Setting up and Using Wine

[CylonGlitch]

I have been tempted to finally figure out how to use Wine or Crossover to get games / applications running.

I've looked into it before and got lost trying to figure out how to make things work, so any help would be appreciated. At the same time, I'd like to document the process here, and in the end create guide to help others.

I also notice that games from Steam seem different, not sure how to get them to run yet.

I'm using my work machine, clean Admin account (MBP 2011)

I've done a few things.
1) Downloaded and installed Wineskin Winery
2) Downloaded and installed Crossover Trial
3) Installed Steam in Winery (took a little to get it to work, but figured out you need to run as Administrator and then things went easy)
4) Installed Steam in Crossover (a little easier, but not perfectly smooth)
5) Installed Machinarium under both as a test.
6) Machinarium fails on both; In the Wine setup, it runs, but the screen is black, but I can hear music and it is obviously running. In crossover it comes up with a white screen but doesn't seem to do anything else, no music, can't exit, anything.

At this point I'm suspended working on it. I will do more work shortly, but had to get back to real work.

Any thoughts / suggestions?

 

[iMacFarlane]

It would be great to have a collaborative guide on how to get the most out of WINE/Crossover. It seems the vast majority of the pages on how to get WINE to work are geared towards the Linux side of the house, or require extensive terminal operations . . . no thank you.

I've fiddled with Winery, and got a few things to work. I have successfully created a wrapper for Homeworld, and without anything shady, got it to run without the CD. Most of my other attempts utterly fail, including my recent go at Legend of Grimrock that I bought from Steam during their summer sale event.

A good place to go for discussion is :

http://portingteam.com/frontpage

They have many Wineskin wrappers prepared and tweaked for a plethora of games, but their download sites are . . . scary?

 

[CylonGlitch]

So far my testing has gone horrible. WineSkin Winery now refuses to run, it actually will crash finder completely. DOH123 I'm looking your way!

Crossover has been a little easier setting things up, but that's putting it gently.

What I found out was my first game of choice, "Machinarium" seems to be nothing much more than a Flash game, so you need to get flash installed. Crossover does this easily, that was good. WineSkin seemed to want to do it when it was installed but I think I didn't allow it because I hate Flash in general. Now I have no idea how to get it back. Additionally WineSkin crashing Finder wasn't a good thing so I bailed on this. . . not sure what to do here.

Next up, let's throw a softball at this thing, the ORIGINAL Half-Life. This ancient piece of software probably runs beautifully emulated with Parallels or Fusion, it's that old. Let's see how it does.

WineSkin - Crash Finder -- machine needs to be hard rebooted.
Crossover, installed no problem, main menu, no problem. Starting a new game, no problem. "Starting New Game Server" forever. Done.

So far, 2 games, to failures. BOTH games should be easy, neither working at all.

I'm going to wipe out WineSkin and try re-installing it, see if that gets me past the Finder Lockups.

 

[CylonGlitch]

I had a little better luck with Machinarium; I figured out that I could use the WineTricks and install Steam and Flash10. I was able to get the application to run BUT would render ONE frame and then I would have to right click to cause it to advance to the next frame. Ugh. BUT it did run, just couldn't figure out how to get OUT of the app because it was basically useless.

I haven't retried Half-Life yet, I'm getting there.

 

[doh123]

I've fiddled with Winery, and got a few things to work. I have successfully created a wrapper for Homeworld, and without anything shady, got it to run without the CD. Most of my other attempts utterly fail, including my recent go at Legend of Grimrock that I bought from Steam during their summer sale event.

Legend of Grimrock runs pretty good.. the problem is that there are several bugs with Wine that will affect the new Ivy Bridge CPUs, and/or AMD/ATI GPUs and such. I put together an engine that should be able to run it on any Mac, if you want a copy grab it here...

http://wineskin.UrgeSoftware.com/EnginesSpecial/WS9Wine1.3.36Grimrock1-Installer.app.zip

So far my testing has gone horrible. WineSkin Winery now refuses to run, it actually will crash finder completely. DOH123 I'm looking your way!

are you talking about Winery, or a Wineskin wrapper you made from Winery. Winery is just an organization and downloading tool. If you mean a Gray screen crash, thats actually launchd crashing... try the Wineskin 2.5.6beta1 wrapper and see if it works better. If its actually Winery crashing... I'd need some crash logs because I've not seen the current version ever crash.

http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-view_blog_post.php?postId=53
Just manually install that and it'll knock it up to 2.5.6beta1. If you use the Update in Winery again it'll go back to 2.5.5, so don't push that if you want to keep the beta. Its only a beta because its pre-release, but I don't know of any major issues, and its overall better than 2.5.5 in all my own personal testing.

