Hello,

New developments in wine has suddenly made it possible to install the Windows X-Wing Series on our Macs without Windows. (That means no Bootcamp or Parallels) With wine winmm.dll support in OSX with 1.7.39, suddenly the joystick detection will now work!

There are however quite a few little issues to work around, but all can be overcome. Due to the universality of OSX and wine, any mac 2007 or newer with at least OSX 10.6 can do this. But it will take some skill in computer use. This is not for everyone!

BASICS

First is to install wineskin winery. Available here
(this is the same technology GoG uses with many of it's ports to OSX.)

Open it and go through the process of installing the 1.7.39 engine (or newer) and wineskin-2.6.0 (or newer) engine.

Create your wrapper, click on it and go to advanced -> install software -> Choose Setup executable and select the GoG windows installer. There will be little errors toward the end of installation, but these can be safely ignored.

From the advanced -> configuration menu you can select the .exe to load upon clicking the .app, give the name for the Menubar, give the program version number, ect..

You can get at the game's resources by right-clicking on the Wrapper.app and selecting Show Package Contents. Its all under the drive_c symlink (actually Contents/Resources/drive_c).

Give your wrapper the corresponding GoG icon by opening the game's .ico file in the GoG install. Then select the image in preview and hit cmd-c. Next select your wrapper and press cmd-i (or get info). In the window, click on the icon in the top left corner and then hit cmd-v. (FYI, the original icon of the app, as defined by the info.plist and in the Resource folder, is still there and the copied icon can be removed with cmd-x, but this trick works in a pinch with almost any raster image in the clipboard.)

ISSUES

-There will be flickering of the 2d UI. you can go to winetricks in the Advanced -> Tools section and switch ddr->gdi. (as oppose to opengl) This will stop the flickering but break Hardware Render Mode. (disabled by GoG on all but X-Wing Alliance anyway)

-To re-enable hardware render in XvT engine games, you must go to this thread here and apply the respective patch. The XvT executable's patch is separate and toward the bottom of the first page of the thread (use the same install method you did with the gog installer).

-To use hardware mode, you must use a crossover engine which can handle the 2d elements without flickering in opengl mode. I took the liberty of patching the latest crossover engine with the winmm joystick support -> here
Download the wrapper and put it in your ~/Library/Application Support/wineskin/Engines folder. (Keep Compressed!) It will then be selectable in Wineskin Winery or "Change Engine Used" in Advanced -> Tools in any wrapper.
(Crossover engine sourcecode from Codeweavers is FOSS and freely available on their website. They are the main corporate sponsors of wine.)

-The Fixedclear patch is applied to Xwing95, Tie95 and BoP by GoG. In hardware mode, this causes graphical issues in wine. To remove it you must use the respective nofixedclear .bat file from xwahacker (the commandline version not the qt GUi version) Use the commandline shell in Wineskin's Advanced -> Tools menu.

-Xwing95 and Tie95: both crash in hardware mode upon launching a mission. Go to Advanced -> Tools -> Config Utility. In the Applications tab select Win95. This must be done after the Game is installed in the wrapper as the GoG installer demands XP or newer.

-Xwing95 and Tie95: both wont have music. This is because wine doesn't like the winmm wrapper .dll included with the games's install folder to be named the same thing as the system winmm.dll. Navigate to to the games's install folder and rename winmm.dll to win32.dll. Next, right click Tie95.exe or XWing95.exe and select open with and then select "Other" Search for TextEdit.app in your Applications folder. Once it opens and you get a text window full of giberish, search for WINMM.DLL (there is only one instance). Rename it to WIN32.DLL. (this is what was done with XvT.)

-Xwing95 and Tie95: the mouse cursor disappears randomly. Either use the software cursor (which is slow), or go to the wrapper's Advanced -> Set Screen Options and check Use Mac Driver instead of X11

-XWA: loading screen is illegible/wonked-out colors. Use xwahacker (either commandline or GUI) to switch the render back from 32bit to 16bit. (Also solves green target indicator box being completely off in the HUD for sections of the ship)

-XWA: XWAUP craft pack will install, but hangs upon loading missions. Sorry but the only way is to install each ship individually. Be sure to do install DTM's Super backdrop addon last. (took me a few hours to run the 100+ installers, and is a real pain, but doable)

Good Luck!

My real hope is that GoG will use this information to release osx ports of the X-Wing series. However I doubt they would want to use a crossover based engine

here is a hack in the attachment section of this bug report to fix the flickering issue, same one used in crossover (really an OSX bug, but according to the linked bug report it doesn't look like Apple will fix it). Bear in mind that exact flickering issue affects many, many 2d games on OSX.

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34166

I'd be happy to implement a GoG friendly engine with the needed hack in a little bit.

Thanks!

Care to tackle the others? or is all the post installation more trouble then it's worth? I thought so. Unless GOG were to make a full downloadable OSX package.

Also, I should point out, you certainly don't need that controllers app. Wine's joystick support is properly integrated with OSX and worked fine for me with apple's built in drivers Button configuration is in game.

Yes. I corrected the section about joystick support.

Yah, sorry, I posted that before posting on the portingteam thread.

I also made the '98 version of X-Wing work in Wine under OS X.

http://portingteam.com/files/file/8234-star-wars-x-wing-1998/

I just want to pass on my sincere thanks to herecomesthe2000 for their instructions on getting the XvT/XWA-engine games to run. Following their instructions, I've got all four games (XvT, XWA, TIE-Fighter 1998, X-Wing 1998) all working with full sound and 3D graphics support, and, to top it all off, seamless joystick support too. I've played my all four games with my Mad Catz/Saitek Cyborg V.1 flightstick, and everything works as it should.

I do have some comments of my own though:

a) In both X-Wing 1998 and TIE Fighter 1998, I had to use swcursor.bat (bundled with XWAHacker) in addition to enabling the Mac driver; otherwise my mouse cursor was invisible.

b) In X-Wing Alliance, I had to use the CrossOver 15.1.10 engine in Wineskin. Using the CX 14.x engine linked in the OP unfortunately brought about the bug where the keyboard is non-responsive in the hangar. Any non-CX Wineskin engine suffers from flickering graphics.

c) In X-Wing Alliance, you *may* experience very occaisional stuttering of the music and cutscenes; also, use noforce800.bat (also bundled with XWAHacker) if you find you can't change the resolution of the game to 1024 x 768.

d) XW/TF '98 both are hard locked to a max resolution of 640 x 480 (software or hardware). You can change their resolution (as well as the resolution for XWA and XvT) to higher levels, using changeres.bat from XWAHacker, but due to issues with the game itself, you are limited to 4:3 resolutions only. Also, remember to set WINE to emulate Windows 95, or else the game will crash if you've enabled 3D hardware acceleration.

e) Get a good joystick. My Cyborg V.1 is adequate enough (and it was cheap), but the stick itself is a bit stiff with a noticeable deadzone.

Better a Logitech, the Cyborg V1 is a bit too overdesigned, which means more things can break, which is typical of all the Saitek/Mad Catz flight stuff really, they only make good high tier arcade sticks but only because they purchase the mechanical parts from Sanwa instead of using their own.

You're welcome rampency, it's just me, I'm not a they ;) XvT was one of the games that I always wanted to get running in wine.

I think most of what you mention I already have in the first post. I didn't know you could change the XvT games resolution. Good to know! That must be new.

Also I should point out, that now days the joystick patch is already included in all new versions of wine and crossover. So no need for special builds

{EDIT} Awesome! looks like XWA hacker nowdays include their own patch to re-enable 3dmode on XvT games!

The software cursor patch is new, and handy although you could enable it in the launch menu for the games.