Wine for Emulation

HDL

So I've been messing around with Project 64 under Wine instead of CrossOver. For some reason I can get the "Glide Napalm WX" plugin working under Wine, but not CrossOver (gives me a "cannot find ini file" error). But Wine doesn't seem to detect my USB controller. I've tried multiple emulators and none of them do. Would anyone here know the solution?

I'd also like to know if there are any advantages to using Wine for emulation instead of CrossOver (besides being free). Anyone with knowledge on this?

finkmac

Well, I don't know the answer… but I know that I have bought crossover/games and have wine installed, and that they are HORRIBLE for playing windows games, that includes emulators. I suggest you purchase windows XP and parallels desktop (or vmware) , or install windows via bootcamp.

HDL

Thanks for the tip, but I already have that stuff. If I wanted to use Windows, I wouldn't even bother trying CrossOver or Wine. After all, the whole point of using them is when you want to avoid having to boot into Windows in the first place.

Good thing most of the major players have worthy Mac ports by now, huh.

Edit: Well I tried installing Wine using MacPorts, and it works fine. This one recognizes the USB controller, the one I was trying before was a binary someone made with a GUI. Both exhibit some strange behavior regarding certain things, though, that CrossOver doesn't. Makes me wonder why there are discrepancies between all these different Wine packages.

dickmedd

SpeedofMac wrote a good tutorial on setting up the Windows version of PCSX-R on his site, he used Wine. I've since used Wine and Wine Bottler to run a myriad of different small Windows apps here and there but do have patchy compatibility. Project64 always seemed to fail for me, PCSX-R and lots of others ran well though - beats booting up a VM just for one app!

speedofmac

I should likely have this up on that old site of mine, but to get Project64 working through Wine, see this MacRumors Forums thread: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=9258582&postcount=19.

Also, HDL, do you know why compiling Wine through MacPorts allows for gamepad compatibility and Kronenberg's OS X version of Wine doesn't?

HDL

This was the sequence of events of what I was trying to do, in a nutshell:

Use the "Glide Napalm WX" plugin in Project 64, running in CrossOver. I kept getting this "cannot find ini file" error. I've been using the prior release, Glide Napalm Public 1.22, which works just fine.
Tried Kronenberg's binary. Napalm WX worked (somewhat), but USB detection did not, I have no idea why. Nothing in "winetricks" seemed to help, either.
I gave WineBottler a go next, but it seems that Project 64 doesn't play nice with it, not even if I change the plugin/save directories.
Lastly, I used MacPorts to install the latest development version. This one detects my USB controller, but gave the same error as in CrossOver.
The 1.22 plugin works fine for each one, but the emulator itself still has some bugs/quirks in Wine/CrossOver.

And just out of curiosity, I decided to try out Kega Fusion and Snes9x 1.52, even though they have excellent OS X ports. It seems that after loading a game, Kega won't show the video until you try to enter full screen, at which point it will fail, but then show the game normally (lots of frame skipping, though). Snes9x didn't give me any sound or video until I fiddled with a bunch of settings, and even then it was very inconsistent and didn't perform well. It didn't even let me configure my buttons.

So yeah, I'm inclined to agree that Wine isn't so hot for emulation, but perhaps there are workarounds for certain things. And Wine development is highly active, so you never know when all this will become much easier.

M.I.K.e

finkmac wrote:

Well, I don't know the answer… but I know that I have bought crossover/games and have wine installed, and that they are HORRIBLE for playing windows games, that includes emulators.

Actually Lord of the Rings Online works quite well on Crossover Games once you disable the pixel shader. I tried it on VMware Fusion once, but it didn't work that well.
If you want it in full glory then it's always better to run in via Bootcamp, but I didn't feel the need to boot Windows for weeks.

HDL

I've been getting into this a bit more lately, since I like Wine and figure that video-based applications play an important role in its development. As such, I've contributed some info to the AppDB on the official site. Some examples:

Test data for 1964
Maintainer for Project64 1.6
Maintainer for pSX 1.13
Maintainer for Snes9x 1.52

As you might notice, there's a big lack of Mac OS X contributors, so I thought I'd get involved.

If you read the Snes9x one, you can see that I actually got it working right. I learned how to work around the main issues and found that netplay with Windows users works. It's a great alternative, since the Mac port of this emulator only supports Mac-to-Mac connection. The worst problem with it is that it won't recognize USB controllers, but if you don't mind using the keyboard it's just fine. Alternatively, you can use ZSNES 1.42. Netplay with Windows users works great, and USB controllers are recognized no problem.

And for those who like hi-res texture packs:

For those who may be interested in this stuff, I recommend you download wine-devel from MacPorts, and then winetricks. With winetricks you can install various runtime libraries and other stuff often needed for video-based applications.