Please Assist With FFXI On IMac.

You are able to boot into windows, natively. Do so. I play on the 360 because I like using a superior OS for other things.

I use a Macbook Pro for FFXI, but not as my main gaming system. It works great, but gets pretty hot for obvious reasons.

FFXI will work in parallels and I use parallels (with Vista installed) to run FFXI while doing less involved tasks in FFXI (i.e. crafting, farming, checking plants, checking AH, etc.) I have used it for events like Dynamis and such but I normally have to turn the graphics way down due to slowness.

For events, boot into Vista using Boot Camp so everything can run the way it was designed to run and not through some emulator. FFXI on my machine while running Vista natively works just as well as running on any other laptop.

On my machine I can bump all the graphics up and resolution up as high as I want and experience little to no slowness with the game.

Hope that helps.

ADD: I've had zero stability problems. I made my Vista partition with boot camp and pointed my parallels software to run this partition while in OS X and I've had zero issues doing so.
The nice thing about running FFXI in parallels is that you're able to still browse the web via OS X while play FFXI Windowed via Parallels. Which is great since you won't have to worry about visiting malicious websites and such as much.

On that note, I found FFXI seems to operate better (faster) if you run it in full screen mode and let parallels do the "Windowering" instead of SE themselves; however, I do not know how FFXI would operate using the 3rd party Windower that everyone out there seems to use ... I don't use that.

I run FFXI on a Macbook Pro, using VMware Fusion, and find that it works smoothly, with the exception of some very minor graphical issues. I don't know how well FFXI will run using Parallel, but I have also had success running FFXI while running Windows natively, without any of the annoying graphics problems, on my older mac.

I would suggest you use native Windows, although if you have one of the new macbooks, it may not work. I cannot even play FFXI, or any other game for that matter, while running Boot Camp on my current macbook, although this may be due to either Parallel's drivers or improper installation on my part.

I play on a MacBook Pro that I BootCamped to run XP. Everything works fine for me doing this.

running vista on bootcamp on my imac. ffxi and vista works perfectly for me. i tried out the newest parallels and got ffxi to work, but the fps are very unstable. it is possible to run to ah and do synth or even nyzul. but wherever lots of people are around i get very low fps. i wonder if it works better when once im upgrading to 4gb ram.

Mac = don't

You're using the Boot Camp Assistant application, right? If not, it can be found at:

Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities > Boot Camp Assistant

As far as I know, the Assistant won't let you partition the entire HD, and is quite strait-forwards. Otherwise, installing Windows without a support application will always take up the entire HD, at least from my experience.

I wouldn't recommend installing Windows via Parallel, as if it is anything like Fusion, it will install all sorts of drivers that make it a pain to run natively.

~sigh~ why do this people imac....REALY?! Shame on you.

Because, over the life of myself....

I have ended up destroying 4 Macs (1 of which was my school's computer system)

I don't trust Macs.

This is PC world get used to it. But for better longer mac hate check this
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant