EverQuest Forum

Has anyone had any luck getting past the launcher on a Mac? I tried working with Winetricks as someone posted in the tips, but I couldn't get it to install IE6 properly on the Mac.

What I ended up doing was using Crossover to create a Win98 bottle and installing IE6 into that bottle. I then archived that bottle and opened it up in Crossover Games. After enabling all the ActiveX settings I can pull up the web launcher (which I couldn't do in newer versions of IE) but it won't prompt me to download the applet (I think there is supposed to be a download there). The result is that I can see the page and navigate around, but on the options tab it can't locate my EQ install directory or update any files. I tried adding launch.soe.com to the trusted sites list in internet options, but Crossover just hangs when I hit the 'add' button.

I feel like I'm so close, yet so far away. Anyone else having any luck with this? This is really my first time monkeying with Crossover, so if I'm doing something completely stupid, feel free to point it out. 😊

Hi,

I'll download the client and have a look ... which particular Mac
do you have?...ie; OS version/model/video card/chipset fitted? These
things can sometimes matter. When you say Crossover games 10, do you
mean 10.0 or the latest (10.1)? If not the latest, I would retest the
situation - there was an obscure networking bug (on the Mac) that was
fixed in 10.1 .... I'll post back (eventually ; our ISP has been a tad
erratic of late ;) ....

Cheers!

Hi Don,

Sorry, I did mean version 10.1 of Crossover. I'm running the newer model 13" MacBook Air with the following specs:

1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB RAM
128GB SSD
GeForce 320M GPU
OSX Snow Leopard

I'll be hammering away at it a little more tonight as well, though I'm almost out of ideas. Thanks for taking the time to check it out.

Hi again,

Well, I had a look at it on the linux box here, and spun up a rudimentary crosstie
profile for it -- it would not appear to need much more than app_id=7854 in the same
bottle ... that said....

...the browser based interface that first appears, looks like it will work in the
situation where you already have an EQ account - that is, entering you username and
password should work afaict...

...if you click on the 'create new account' link, it tries to pop another ieframe window,
and it seems to be an internal URL link (non-http/https), so it was impossible to link
that call out to one's native system browser. After a bit of tinkering, I did get this
window to work, in the client itself, however it flailed off into a crash, which probably
isn't the sort of thing one wants happening when creating a new account...so...

..I think the caveat is going to be that one must have already created an EQ/Sony user
account (or have one), using your native system web-browser, and then fire up this client
and just login -- don't use the '(create new account)' option...

..I have an 11,2 iMac here with HD5670 video, and the install profile gets things installed
and to the login screen. Someone else (with an account) will need check further....

...you can download the tie from the link below see how it goes - note that the profile
enables emulated virtual desktop @ 1024x768, and, I've left the dll overrides in place
so the builtin browser part should work to some degree ; just don't be surprised if it
goes and crashes on you =)

http://rapidshare.com/files/455383775/EverQuest.tie

If, with others' help, we can be satisfied it all does work, I can publish the crosstie
so all might use it - right now though, it needs some proper testing. Post back with any
good/bad stories <grin>...

Cheers!

ps: I became confused as to which exact client was being referred to, so, I flipped a
coin. All things considered however, what works for this client, is likely to work for
another from the same Sony stable...

I thought I'd provide a couple of screenshots so you could see where I'm at with this.

Here is the main launchpad screen. It comes up but never prompts me for the download and subsequently the "Initializing" button never turns to a "Play" button.

Here you can see the options page. Notice that, since it couldn't download the SOE web installer it can't tell where my game folder is.

EDIT: Haha, you posted while I was writing this up. I'll give your post a read, try out your suggestion, and let you know how it goes. Thanks for the fast response.

You won't be able to tell it where the folder is when using it through a browser, so the game has to be at the location mentioned in the tips & tricks section.

TL;DR at the bottom

Okay, I tried the Crosstie with no luck. It would let me get to the server login screen, but when I clicked on 'Play' it crashed with an "Unexpected Error" message. It looks like Escape to Norrath uses a slightly different launcher than I'm used to seeing on my PC. I'm not sure if the client is exactly the same as full EQ or not. I'll try to do some digging on that if my next steps don't work out.

So I went back to my bottle that had IE6 and installed the HTML Rendering Engine and XML Parser. Previously, my EQ files had been in the directory indicated in your tip, EskildH, but when I copied the files back over for this attempt I copied them into the wrong directory. That might have been a lucky break because when I launched IE and navigated to the site, it started downloading the EQ files!

I verified the directory it was dropping it's files in and cancelled the download. Then I moved all my files into that directory and reloaded IE. This time it recognized the directory and said I had a 655MB update to download. When I tried downloading the update, it (the EQ site, not Crossover) gave me a 1017 error. My google-fu is apparently weak because I can't find much about that error from EQ. Everything I found indicates a server communication error, but I'm obviously able to connect to the download server.

Anyway, I pulled my old files out of that directory and I am now letting the launcher re-download everything. It will take a few hours to get everything downloaded, so I'm going to get some sleep while it runs. I'll let you guys know if I get past the server selection screen in the morning.

TL;DR: Crosstie didn't work out, but did get me to the server select screen. Installing the HTML Rendering Engine and XML Parser appears to be letting me download the EQ files through the browser based launcher. Will post an update when the 6.5GB download finishes.

Glad to see you're having at least some progress.

Worst case scenario, you can install the station launcher ("launchpad2"), which should still work (though I haven't tried it, as the new patcher works for me as described in tips&tricks, but I guess Mac varies just enough for things to work differently).

Yeah, I wasn't terribly sure I had the same target, but these sorts of things
are getting more and more like things 'worth looking at', because the cxhtml
engine just keeps getting better and better of late. In this case (and another
2 I know of), it's actually been the case of forcing a native mshtml override
to get things working ; the problems are mostly in and around wininet.dll here.

...the client I chose, uses the v1.75 version of launchpad it seems. When I
checked it's error log, I found https is being used, which probably means the
crash is somewhere like crypt32.dll or something (last time I looked this was
a bother) ... it is pretty close to working. Pity it's not a little easier
for me to look at it deeper... always a pain having to use IE6 for something...

Okay, update time. After the download finished, I hit play and got the "eqgame.exe has encountered a serious error..." message. No dice. I remembered that I had not yet copied d3dx9_30.dll into the Everquest directory. I dropped that file in there and now when I click play the text below the button changes to "Starting" for a few seconds, then "Checking", then "Playing", then it just returns back to normal as if I never pushed the button.

For whatever it's worth, if I try to just run eqgame.exe it throws up an error saying "Trying to load PE image for unsupported architecture (AMD-64)"

EDIT: I also just noticed an oddity. When I open the the configuration utility, it reports my GPU as a Geforce 8600 GS. Is that a function of Crossover or is something wonky?

I started with your Crosstie, Don, and added the following applications:

Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable
DirectX 9

I don't know if they are particularly necessary, but I found several posts indicating they might help.

Then I loaded up the Station Launcher from http://launcher.station.sony.com/

I can get to server select again, but when I click to enter the server I get a crash. Running a tail -f on the log file and monitoring it reveals the following error at the point that I hit play:

err:d3d:IWineD3DDeviceImpl_Reset Cannot change the back buffer format yet
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000000 at address 0x54a1a396 (thread 0059), starting debugger...
Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000000 in 32-bit code (0x54a1a396).

I can post more of the log file if anyone can make something of it. This, btw, is without the d3d files in the EQ directory. If I drop them in, I get the previous error about "Trying to load PE image for unsupported architecture (AMD-64)".

I just finished some more testing wrt Escape to Norrath -- it all works, I can login
and join the game on the free account ... that said....

On my linux box with nvidia 9800gt with 1024mb videoram & vanilla linux-2.6.34, although
I can login etc, I cannot see my character. In fact, I can't see -any- characters -- I see
the names floating about (including those of rats etc), and I can see shields and various
things shoot about (being carried by ppl), but I can't see the characters themselves.. bit
weird, I'll have to look at just why that may be so....

..things were better on the 11,2 iMac with HD5670/512mb setup -- there, I could login just
as easy, and all the characters were visible to me ... in fact, it seems to run quite well
on the Mac in the limited time I fooled with it -- I did not add anything to the bottle, I
used the crosstie profile 'as is' and it pretty much worked 'out of the box'. Keep in mind
this is with the Escape to Norrath title, but, I would imagine it should work equally for
other as it does here (caveat the linux invisible characters thang, however it did appear to
be working otherwise)....

..at a guess, I'd suspect the 320M video chipset you have, only because that has known to be
prone to some issues & problematic with some apps. Only sure way to ascertain that, is for
someone else to check the crosstie install on different Mac hardware again, and see what plays
out there... of course, this doesn't help with Everquest perse, but, it's a valid test case
of sorts...

Just did a fresh install and got everything working very well on an Intel Mac running OS X 10.7.2 with Crossover Games 10.2.0.

Things I did to get it to work well.

1. First I made a fresh windows xp bottle with nothing else installed and copied the Sony directory from a working windows install into the Program Files directory in the bottle (I did not install Directx9 or any other packages. The only application listed in the Installed Applications is CrossOver HTML Engine.
2. I used the patched d3dx9_30.dll from winehq.org and copied it into the System32 directory under drive_c\windows\system32
3. I turned off all pixel shaders as was said in another forum post. In eqclient.ini make the following changes
   Change

   ---

   20PixelShaders=TRUE
   14PixelShaders=TRUE
   1xPixelShaders=TRUE

TO

20PixelShaders=FALSE
14PixelShaders=FALSE
1xPixelShaders=FALSE

3. I set the game to run in windowed mode. Also in eqclient.ini make the following change
   From WindowedMode=FALSE to WindowedMode=TRUE
4. I turned off all the Luclin models for performance, but I believe they worked the last time I tried it.
   Then I ran the Everquest.exe from the EQ bottle and everything ran beautifully.

This is the with the most current patch of EQ as of Veil of Alaris release on Nov 15th, 2011.