El Capitan issues? How to fix running old STEAM games

Fix issues with El Capitan, to run old STEAM games

I recently purchased the 3D Realms (Apogee) Anthology pack on STEAM (which I’ve started vlogging about as well). Although most games run just fine, there’s a few games that just wouldn’t start.

When starting a game you’d get a message along the lines of:

[code]An error occurred while starting the X11 server: “Failed to activate core devices.”[/code]

The solution to resolve this on your Mac OS X El Capitan is quite simple actually, it has to do with ‘rootless’ (System Integration Protection) which is a protection by your Mac system that disables programs to write/change files in critical system directories. That is obviously a good thing normally!

Disabling this is quite simple (although be aware, there’s a reason that your Mac protects these directories; there’s a risk involved in disabling this. Only keep disabled when playing certain games and re-enable when you’re done!).
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• Shut down your Mac
• Power it up, while pressing and holding CMD + R (not the +)
• It will boot into OS X Recovery mode
• Once this shows up, click “Utilities” (top menu) and choose “Terminal”
• In the terminal enter the following command

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[code]csrutil disable; reboot[/code]

Your Mac will reboot and you’ll have disabled the System Integration Protection. The games will run just fine after this. If you at one point want to turn it back on, simply do the same steps and type in “csrutil enable” instead of disable.

Again, remember, this is an advanced setting on your Mac and generally speaking you should not disable this.

Keep on playing! 🙂