trouble playing spore in mountain Lion

When I started up Spore for Mac in Mountain Lion with all patches installed, the screen went white with horizontal lines flashing on it. No problems with audio.

I was able to resolve the problem by enabling "Use FBO for Backbuffer" in the Transgaming Cider preferences box. This is the box that goes away if you have disabled the "Display this on subsequent starts" option. I was not able to get it to come back on another account where I had disabled that option. Instead I had to go into the file "Library/Preferences/SPORE Preferences/config" with a text editor and change

"fbobackbuffer" = "0"

to

"fbobackbuffer" = "1"

After that everything worked fine.

Oh. That's a different bug. Delete the spore application and reinstall it. Do not install the updates. Start up spore to the galaxy screen on every account that you want to play it from. Then you can install the updates.

I had the same problem, and mattw's fix above solved the problem. Thanks!

The config file should be in the folder /Users/[your user name]/Library/Preferences/SPORE Preferences/, which you can access via Terminal.

Or, if you perfer to navigate via the Finder: in the Finder, click on the Go menu and choose "Go to Folder..." and enter the path above. Right click (or control click) on the file "config" and choose "Open With", then choose TextEdit. Then follow mattw gx's instructions above to edit the file.

Note that the SPORE Preferences folder was not in the System/Library/Preferences folder (at least in my case).

It's not really an apple problem, it is more a problem with an old program that is no longer being supported by the manufacturer. I would say that if the solution here is not working then you may have to try to completely remove the program and reinstall according to the instructions here.

Thanks for reminding me about the "go to folder ... " feature. I opened it with TextEdit, followed mattw gx's instructions but it did not work. The icon bounces for a while, another will come, the spore splash screen comes up and then the icon disappears.

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.

I've got a new MacBook Pro (retina display) w/ Mountain Lion. Couldn't run Spore, even with the FBO back-buffer on. I did a complete re-install as suggested, without loading any upgrades. Still doesn't run. It starts up, I get the splash screen, the screen goes black, flashes white, then I get an exception raised ("Unhandled page fault on write access to 0x0000000c at address 0x00e60501"). It asks me if I want to debug the exception. If I select no, it quits. If I select yes, the screen flashes and it quits.

Hey there

I just bought a MacBook Pro this past summer and I can't run Spore, although I deleted everything, did the config update, and reinstalled it. I'm still getting the same error message and am getting annoyed.

I am experiencing the exact same problem. I am running Spore 4.0. I tried to update to 5.1, but the patch won't install with this version. I will attempt to install the trial version and if that works, may have to re-purchase a new license.

Thanks for all of the info. I've been searching all over trying to solve this for my son. I can now install and get it to launch which wasn't possible before, but the screen has a lot of white lines on it, and after just a free minutes it freezes.

I've tried removing everything and reinstalling, rebooting with the combination of keys in between each update. I checked the file for the (1) in it. All is as suggested here. Before this it wouldn't even launch, so I've made some progress but I'm just not quite there yet. Do we just need to wait for Apple to come up with an update that will help with some of these games? I'm running on an iMac that was created sometime in about 2012 according to the system info. There's plenty of memory and disc space.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks so much! Being trying to fix that for ages, and it works now! Thanks!

I can't find the SPORE Preferences folder. I looked the the library/preferences, system/library/ , and even the packaged contents of the app. Can someone help? Thanks.

I can't find the SPORE preferences folder either. Under the Spore folder is just the icon for Spore and Galactic Adventures and the two readme files...

me too 😟

anyone going to come up with a solution to this issue. I have the same result.

how the **** did you know that?