Make sure you update every wrapper after you put this on so they'll go to 2.5.6Beta1, or just make a new wrapper.

 

[iMacFarlane]

Legend of Grimrock runs pretty good.. the problem is that there are several bugs with Wine that will affect the new Ivy Bridge CPUs, and/or AMD/ATI GPUs and such. I put together an engine that should be able to run it on any Mac, if you want a copy grab it here...

http://wineskin.UrgeSoftware.com/EnginesSpecial/WS9Wine1.3.36Grimrock1-Installer.app.zip

Oh my God!!! What the hell kind of wizardry did you do? It runs full screen, native resolution, no lag, no stuttering, amazing! Thank you!

@CylonGlitch, this guy obviously knows what he's doing with WINE. Maybe we can convince him to shed some light and pass the knowledge in this thread/forum . . .

 

[doh123]

Oh my God!!! What the hell kind of wizardry did you do? It runs full screen, native resolution, no lag, no stuttering, amazing! Thank you!

@CylonGlitch, this guy obviously knows what he's doing with WINE. Maybe we can convince him to shed some light and pass the knowledge in this thread/forum . . .

Thats why I created Wineskin in the first place. I'm knowledgable in Wine, though not an expert... but I am an expert on Wineskin though since its my software

Basically after testing and talking with Paul at PaulTheTall.com (who is a heavy Wineskin user), I found that Wine versions after 1.3.36 added some bugs that made ATI GPUs run the game bad... also found out that any Wine version couldn't run it on Ivy Bridge CPUs (2012 Macs) due to a buffer being too small in Wine for CPU info. That engine is basically just a standard Wine build of 1.3.36 with the buffer made bigger, and XInput2 disabled as its sometimes problematic on OSX. Really one of the easiest custom engines I've ever made.

I don't know how the Steam version runs, I only use the stand-a-lone Grimrock installer because I had bought it right from the Devs. It just needed Winetricks install of Xact, d3dx9_43, and d3dcompiler_43, and the game runs great. Was playing it some at 2880x1800, and it runs decently, but most of the interface and menus do not scale good for that res, so I had been playing at 1920x1200 and it runs great.

 

[iMacFarlane]

You know that scene in Wayne's World when Wayne and Garth are backstage and they meet Alice Cooper? That's me right now . . .

Thats why I created Wineskin in the first place.

"We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"

Now your response to me in a different thread about "making an emulator for PPC programs" carries quite a bit more weight. I've been tinkering with Wineskin since I first crossed over to OS X about 2 years ago. Awesome work.

I have the Steam version of the Legend of Grimrock. All I did was dig into the file system, find the folder containing the game, manually place the entire folder into a blank Wineskin wrapper I made, set the launch executable, then selected your custom engine for the wrapper and BLAM! Complete success.

Thanks again, I tip my hat to you, sir.

 

[doh123]

Now your response to me in a different thread about "making an emulator for PPC programs" carries quite a bit more weight.

Sometimes i can come across as a little harsh... but I like finding or making solutions to issues, and it really is possible if someone wants to take the time to make a PPC processor emulator, even though it would be a big project. I thought about it at one time, but ... its too much of something from the past thats fading out, and my heart is more in gaming.

I have the Steam version of the Legend of Grimrock. All I did was dig into the file system, find the folder containing the game, manually place the entire folder into a blank Wineskin wrapper I made, set the launch executable, then selected your custom engine for the wrapper and BLAM! Complete success.

I think the Steam version already has much of the required files in there already to make it easy to port that way.

I mainly grabbed Grimrock to play because the old school RPGs like that are my favorites... with things like Eye of the Beholder (which this game is a lot like), Might and Magic, Wizardry, Lands of Lore, etc...

I'm currently in the process of making a game like that all from my own imagination based more on how the old Might and Magics were set up (like 3, 4, and 5) which were my favorites... but a huge world with tons to do so its not going to be quick, probably a couple more years at least, but its just as fun to make things as to play them (and I won't be using Wineskin for the Mac port, I like building things open from the start, and I'm currently using Unity)

 

[CylonGlitch]

DOH123 - First thing, yes, Winery was taking down FINDER! Sadly because it was crashing so hard, there were no log files created. I have gone back reinstalled and everything seems OK for now. Not sure what happened there, but I'm guessing maybe it was one of those things where a game locked up, everything was open (including Winery) and it corrupted one of the files.

Using Winery to set things up is mostly easy. But there are still a ton of things going on that aren't making it easy for someone who doesn't know the system. But this isn't really your problem, it is more the way Wine works in general. Taking a premade wineskin and going from there seems to be the best way to move forward, but even that isn't the easiest path, especially for people who isn't super tech savvy.

Sadly, I consider myself on the side of super techy, been dealing with windows before it was born. I deal with low level hardware and semiconductor designs for decades. And even with the hardware and software knowledge that I have, the learning curve for Wine is a bit steep. Thus my desire to create a "how to" for those who come after me. Remove some of the mystery and make things better for those who own Macs.

Unfortunately I don't have a huge amount of time to work on the project; several other things going on all at the same time, including life. But as I work on it, and figure things out, I'll be documenting them here and eventually will want to put them all together.

Thanks for any help.

 

[doh123]

DOH123 - First thing, yes, Winery was taking down FINDER! Sadly because it was crashing so hard, there were no log files created. I have gone back reinstalled and everything seems OK for now. Not sure what happened there, but I'm guessing maybe it was one of those things where a game locked up, everything was open (including Winery) and it corrupted one of the files.

Using Winery to set things up is mostly easy. But there are still a ton of things going on that aren't making it easy for someone who doesn't know the system. But this isn't really your problem, it is more the way Wine works in general. Taking a premade wineskin and going from there seems to be the best way to move forward, but even that isn't the easiest path, especially for people who isn't super tech savvy.

Sadly, I consider myself on the side of super techy, been dealing with windows before it was born. I deal with low level hardware and semiconductor designs for decades. And even with the hardware and software knowledge that I have, the learning curve for Wine is a bit steep. Thus my desire to create a "how to" for those who come after me. Remove some of the mystery and make things better for those who own Macs.

Unfortunately I don't have a huge amount of time to work on the project; several other things going on all at the same time, including life. But as I work on it, and figure things out, I'll be documenting them here and eventually will want to put them all together.

Thanks for any help.

really odd.. Ive never seen it crash Finder... I've also never seen a Finder crash require a reboot (its set to restart itself, unless you hack the OS to be able to quit Finder), so something must have really got messed up.

On the developer/programmer side, Wine is probably *the* most difficult project in the world... its mega complicated... which makes it less than user friendly too... just looking at the fact that for OSX its all command line usage. Crossover does a good job at user friendliness. WHile I tried to make Wineskin user friendly as much as I can, its focus isn't something like Crossover, for someone to just take it and run a program or two, I made it to actually be a porting tool, which gets more complicated from the start.

 

[CylonGlitch]

DOH123, what you've done is great, it does get people started quickly, but the learning curve is steep and I think it intimidates a lot of people. Hell, Crossover is good, and that is intimidating as well. Unfortunately for it to become completely usable by the average person a lot of effort has to be put in to make it really user friendly and simple. But there just isn't enough money in it to really make it worth someone's time and effort.

Thanks again!

 

[CylonGlitch]

Here is what I'm getting most of the time when I try to run anything :

WineskinX11: main(): argc=12
	argv[0] = /Users/david/Applications/Wineskin/Half Life.app/Contents/MacOS/WineskinX11
	argv[1] = :1239
	argv[2] = -depth
	argv[3] = 24
	argv[4] = +xinerama
	argv[5] = -br
	argv[6] = -fp
	argv[7] = /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi,/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic,/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/misc,/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/OTF,/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo,/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/TTF,/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/util
	argv[8] = -xkbdir
	argv[9] = /Users/david/Applications/Wineskin/Half Life.app/Contents/Frameworks/bin/X11/xkb
	argv[10] = +extension
	argv[11] = '/usr/bin/quartz-wm'
Waiting for startup parameters via Mach IPC.
WineskinX11: do_start_x11_server(): argc=12
Attempting to use pixel depth of 24
[2990159.958] WineskinX11 starting:
[2990159.958] X.Org X Server 1.11.99.902
[2990159.958] Build Date: 20120208
[2990159.958] _XSERVTransmkdir: ERROR: euid != 0,directory /tmp/.X11-unix will not be created.

 

[CylonGlitch]

I finally got Half-Life working. I don't know what I did to make it happy, but I started a new bottle, installed steam. Got that up and running smoothly, no problem. I downloaded and installed Half-Life and it worked. Not sure what was different this time. That one was easy, and should have not caused ANY problems. Next up, something more advanced, maybe Mirror's Edge.

 

[iMacFarlane]

@CylonGlitch,
Good job getting half-life to work. I remember buying that so, so long ago and being disappointed with it's performance on my 120MHz Pentium. My, how it would scream today . . .

I've been dabbling more with Wineskin and have had great success!

I had tried Fallout (I) before, and although I had gotten it to work, it was dreadfully slow. This problem was widespread, as I saw after some Googling. No one had a solution. Same thing with Starcraft (I). Works, like crap.
Until I read something in these forums about a special Wine Engine that ends in "ICE". I changed the engine in my Starcraft and Fallout wrappers to the ICE one, and both run perfectly now, just perfect!

The other games I had repeated failures on were Warcraft III and its expansion, The Frozen Throne. I had full installs of these on an old XP laptop, but couldn't get them to work in a wrapper.

A few posts up, doh123 provides a link to a special Wineskin wrapper he made for Legend of Grimrock. It worked miracles with that game, so I figured, why not? Changed the engine in my Warcraft III wrapper to the Grimrock one, BAM! Worked like a champ. A problem with Warcraft III, though, is that, unlike Starcraft, its expansion is launched using a different executable, instead of chosen in-game. That means two wrappers and an extra 1.2 GB on my hard drive.

So I learned about symlinks, and made one in my Frozen Throne wrapper to point to the game files in my Reign of Chaos wrapper. Works great!

This was after I tried using an alias, which does NOT work.

Also, I'd like to point out that I had screen drawing issues in all of the wrappers I had tried before (black screen, white screen, crazy dancing parts of the image I was supposed to be seeing), but I seem to have resolved that. I always open up screen settings now, Fullscreen, Override, Use these settings, Decorate windows, Auto Detect GPU Info for Direct3D.

And although Fallout and Starcraft are coded for 640x480, Warcraft III is not. However, it only allows you to choose 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768 in-game. No worries! I opened wine tricks registry in my wrappers, found Blizzard/Warcraft III registry, and manually changed reswidth and resheight keys to my MBP native (1280x800), and the games run in native res now.

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I'd been working on these games for a long time now, and everything came together last night. Thought I'd share my success!

 

[doh123]

A few posts up, doh123 provides a link to a special Wineskin wrapper he made for Legend of Grimrock. It worked miracles with that game, so I figured, why not? Changed the engine in my Warcraft III wrapper to the Grimrock one, BAM! Worked like a champ. A problem with Warcraft III, though, is that, unlike Starcraft, its expansion is launched using a different executable, instead of chosen in-game. That means two wrappers and an extra 1.2 GB on my hard drive.

glad you had success.. it can be tricky getting some things to work, but after you figure out a few you know the most common things to try.

As to 2 wrappers, you can install them both in the same wrapper, and make 1 of them the main exe, then set the other one in a Custom EXE launcher, which makes a launcher app inside the wrapper beside Wineskin.app. WHile that launcher app has to stay there to work, you can always make a alias or symlink to it outside the wrapper to launch it.

 

[CylonGlitch]

glad you had success.. it can be tricky getting some things to work, but after you figure out a few you know the most common things to try.

As to 2 wrappers, you can install them both in the same wrapper, and make 1 of them the main exe, then set the other one in a Custom EXE launcher, which makes a launcher app inside the wrapper beside Wineskin.app. WHile that launcher app has to stay there to work, you can always make a alias or symlink to it outside the wrapper to launch it.

