Fallout 3 Mac OS X on WINE. STALKER Call of Pripyat Mac OS X on WINE.

osx_wine_fallout3.md

Windows-only games on Mac OS X

Achieved with WINE. None of the online tutorials were sufficient so I created this.

Games and settings

I've played the following Windows-only games with zero performance issues.

• Fallout 3 GOTY Edition
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Typical in-game settings:

• Resolution 2880x1800 fullscreen (also 1280x800 windowed)
• Ultra/Max settings for everything.
• Maximum viewing distances.
• Maximum vegetation densities.
• Highest quality textures

Basically, I put all graphics settings the maximum they would go and had no performance issues.

Installing WINE on Mac OS X

Recently, I installed Fallout 3 GOTY edition (a Windows game) on my Macbook Pro Model A1398. After reading several tutorials I instead opted to go a little more creative route by using homebrew, winetricks list-all and winetricks dlls list. This allowed me to easily instal all reaquired prerequisites for the game with little effort.

One of the great things about the homebrew version of wine is that I can build the latest development branch from source. The development branch is usually pretty stable and you get the latest and greatest changes. I discovered that by doing homebrew info wine. Here's how I installed wine on Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9.5). This is my "wine for gamers".

Warning: when installing via winetricks careful not to touch your keyboard until winetricks pauses with an installer dialog. I've accidentally closed installers.

brew install wine --HEAD
brew install winetricks
winetricks corefonts
winetricks dlls msasn1
for x in d3dx9_43 d3dx10 d3dx11_43;do winetricks $x; done
for x in vcrun6sp6 vcrun2003 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun2012 vcrun2013;do winetricks $x;done
for x in dotnet30sp1 quartz msxml3 dxdiag physx;do winetricks $x;done

That installed the base prerequisites for Fallout (as well as a few other extras which are used by other games I play). Now to configure wine.

winetricks winxp
winecfg

Once inside of winecfg, configure the Graphics tab and enable "Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows".

Now we're ready to install Steam. Note: don't automatically launch steam when install is finished.

winetricks steam

Start Steam and install Fallout 3 GOTY Edition

wine 'C:\\Program Files\\Steam\\Steam.exe'

After Fallout is installed, don't forget to enable all of the optional DLC (from the Fallout Launcher visit DATA FILES and enable them). Occasionally, there are a few graphics quirks but overall the game performs well.

Additional tweaks since the game was crashing. Forced detection of device and vram. Edit the wine registry and set the vendor to Nvidia, Device to GeForce GT 750M, and video RAM to 2048MB. If your settings are different on your Mac then use the appropriate Vendor ID, Device ID, and VRAM total as reported by the Mac utility "System Information".

View Mac "System Information"

1. Click on the apple icon in the upper left.
2. Select About this Mac.
3. Select More Info... button.
4. View the section under Hardware > Graphics/Displays
5. View information about the NVIDIA onboard graphics. For the Macbook Pro Model A1398 the settings are the following.
   • Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
   • Device ID: 0x0fe9
   • VRAM (Total): 2048 MB

Configure WINE with proper graphics

1. Open the wine registry with the command wine regedit.
2. Create the registry key and values:
   • Create key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D
   • Create DWORD Value VideoPciDeviceID and set the value to 0x00000fe9.
   • Create DWORD Value VideoPciVendorID and set the value to 0x000010de.
   • Create the String Value VideoMemorySize and set the value to 1024. This value is in megabytes.

Notes:

• This should resolve a crash resulting from "fatal error C9008: out of memory - malloc failed; Cg compiler terminated due to fatal error".
• Even though the graphics card has 2048MB of video memory. Set the Direct3D video memory size far below to avoid over allocation.

Other FALLOUT.INI notes

Edit ~/Documents/My Games/Fallout3/FALLOUT.INI.

• Set bMultiThreadAudio=0 otherwise the game will hang on exit. If the audio becomes an issue then re-enable this setting.

Recommended Steam settings

Since the Web renderer doesn't work in Steam there's no point in displaying the Store page or product updates. Here's a list of settings I customized.

• Settings > In-Game
  • Disable steam overlay while in-game
• Settings > Interface
  • Favorite window set to Library.
  • Disable Run steam when my computer starts (setting doesn't really matter since it's wine).
  • Disable Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases.