I don’t know if anyone else had the same problems, but I managed to get BioShock on my MacBook Pro, despite those problems. Here’s the story. Skip to the steps if you had the same issues and don’t want to bother reading the story.
I don’t game that much, so I limit myself to playing a kick-ass game from time to time. BioShock happens to be one of those kick-ass games, so I finally got it. I chose not to use Steam because we’ve got a ridiculous bandwidth limit in Belgium (grossly overcharged, too), and I feared DRM issues. Suppose you can’t connect to Steam? About the DRM: Apparently, BioShock is notorious for its activation issues. They don’t limit it anymore since June, though. SecuROM is a bitch, too, so I guess Steam is a good way to get it. Anyway, DRM penalizes the legitimate user, making getting it illegally that much more attractive, so it’s pretty stupid, and they’ll figure out eventually, I guess.
Enough about that, though. I had played the demo, and I had a dual-boot setup with Windows XP, so I assumed that it would do just fine. However, the issue I had on my MBP was: Every time I tried to insert the DVD, it made a few noises, which apparently mean: “I can’t read this bloody thing”. I started hoping it was the DVD, so I checked if it worked on our desktop PC. No problem there. Of course, I couldn’t play the game, because that PC’s hardware is just not made for games. It’s got one of them crippled cards.
I started to fear for my drive, so I tried other CDs and DVDs. They all worked. I don’t know if it was because of dual-layer, or SecuROM, or whatever. It just didn’t work. Then I started thinking: Can I share drives? I knew they do it with HDs all the time, but what about DVDs? I asked my father, and he said: “sure”. Anyway, I got it to share, and I got my MacBook Pro to connect. After the installation, however, SecuROM checked if it was a genuine disk, and told me it wasn’t. Why don’t they do that before the installation?
Then, I started googling around to see how it was done. There appears to be something called a ‘mini-image’, which is only a few megabytes of size, but manages to spoof SecuROM. So, I downloaded that, mounted it with Daemon Tools, did it all over, and: It worked.
About the performance: It was pretty good. If I cranked it up, it was jerky, but if I put the graphics settings a little lower, it ran fine. It looked pretty damn good in the end, especially the water. About the game: It was kick-ass, but you don’t need me to tell you that.
Now, all steps combined, here’s how to install BioShock on your MBP using a remote drive on another Windows PC. I’m not going into much detail, though.
Not inserting the DVD does not influence the gameplay in any way. Everything you need is on the HD. The DVD is only required for SecuROM.
So, there’s how I did it. I don’t know if I’m the only one, but if I’m not alone, here’s a way to do it.