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Konclan edited this page Sep 3, 2022 · 1 revision

With Portal 2 no longer able to run since macOS Catalina, it becomes increasingly more difficult and pointless to continue developing mod tools for the Mac version of Portal 2. As a result, starting with version 4.37 we have discontinued support for Mac and will no longer be providing Mac releases. This page details how you can still use BEE2.4 if you are a Mac user.

A quick bit of advice...

If you're trying to use a Mac as your main gaming machine...just don't. Apple has proven time and time again that they have no intent to support game developers working outside of their "official" systems (Apple Arcade, Mac App Store, etc.) Many developers have deliberately chosen not to release their games for Mac, so by using a Mac for gaming, you're just going to be locking yourself out of more and more games as time goes on.

That being said, if you're playing Portal 2 on a Mac simply because you have no other option, read on.

Using an old version

The easiest option to use BEE2.4 on Mac is to stay on an old version. You won't get any new features or bugfixes, but things should be relatively stable. The last version of BEE2.4 to support Mac is release 4.36.0.

However, upon launching this version you will receive an error about a file called basemodui.txt. Valve broke the syntax of this file in an update, which Portal 2 is apparently fine with, but older BEE versions aren't, so they crash. To fix the problem, you'll need to fix the syntax error yourself. Navigate to your Portal 2 folder, open portal2_dlc2/resource/basemodui_english.txt (regardless of your language), and add a single } on a new line at the end of the file. You should now be able to start BEE2.4 without getting an error.

Some users have additionally reported being logged out when attempting to add a game. It's not known exactly why this happens, or why the issue has only popped up recently. Working around this would likely require putting a pre-existing games.cfg in your BEE2.4 config folder, but we don't currently have one on hand. Your best bet would probably be asking existing Mac BEE2.4 users for their copy of the file.

To-do: Provide this file.

This is the easiest method of using BEE2.4 on Mac, but it does have the obvious drawback of being stuck on an old version. If you want to use the latest version of the mod, things get a bit more technical.

Building from source

While we've stopped providing Mac releases, some Mac-specific code may still exist in the app, allowing you to compile it manually. However, things may begin to break as time goes on and more Mac-specific code is stripped out. As such, this method is not recommended, but feel free to try it. Instructions to compile the app on Windows can be found in the README, and should be able to be adapted to Mac fairly easily.

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