Peter Tran – Sydney, Australia

I’m an avid fan of the game DoTA (Defense of the Ancients), which is a Warcraft 3 custom game that seems to have a very large fan base. So what you do is you purchase the Warcraft 3 – Reign of Chaos game, as well as the Frozen Throne addon, install it and download the DoTA custom map from the link above. Connect onto Battle.Net and you can play with all kinds of players around the world. This set up had me hooked for several years between 2003 and 2006. Since then, I haven’t had a chance to play this game much.

Just a month ago, I recently converted to using an iMac. This meant a limited number of games could be played natively on the Mac. However, some game install CDs/DVDs come with both Mac and PC compatibility – The Warcraft 3 series being one of them.

Excited that this game could be run natively, I installed WC3: RoC fine, then however as I proceed to install WC3: TFT, the installer seemed to hang with the twirling beach ball. It looks like there’s an apparent bug in the installer. Attempting to google for the answers, I was unsuccessful in finding one. However, after trying a few things out, I’ve managed to get the expansion pack successfully installed. Should you come across the same issues, just follow these steps to instal Frozen Throne onto a Mac (I did this on Snow Leopard):

1. Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
2. Select the HDD that you will be installing WC3: The Frozen Throne on, and click ‘Repair Permissions’. This may take a few minutes.
3. Insert your TFT CD.
4. Run the Installer. You will see the spinning ball. Leave the installer running for up to 20 minutes.
5. Have a tea/coffee, smoke or a nap.
6. When you come back, you should be presented with the install menu. Proceed to install Warcraft 3 into the Applications folder. Note: You will also be asked to insert your WC3: ROC CD during the installation.
7. Download the latest Frozen Throne Blizzard Update Patch from here. At the time of writing, War3TFT_124c_English.zip is the file I downloaded and is the latest update released.
8. Run the update patch. Once complete, you should be able to eject your CD and run Frozen Throne natively without the use of your installation CDs.

That all worked for me. Ok, so this isn’t really a workaround, but really is a set of instructions that should get the game installed onto your Mac. I’d like to hear if this method worked for you on your Macs as well. Feel free to leave your comments or other alternate workarounds that you have discovered.