Panzer General III: Scorched Earth Forum

On Mac CO6.0.x PGIII can be installed with ease. After installation the game will run, but no updates appear in the display. Everything seems to be working properly, there are sound cues attached to the menu that appears that can be heard playing in response to the clicks as you'd expect, but the screen remains black so it's difficult to get anywhere.

I notice that there are screenshots that have been uploaded, so it appears it works to some degree on other versions of CO, although there's no information in the images to get more specific than that.

This problem appears to be a common one that affects many games from the 2001-2003 era, at least according to a thread on the Wine bug tracker. The odd thing is that the report claims this bug is due to CO/Wine not supporting threaded D3D, which strikes me as odd because these games are old enough that I would generally not use threading. Perhaps I simply don't understand the thread. Anyway my PG report over there was filed under this bug, along with a LOT of other games. If they have correctly filed it, it seems that a large number of games might be made to work with these changes.

This problem is almost certainly due to a known problem in older versions of WINE that has since been fixed.

D3D did not have built-in mouse support until fairly recently (surprising, if you think about it) so programmers were forced to roll their own solution. The one that was considered "teh way" was to put up the D3D context in the background, then place an empty GDI context (2D) in the foreground with the mouse inside that, running as separate thread. WINE did not support threading in D3D, so the background context, the one that had everything except for the mouse, never got any time on the CPU and thus never updated. This HAS been fixed in the latest WINE builds, and PGIII:SE is known to work on these versions.

PGIII:SE also used BINK video for the intro and cutscenes. This doesn't cause any problems however, they can be exited with a mouse click.