Loordstewie wrote:
mmmkay,
Went through all this, downloaded Xcode, macports, and wine....now to download the game I have to purchase it again...guess i should take this as a sign that i should leave this as a "after hours hobby"...
Oh well, thanks for the help everyone
The methods listed on that link are dated and, even knowing how to do it (I've done it with all the little annoying wine hacks / wine tricks to get it running right), it's still a pain to get it going that way properly. For a newbie in wine, I wouldn't recommend it. For someone who lives and breathes wine, I still wouldn't recommend it, because having done it myself, I can say without a doubt it just works better in a virtual environment. There are many virtual environments available on OSX, some work better than others. Parallels had it's high points (most notably native-osx-style simulation, where it trimmed the application to fit in it's own window and was launched from a shortcut on your desktop / made it feel like citrix), but I found it really ate my hard-drive alive (I could hear it cranking at my hard drive pretty much 24/7, which is what drove me to look into a Wine-based solution in the first place). Today I'd recommend trying multiple, and using the lightest weight VM you can find. VirtualBox works very good and offers several features that may come in handy, you can download the DMG file right from their site. Qemu is older and a bit out of date, but I found it surprisingly light weight and it worked really well.
If you 'must' have a wine solution, take my advice and use whichever version of wine you can get pre-configured for STEAM (there are many just a google search away). Then install FFXI right from STEAM, it will save you a lot of hassle as it takes care of the proper DX pieces, and if it's preconfigured for steam, it will most likely have the core pieces you'll need to render text / html properly (these are two things almost every complex app has a problem with in Wine, since internet explorer 'as we know it' isn't there, so there are components you 'need' to install to make these things work better and give the applications the ability to render those elements or you'll get blank buttons and black screens etc). A commercial version of wine like Crossover does a pretty good job of this, and they have a small faq on which games are supported, where FFXI is listed as 'gold' and there are comments from the users on how to get it up and running (I had it running best with Crossover, but today there are MANY more options for OSX wine that are free and probably do just as well, when I did this it was years ago). Here's a quote from Crossover users, from here
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=22;tips=1 Quote:
How I make it work:
First of all install a new (winxp based) bottle on cxgames. Then install this on your new bottle (mine is called playonline )
CrossOver HTML engine
Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) 3.0
Microsoft DirectX Runtime
Microsoft DirectX Runtime (Download)
Microsoft XML Parser
Core Fonts
Most likely your best bet today for a 'free' wine solution would be to use Wineskin, and try to match up the cores with whatever the most recent Crossover gaming solution is using (it's got a very clean core / framework selection utility built right in), but keep in mind that at some point along the line, you are still going to find yourself going "damn, if only I had the full windows environment", so a VM is still what I'd recommend.
Edited, Jul 10th 2012 10:43am by FUJILIVES