Hello,
I am trying to make my copy of Giants work again in Crossover. I have both the ancient CD release and the GOG release.
A while ago, I successfully installed Giants and was playing along merrily for a few months, thoroughly enjoying replaying the campaign. However, a little while ago, without any changes to the Giants bottle, the game just started crashing every time on startup. I do keep my Crossover installation up-to-date, so there was probably a Crossover update in between working and non-working launches. The last level I remember was beating the Mecc campaign and getting ready to begin the Reaper campaign, although I doubt that matters.
A black window pops up and (usually) behind it is an error message saying "Giants Error: ZipRead Fail: mu_idselect.gbs". Unfortunately, I do not remember if this previously working installation was the CD or GOG edition, although I do know I was using the 1.497 patch to fix frame rate issues.
This was saddening, but I was hoping the bottle feature of Crossover would save me. I kept the old bottle to retain my saves, and just made a new bottle and tried reinstalling. Every time I do so, it appears to install fine, but when I go to run the game, it does a similar looking crash to my previously working version, with a black window and "Giants Error: Missing game files - Corrupted installation?" popup. I have tried both the GOG and CD releases in fresh bottles, with various Runtime Support Components (the various DirectX versions mainly, but also Wine Mono). I default to WinXP bottles, but would be willing to try other types if recommended.
The complete list of applications installed in my previously working bottle is:
CrossOver HTML Engine, DirectX 9, Giants, Microsoft Direct X Runtime - Modern, Microsoft Rich Edit 2.0, msls31, and Wine Mono
I have been trying to troubleshoot this off-and-on for well over a month, so I can not guarantee that those were all installed when the bottle was working, I don't remember if I tried troubleshooting this bottle before starting a new bottle, but I definitely haven't removed any components from the bottle since it was working.
Since there was a black window popping up, I tried running it with the "Emulate a virtual desktop" at 800x600 under Wine Configuration -> Graphics both checked and unchecked, with no difference.
Unfortunately, I do not know where log files for this would be located, but would be quite willing to post them if necessary and you tell me where to look. Crossover itself does not crash during this, only the game instance. I have tried a few of the ideas over at the GOG forum for Giants, such as loading different versions of the DirectX dll with a set downloaded from GOG's forum.
Thank you in advance for any suggestions or help.