HOW-TO: Play Project 1999 on a Mac

[captainzero]

Originally Posted by Dundrige [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Hi everyone. I am running Project 1999 on my new m4 iMac in Parallels 20 and everything works great in fullscreen mode, but the game is just a little dark and I can't adjust the gamma. Any fix?

I got everything to run perfect on my M4 macbook air with VMware fusion. I have the issue the night time is still extremely dark, even as a half elf. Did you find any way to increase the gamma?

[SwordNboard]

Extra details to do during, or after, setup for a sure-fire launch, every time, on Apple Silicon:

Also install WinEQ2 to your wrapper. Copy the WinEQ2 install exe to your wrapper like you did with the game files. You can run the setup exe by re-configuring your wrapper and pointing it to the WinEQ2 setup exe.

Reconfigure your wrapper yet again to run WinEQ2.exe itself.

Set your WinEQ2 preferences, pointing it to eqgame.exe within the wrapper.

*IMPORTANT* Especially if you are getting the 'no graphics' or 'black graphics' issue like me:

When copying the latest patch files into your wrapper's EQ directory, go into each folder individually and copy the new files into the corresponding folder in your wrapper. If you copy the whole parent folder into your wrapper folder, it inherits that file structure, removing some of wrapper's files. Hence no graphics.

Get that old, special dsetup.dll (if needed).

Launch via WinEQ2 systray.

Enjoy.

--

YMMV as far as performance goes depending on your Apple chip. Since EQ is a 32-bit single threaded/core game, it will bottleneck itself. There is a ton of overhead with the translation layers from 32bit > 64bit > ARM. Example: My 2020 M1 chip will have a system resource usage of ~15% CPU, but the wine process running EQ will be at 150% CPU / 25% GPU. I have tried and tried to break this barrier, but there is simply nothing to be done about this. Later chips will likely handle this better. Some spots in the game are worse than others: KC castle ent, WL, BW, etc.

If you find some magical setting within Sikarugir (Wineskin), Winetricks, or the eqclient.ini to ease this, let us all know.

Cheers.

[GamoXis_13]

Hello I've been trying to play EQ99 on Mac but it doesn't work, I installed Sikarugir and do what It is written in the previous comment but it doesn't work, I replaced the eq client and the dll also.

[Hindail]

Have been trying the Sikarugir method. Macbook Pro M2 running Ventura 13.3. My windows app is pointing to the Launch Titanium.bat rather than the .exe, as I could never get the latter to work. It works rarely, and can't figure out how to get it to boot consistently successfully.

What I've seen so far: two sessions running perfectly, 100 failed boot attempts with the ca't attach process error 5, a handful of slow mo play sessions (where your toon is moving in super slow motion, totally unplayable, but chat seems to work totally fine), and one of the great sessions crashing when I died (and then not being able to get it booted after a bunch of attempts before going back to my pc) and now me seemingly not be able to get a non-slo mo boot??

So close, and yet so terribly annoying.

[darkvane]

If you have slow mo play sessions (Your char will be slow mo in the character select screen), I go into one of my mule chars so I won't die. Then camp and usually it will be fast after that. As far as the crashes, I still get them a bunch. I line up the icon in crossover with the Ok button to close the window and just hit it a bunch of times till it works. After 10 or so I close crossover and reopen. Sometimes I reboot, but I have to be 20 tries in for that. M3 Pro, 18GB, Sonoma 14.7.6. I tried upgrading but never got it to work above that and downgraded the OS. It does run slow if I have a lot going on like in a raid with spells artifacts or lots of people running around. BTW, I've done nothing with EQ2 or anything else. I have a stock install other than the P99 patch files.

[Hindail]

Originally Posted by darkvane [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If you have slow mo play sessions (Your char will be slow mo in the character select screen), I go into one of my mule chars so I won't die. Then camp and usually it will be fast after that. As far as the crashes, I still get them a bunch. I line up the icon in crossover with the Ok button to close the window and just hit it a bunch of times till it works. After 10 or so I close crossover and reopen. Sometimes I reboot, but I have to be 20 tries in for that. M3 Pro, 18GB, Sonoma 14.7.6. I tried upgrading but never got it to work above that and downgraded the OS. It does run slow if I have a lot going on like in a raid with spells artifacts or lots of people running around. BTW, I've done nothing with EQ2 or anything else. I have a stock install other than the P99 patch files.

Appreciate the tip, but unfortunately no luck on the camp out method -- literally took 55 min to camp lol and then was still slow mo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Hindail]

Originally Posted by Hindail [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Appreciate the tip, but unfortunately no luck on the camp out method -- literally took 55 min to camp lol and then was still slow mo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Upgraded to Sequoia and everything works now! Still a few crashes before a successful boot, but otherwise seemingly perfect [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]