This has been my question. Is it better to use one wrapper for each game? Even more so, steam. 99% of the games I buy now are from Steam. As it is, I have one WineSteam running; I use this to download the applications. Then I copy the data over to the wrapper (if I can find one) and run it from there. BUT it means it isn't working through steam anymore (has to be hacked to make this happen). Should I just use everything through steam? Should I build one good steam wrapper (such as start with Grimmrock?) and work from there?

I would love to keep the Steam functionality, automatic updates, save games in the cloud, etc. Thus it would be ideal to have just one wrapper for all the steam games . . . or most of them at least.

 

[iMacFarlane]

glad you had success.. it can be tricky getting some things to work, but after you figure out a few you know the most common things to try.

As to 2 wrappers, you can install them both in the same wrapper, and make 1 of them the main exe, then set the other one in a Custom EXE launcher, which makes a launcher app inside the wrapper beside Wineskin.app. WHile that launcher app has to stay there to work, you can always make a alias or symlink to it outside the wrapper to launch it.

I actually haven't played around with that option yet. Does it make a multi-option switchboard kind of like what you did with the Ultima Underworld Duo?

 

[doh123]

This has been my question. Is it better to use one wrapper for each game? Even more so, steam. 99% of the games I buy now are from Steam. As it is, I have one WineSteam running; I use this to download the applications. Then I copy the data over to the wrapper (if I can find one) and run it from there. BUT it means it isn't working through steam anymore (has to be hacked to make this happen). Should I just use everything through steam? Should I build one good steam wrapper (such as start with Grimmrock?) and work from there?

I would love to keep the Steam functionality, automatic updates, save games in the cloud, etc. Thus it would be ideal to have just one wrapper for all the steam games . . . or most of them at least.

Typically many things need to be changed for a game to run, and some of those changes can break other games... or certain ones run better with different Wine versions, etc... so normally you'd use a wrapper per game.

This isn't required though of course, if you get a buncha Steam games that can all run in the same wrapper fine, then go for it.. I know some people do this and just make the wrapper launch Steam and they select the game they want in there and play. Some Steam community functions and stuff still crash Wine though.

I actually haven't played around with that option yet. Does it make a multi-option switchboard kind of like what you did with the Ultima Underworld Duo?

no... that wasn't even Wineskin, but just a custom thing i through together that used DOSbox.. i manually made the menu.

You could create a start up menu like that, but that is much MUCH more complicated. I've had on the todo list for a while a way to add in a custom splash screen, and I would like to be able to have menu options listed that would be generated onto the splash screen for starting multiple apps and things, but its not a feature I've gotten to yet... maybe like an XML file that listed buttons and actions they do and the splash screen would have a background image you set then dynamically put on buttons based on the XML file. Would probably put a editor for that XML file in Wineskin.app as well. The splash screen itself would be part of WineskinLauncher, so feel free to grab the source at Sourceforge.net and get it working and give me some patch files for it I'm all for other people helping out coding.

Custom EXE Launchers are just super simple little apps that launch a different EXE in the same wrapper, no fancy menus and such. The main idea behind them being put in originally was for games that has like a separate setup.exe for configuration and things like that, not really to run a bunch of different games at once. Of course you can also make top of the screen menubar scripts to launch things from too.... not too easy if it launches in fullscreen though.

 

[CylonGlitch]

Here is where I am.

1) I have a stand alone steam Wineskin for download games from Steam. So far, working perfectly.

2) I have Half-Life installed under this Wineskin and it operates beautifully -- it should it's old and not a very taxing application.

3) I have now Downloaded the Mirror's Edge Wineskin, and the application and installed it into the Wineskin. The instructions on how to get it to worked were quite clear; even included the hack to make it work outside of Steam. It works like a dream; fast, and seemingly full featured. (This is awesome because that was a game I truly enjoyed but never finished). Now I can get back to completing it.

I want to be able to understand what is being done with the Wineskins so that I can figure out how to build one for the games that I have that don't have Wineskins. I'm considering modifying the Mirror's Edge one to see if I can get it to work under Steam. That would be sweet.

For steam games, I don't mind having to log into Steam for each one or even to install steam into each Skin; not a problem. But I do want Steam to keep it up dated and the save games remote (for those games that support it). But maybe I'm getting too far ahead of myself.

So far, it's easy if you are using 3rd party skins, much more difficult if you're trying to do it yourself.

 

[doh123]

Here is where I am.

1) I have a stand alone steam Wineskin for download games from Steam. So far, working perfectly.

2) I have Half-Life installed under this Wineskin and it operates beautifully -- it should it's old and not a very taxing application.

3) I have now Downloaded the Mirror's Edge Wineskin, and the application and installed it into the Wineskin. The instructions on how to get it to worked were quite clear; even included the hack to make it work outside of Steam. It works like a dream; fast, and seemingly full featured. (This is awesome because that was a game I truly enjoyed but never finished). Now I can get back to completing it.

I want to be able to understand what is being done with the Wineskins so that I can figure out how to build one for the games that I have that don't have Wineskins. I'm considering modifying the Mirror's Edge one to see if I can get it to work under Steam. That would be sweet.

For steam games, I don't mind having to log into Steam for each one or even to install steam into each Skin; not a problem. But I do want Steam to keep it up dated and the save games remote (for those games that support it). But maybe I'm getting too far ahead of myself.

So far, it's easy if you are using 3rd party skins, much more difficult if you're trying to do it yourself.

Wineskin Manual The Neverball example at the end usually helps people a lot in the general flow area... but figuring out what kind of reg changes to make, dll overrides, winetricks (which does a lot of stuff for you easy), Screen settings, etc etc... can take a lot of trial and error.

Can also ask questions

 

[iMacFarlane]

So, post Mountain Lion . . .
My wineskins now run 'when they want to'. Don't know how else to describe it. Launch Warcraft III, get an error message about how X11 failed to initiate core devices . . .
But out of stubbornness, try launching it three or four times, then suddenly it works. Just fine.

Weird.

I installed xQuartz, and see in the Wineskin where you can force xQuartz to be used vice X11. I tried that, xQuartz launches faster, and the programs seem more stable!

My question is, some wrappers don't have the option in the list to force xQuartz. Will this be fixed if I 'update wrapper', or do I risk breaking the wrapper if I do this?

 

[doh123]

So, post Mountain Lion . . .
My wineskins now run 'when they want to'. Don't know how else to describe it. Launch Warcraft III, get an error message about how X11 failed to initiate core devices . . .
But out of stubbornness, try launching it three or four times, then suddenly it works. Just fine.

Weird.

I installed xQuartz, and see in the Wineskin where you can force xQuartz to be used vice X11. I tried that, xQuartz launches faster, and the programs seem more stable!

My question is, some wrappers don't have the option in the list to force xQuartz. Will this be fixed if I 'update wrapper', or do I risk breaking the wrapper if I do this?

WineskinX11 older versions have some race conditions going on and may fail like you see. Using XQuartz instead was added in 2.5.5. If you want to update your wrapper to something that runs better I'd suggest 2.5.6RC1 which I've done a ton of work on to get it quick and stable. Your old wrapper can be updated fine usually... you can also fix many by installing XQuartz(even without selecting to use it), as it can grab files from there and get around race conditions. 2.5.6RC1 should run fine whether you have XQuartz installed or not.

 

[iMacFarlane]

WineskinX11 older versions have some race conditions going on and may fail like you see. Using XQuartz instead was added in 2.5.5. If you want to update your wrapper to something that runs better I'd suggest 2.5.6RC1 which I've done a ton of work on to get it quick and stable. Your old wrapper can be updated fine usually... you can also fix many by installing XQuartz(even without selecting to use it), as it can grab files from there and get around race conditions. 2.5.6RC1 should run fine whether you have XQuartz installed or not.

Good to hear from you again. Just checked again on my lunch break, and XQuartz does run reliably and faster. My Warcraft III wrapper is perfect now, I can actually get on with playing it and beating the Frozen Throne!

I'll update my wrappers to 2.5.6RC1 as you suggest, thanks for everything and a great hobbyist tool like Wineskin!

 

[antonis]

Edited to delete a question.