that there are actually buttons, because random clicking got it to tell me an enthralling story about how great the Chinese empire was. Of course, I have no idea what was going on because I couldn't see anything.

Can anyone help? What's going on? I think Steam automatically downloads the updates so I don't think that they fixed this in the recent patch.

Thanks so much...

 

[The_J]

Welcome to CFC .

Please provide your system specifications. It might be, that your computer is just to weak for the game.

 

[brunonian]

It's a normal Macbook, I'm not too techy so I'm not sure exactly what's relevant but here are some of the specs.

OS X 10.6.5
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Intel GMA X3100, 144 MB VRAM video card

I'm not sure if anything else is relevant, I know it's relatively low end for the game, but I've been able to play Starcraft II and other such games on it, and I don't understand why a crappy computer would result in the game running but me not being able to read anything in the main menu.

It's really difficult to describe what happens so I'll post some pictures.

Main screen right on starting up:

When I highlight what appears to be the quit button:

When I click through several times, and it looks like setting up a game:

Thanks again!

 

[The_J]

Intel GMA X3100, 144 MB VRAM video card

I'm not sure if anything else is relevant, I know it's relatively low end for the game, but I've been able to play Starcraft II and other such games on it, and I don't understand why a crappy computer would result in the game running but me not being able to read anything in the main menu.

Bad news for you .
With that video card the game does not even run on windows computers, and i don't think it would rather work on Macs.
You might try to look around if there's a more recent driver for Macs, but i don't have any hopes there. Might be, that they updated the Mac drivers later than the windows drivers (just due to normal delay), but even the windows drivers are old :/.

But interesting that Starcraft 2 has at the end lower requirements o_O.

 

[Maniacal]

I'm always surprised when an intel 'graphics' card can run anything made within the last 5 years (unless its like Minecraft which has very very little graphical requirement). But yeah you'll need a new graphics card.

 

[timtofly]

I am amazed the game even allowed him to load the game, unless the screen that said "TURN BACK" was not visable.

In his defense though, the demo loaded just fine for me too. It just crashed, however I was able to view the options. I am not a MAC user, but is there any way to provide more graphical memory? 144 is below the 256 required.

 

[wiiwelshman]

Hey Im new to the forum. Im having the same problem here are my specs.
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo


Processor Speed: 2.33 GHz

Chipset Model: ATY,RadeonX1600
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 256 MB

2Gb of ram.

Will it still not work?

 

[The_J]

Welcome to CFC .

Your graphics card is under the minimum specs, so the only real way to fix the problem is to buy a new one, but you can find a workaround, which will give you at least readable text, here.