Friday, March 16, 2012

Saturday, March 3, 2012

"Porting" DC Universe Online (DCUO) to Mac OS X

Tonight I started working on a "port" of DC Universe Online to Mac OS X via Wineskin. So far things have been encouraging but it's not yet playable. Below are the steps and packages I've went thru to install DCUO on my system. This is a bunch of information so it might now be laid out the best but i'll try to make it useful enough for anyone else wanting to help get this working.

Operating System -
Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3

System specs -
i7 CPU @ 4.6GHz
AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB video card
16GB RAM
Audigy 2 PCI sound card

Winskin version used -
Wineskin-2.5.4, engine version WS8Wine1.3.32, WS8Wine1.4-rc5

Windows packages installed -
IE 7 from winetricks (dlls)
VCrun2008 from winetricks (dlls)
ddr=gdi from winetricks (settings)
DCUO_setup.exe, let DCUO Installer install Direct X and Flash

After installing the above the Launcher starts and downloads the 18 gigabytes of game files. Everything on the launcher looks exactly the same as under Windows. One note though, the configuration app (click the green button with the hammer & wrench and choose 'game configuration') does not start properly, it asks for .net 3.5 which it will not install from the launcher. After installing .net 3.5 via winetricks the app still crashes out. Not a deal breaker but worth mentioning.

After the game finishes downloading and you click the green Play button the screen switches resolutions like it's going to start properly. All I get is a black screen with no sound or video. I tried this with engine version WS8Wine1.4-rc5 (newest available) first. When it didn't work I google'd for information and found reference to a Linux user getting DCUO to work using Wine 1.3.32. I installed engine version WS8Wine1.3.32 but the end result was a crashing launcher at startup.

I also tried different configurations of virtual desktop and windowed/fullscreen options to no avail.

This is what i got so far. If anyone happens upon this and can help please leave a comment with your thoughts.