I find it odd that LOTO will run under Crossover Games on my MacPro laptop just fine in one environment, but not at all in other in environments. For example, everything runs fine a a friend's house who has a different ISP (Verizon) than I do (Comcast). At my house on my laptop, Pyltro runs fine, but right after the first LOTRO splash screen comes up the window goes black, minimizes and the program aborts. This is similar to the start up problem a lot of people have reported on the forum, except everyting works fine when I play LOTRO at other people's houses.

I would blame the ISP, except that LOTRO runs fine in my house with my ISP using an iMAC running XP native with bootcamp. I have also noticed that LOTRO under CrossOver/Pylotro doesn't work in many public environments, e.g. hotels, even though I can stream Netflix just fine.

Anyone have the same experience, or have an explanation ?

Mac OS X 10.6.5
Crossover 9.2
New bottle install with C4P
No registry hacks.

Steven Grant wrote:

I find it odd that LOTO will run under Crossover Games on my MacPro
laptop just fine in one environment, but not at all in other in
environments.

It IS a "complex" problem, and for someone (myself) who has spent 30+ years supporting virtually every version of UNIX(tm) and things which call themselves "Unix Like" (i.e. Linux) one can imagine, across many radically different hardware architectures - from "little-endian" to "big-endian," it is not at all surprising to find things "environment dependent."

I had been running CXG since 8.0 on both my iMac

iMac6,1 Core 2 Duo [2.16GHz - 3 GB 667]

NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB VRAM
OSX 10.6.5

and a MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro4.1 Core 2 Duo [2.5GHz - 4GB 667]5

    NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT - 512MB VRAM  
    OSX 10.6.5

When CXG 8.4 or 9.0 (I forget which one) came out, the MacBook Pro "broke." I had no problems "upgrading" on the iMac, but could not get the MacBook Pro to run LOTRO -- the infamous "finished" and "little black screen" problems mostly.

Finally, after about 3 months of working with CodeWeavers and a HUGE number of re-installs, I gave up and "bit the bullet" -- I wiped the MacBook Pro, re-installed 10.6.4, CXG 9.0 and LOTRO Mines of Moria, and have not had a problem since.

What was the lesson learned? ... hard to say exactly.
My theory is as follows:

The primary difference between the MacBook Pro and the iMac was the fact that the iMac had had 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard) installed on it, and upgraded where the MacBook Pro had started out life under Leopard (10.5) and was upgrade to Snow Leopard.

During its life, the MacBook Pro has primarily been used by my son to view videos and etc. on it. It has had all kinds of multi-media software (legit and otherwise) installed on it. There were tremendous differences between Leopard and Snow Leopard -- much 3rd party, both paid for and free, broke when a box was upgraded to Snow Leopard. Much 3rd Party software is simply Windows Software that has been hacked to run under OSX. Even WINE itself is not OSX native, it's LINUX software hacked to run under OSX. (I use the term "hacked" here in its original MIT meaning, not in a pejorative way.)

One particular aspect of such software is that it is insistent on imbedding itself in the OS and in other places where user software does not belong. The Corollary of that issue is the fact the trying to remove that software is virtually impossible... artifacts are left behind, all over the place.

So what likely happened -- some piece of graphics software modified some part of the OS in such a way that subsequent things which expected one thing, got something else, and broke.

How can you tell what? The simple answer is -- you cannot. Debugging at that level is done from dumps, which invariably are generated AFTER the "bad thing already happened." If you have the source code for everything, "sometimes" you can tell what the "bad thing was" -- but you can't tell what caused it in the first place.

As for the Networking environment -- those 30 years I mentioned all were in support of ARPAnet/NSFnet/BITnet/Internet environments. And there is no comparison there either.

"Public environments," like wi-fi hotspots or Hotel Internet connections are all SEVERELY restricted. Comcast and Verizon offer different Internet experiences because of a variety of Networking issues. I have both Verizon DSL and Comcast Internet at home.
One reason is simple. I run my own servers (Mail, Web and FTP) and can do so over Verizon DSL, but CANNOT run them over Comcast Internet. Most all of the differences and restrictions are strictly "political," not "technical." They are POLICY decisions made to control network access.

Your problem might be as simple as "number of hops" and "TTL" values. Single function programs, like NetFlix are "optimized" to compensate for many of the vagaries of networking since they are completely dependent upon it, so it doesn't surprise me that Netflix works where LOTRO, which is dependent primarily on graphics, does not.

And one last thing. Running LOTRO under BootCamp is a very different thing than running it under CXG. There are two different Operating systems involved the hardware is the least of the issues.

I don't know if this helps any by way of explanation or not.
It's not an easy problem.

Thanks for your detailed reply. The take-away message for me is just not to worry about it anymore because things are "good enough" as they are. But for now my curiosity is satisfied.